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The fine art of utter incompetence

I think we can agree it was sub-optimal.

Cricket is a statistical game for statistically minded people and, by any measure, the raw stats from last night’s first game of the White Hunter season were impressive. Most runs conceded in 20 overs (204); biggest 20 over defeat (99 runs); most opposition batsmen retired (5); most wides ever conceded (28); most inept performance (very); most apologies (lost count). Never seek to know for whom the bell tolls, and all that.

Indeed, towards the end of Crawley’s knock, the standing umpire agreed that we had quite a strong point, given that batsmen were retiring at 25, in claiming that ‘wides’ should retire at the same score, only it turned out that the rule book didn’t support us.

Before a ball had been bowled, we were already utterly indebted to the opposition, from whom we had borrowed, in no particular order, two players, some wicket keeping gloves, a match ball, a scorebook and a fielder to replace the one who was stuck on the A34 because of an ‘incident’ that, unbelievably, the rest of us had been untroubled by ten minutes before. When I went out for the toss, my only ambition was to lose it so that I didn’t have to take responsibility for any decision associated with it in what I knew would be a challenging evening.

In last year’s encounter, which we won by 20 odd runs, their opening bat was castled first ball by a vicious inswinging Yorker from a 6’ 4’’ Everest summiteer that we had ‘borrowed’ from the local barracks. This year the Everest summiteer was cycling across Australia, and our first ball went so wide it missed second slip. Which is where the second one went. And the third. All of which was better than the fourth, a rank long-hop, which was brutalized into an adjacent garden. The first wicket fell at 78, and the second at about 171, both being celebrated with the immoderate enthusiasm of sportsmen who might just have won the Jules Rimet Trophy. I don’t think the third wicket fell at all; if it did, we were too far gone to notice it. Most of us were looking pointedly the other way, at the gorgeousness of the sunset, by that point.

Where, in last year’s match, we were panther-like in the field, this time round we were like fat lop-eared rabbits, running around in little circles on the grass hoping that the ball wouldn’t come anywhere near us. It got so bad that we actually started applauding any fielder who managed to catch the dead ball on its way back to the bowler. The close season had neither been kind to our waistlines nor our eyesight, but it had been particularly savage on our sense of co-ordination.

Where, in last year’s match, we had all batted through our own personal glass ceilings and posted a total that, to be honest, surprised us as much as it surprised Crawley, this time we remained anchored to the floor, white jellyfish swirling around in the tides of our own low ambitions. From ball one, our ambition was not to win, or draw, but not to be beaten by over 100 runs, a distinction we achieved in the last ball of our innings, and for which achievement you could hear the sarcastic applause a mile across the neighbouring cornfield.

It didn’t help that the match was so early in the year. When we normally play Crawley Village once the universities have broken up, we are blessed with the services of broke, hungover but exquisitely talented undergraduates, for whom 40 overs in the sun is still an amusing prospect. Because we were short-staffed, Crawley had lent us two of their ‘finest’ to make up the numbers, genial and delightful boys on whom our incompetence duly, and immediately rubbed off, and where it remained. Mind you, on last night’s showing we could have turned Bradman himself into a pure novice, with all the fine motor skills of an Emperor Penguin, and the competitive ambition of a bumble bee.

And yet, and yet. All is far from lost. Our average age may be, bloody well is, in fact, 60, but we will get better. We love this game embarrassingly much and, because we love it, we will respect it by remembering how to get slowly better at it. And by getting better, we will, in management speak, push the envelope until, for each one of us, a tiny shard of competence emerges from the woodwork, and we will do little, seemingly inconsequential acts of near competence that will keep us warm all through the coming winter. The undergraduates and graduates will return from universities and London respectively, but we ourselves will contribute. ‘Ambition’, as Browning told those of us who could be bothered to read beyond the first stanza, ‘is not what Man does, but what Man would do’. So there.

All this, and we weren’t even fielding the Human Sieve. That is a delight in store for Sunday week, when a nation will once again hold its breath.

In the meantime, wake me up when they announce the Nobel Awards for Hopeless Endeavour.

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