The joys of village cricket

Cricket. One of those rare sports in which the majority of those who play it have at some stage thought, “what on earth am I doing this for?”. 

For batsmen, a bad run of form can see you spend just a few minutes at “the crease” each Saturday before being dismissed and condemned to hours standing around in the field watching others have a go. For bowlers, it is incredibly lonely when you’re being whacked around the park without reward. And for everyone — and I mean everyone — those first few matches of the season, in that indeterminate part of the English spring when the cold still bites and the leather ball feels like a piece of rock, are dismal episodes.

But then of course, the days get longer and warmer. You find your rhythm with the bat. Bowlers start hitting their “line and length”. Attracted by the improved climactic conditions, spectators begin to appear, bringing with them that distinctive din that suffuses cricket grounds big and small. Cups of tea are drunk for hydration, not to allay hypothermia. Alcohol flows more freely around the boundary rope, contributing to that haziness that envelops even the most contested of games. And in all this, a unique form of bliss is found by the cricket lover.

Cricket has been an enduring part of my summers since my childhood — punctuating my weekends and exasperating friends and family members in equal measure. But it is only in recent years I have begun to reflect on its significance not only in my own life, but in English life more generally. 

Cricket has taken me to some remarkable places. I went to the local comprehensive school in Dorset until the age of fourteen, and it was off the back of my successes as a left arm “fast” (it’s all relative…) bowler that I was offered a scholarship at an independent school. Later, at Cambridge, I had the pleasure of playing first-class cricket with great friends at Fenner’s — a veritable slice of earthly paradise — and at Lord’s — the most historic ground in the world. I’ve also had the privilege of playing for the Marylebone Cricket Club. 

But my greatest pleasure is and always has been returning to play in the village of Marnhull where I was born and raised. It was there where I learnt the game, and where I had the opportunity to play in the same side as my dad and brother. And it is to Marnhull that I am constantly borne back if ever I have a Saturday spare. 

The village game embodies a way of life that so many of us find hard to articulate

It can be a deeply nostalgic sport. The smell of linseed oil evokes vivid memories of my father teaching me to condition and maintain cricket bats in our garage. In fact, my first cricket bat had been his — lovingly cared for and eventually passed down to me. My first sips of ale — Badger bitter, brewed by Hall and Woodhouse in Blandford and served slightly colder than many other ales — were taken as a young teenager playing up with the men’s teams. It takes very little imagination for me to hear the leather on willow echoing across the village green, or the rustle of cricket shoes searching for a ball in the hedge, or the thud of one hitting the batsman’s pad.

It’s not mere nostalgia, though. And I think the village game embodies a way of life that so many of us find hard to articulate. Roger Scruton once wrote that cricket was in some way a microcosm of the “English ideal”. He meant that it in some way reflected the predominant moral sentiments of the society in which it was invented, perhaps better than any other game or pastime. Its championing of decency and politeness. The central place it gives to individual personalities, and the space it provides for creativity and originality. Its respect for tradition and the past — a respect that can be glimpsed in battered old club scorebooks, in which the same surnames keep reappearing through the years, a testimony to families who have played alongside others in the area over multiple generations.

The central theme running through village cricket, however, is undoubtedly the spirit of voluntarism. Cricket, more than anything else, is about how a form of community is sustained by the time and efforts of freely associating men and women. And it is how that community brings not only enjoyment, but a sense of place and belonging to its members. The village cricket club is not only a sporting society, but a form of mutual support and a school of values. I think of how my grandmother knitted jumpers for the junior teams. How a kind retiree called Mr Tewksbury would prepare the pitches before the weekend. I think of the “tea” rota, when the player on duty would assemble the lunchtime fare at the direction of a superintending spouse or parent. 

The sacrifice of time involved in a day of village cricket is itself something of a nod to cricket’s communitarian nature. Unlike a pick-up game of squash or a weekly game of five a side, village cricket demands at least an afternoon of the player, and more often the majority of a day. But when everyone congregates together in the pub after the game, people are aware if only subliminally of the wider cause they are involved in.

It was George Orwell who observed that cricketing “form” is prized more highly than “success”

Certainly, the result matters. Village cricket can be competitive. But in the broad scheme of things, results matter comparatively less than in other games. It was George Orwell who observed that cricketing “form” is prized more highly than “success”. There’s an aesthetic dimension to this; an innings of fifty runs can be better (that is, more “elegant”) than one of eighty runs. More profoundly however, the village game values those things that go into putting a fixture on as much as who happens to win or lose on the day. Francis Brett Young said village cricket for most is enjoyed as a matter of “certain jolly humours”. Yet it is also enjoyed as a form of ritual in which community becomes concrete. 

Today, cricket reflects so many of the wider trends in British culture and society. In our increasingly attention deficit world, foreign capital is pouring into the shorter, more commercialised forms of the game. Faster, more transactional formats are becoming increasingly popular at the amateur level too; as many clubs struggle to field eleven players for league fixtures on the weekend, “Last Man Standing” — a rapid game played on evenings and over in a couple of hours — booms.  LMS sides are clubs without a club — associations not anchored in a particular place but often forming spontaneously via WhatsApp groups. 

Much less benignly, village cricket itself seems to be threatened by the same developments that community life in general is confronting. This comes in more overt forms, like the efforts by those holding a particular progressive worldview to foist a politicised diversity, equity and inclusion agenda upon clubs and associations. If one reads the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) 2023 report, for example, one would think our highest priority ought to be the recruitment of an army of EDI officers in the local game, instead of proper investment to improve participation. What makes this hierarchy of priorities even more perplexing is that village cricket in Britain is wonderfully, uniquely diverse in the most meaningful sense. Saturday sides see eleven people of remarkably mixed ethnicities, yes, but also ages and social backgrounds too. 

Less explicitly, village cricket seems to be increasingly compromised by a cultural selfishness which elevates the interests of individuals always and everywhere amongst those of settled communities. It is an individualism that exploits an overbearing regulatory state to advance its cause. The stories of cricket clubs like Colehill in Dorset having to call stumps on play at their home ground because of complaints by residents about balls flying into their gardens are instructive. Cricket clubs cannot afford to challenge such claims, and so the interests of cricketing communities which have existed in many cases for over a hundred years are subordinated to individual residents. These trends erode the spirit of voluntarism and community mindedness that has always sustained village cricket.

At the same time, our inability to support organic, sustainable growth in our rural areas is directly contributing to the difficulties that village clubs have in making up teams. As housing costs price younger families out of the country’s villages, sports clubs suffer, just as local schools do. Our planning system risks making rural life unviable, both by destroying what is of value, and by artificially strangling the natural growth that defined rural settlements for centuries prior to the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act.

What gives me heart, however, is that some form of recovery appears to be mounting a comeback. I have observed it in my own village in quite charming ways, as the cricket club goes about supporting the wider community. In particular, with the local pub struggling under the burden of national insurance hikes, beer duty, new employment rules and regulations and surging energy prices, the cricket club books out garden tables every Saturday evening to host the post-match festivities. There has been an explosion of youth teams in recent years, both for boys and girls, which is strengthening the ties with local schools. Men give up their time to help coach the women’s side. The cricket and tennis clubs are collaborating on proposals to raise money for improvements to the shared community facilities. I know of one club member putting up another who was having difficulties with accommodation.

Perhaps the strongest sign of recovery is rather more prosaic: the reinstatement of the mid-innings tea. During and after the pandemic, many clubs decided to forego the provision of teas on the grounds of expense and effort, with players opting to bring their own refreshments to games in some leagues.

But in the Dorset league, cricket teas have made a comeback. And what’s more, they have not done so by edict, but because individual clubs decided voluntarily to put on their own mid-innings teas without expecting reciprocation. Spontaneously, however, others did reciprocate, and so the cricket tea has returned not because clubs had to put them on, but because they wanted to.

In truth cricket teas were never solely about refreshment. Just as crucial was that they provided an opportunity for players and spectators alike to sit down together, and for the home club to show a hospitality towards the visitors which would inevitably be returned in the future. They exemplified the very spirit of the village game — as a pastime that encourages charity, voluntarism, and a deference to inherited custom.

“The test of a true cricketer”, Orwell put it, “is that he shall prefer village cricket to good cricket”. I’m highly excited about watching England taking on New Zealand at Lord’s very soon, as I am about playing some competitive fixtures myself at some wonderful, historic venues. But more than anything else, I’m looking forward to joining those that call Marnhull home at the village cricket club, in the heart of the Blackmore Vale, and with a thousand happy memories distracting me from the game at hand.