The Summer Field

21 Chapter Three Making The Grades ‘A cricket team should feel that they are playing with, as well as against, their opponents.’ From the first page of The MCC Cricket Coaching Book (third edition, 1962) Above all hosts wanted to make a good match, on the field and off, so that at the return match they could enjoy the same hospitality. Cricket, like marriage, was about give and take. As early as September 1847, when Repton School lost narrowly the return game with their Leicestershire visitors, Gentlemen of Swepstone, the Derby Mercury reported: ‘…. so long as Swepstone can muster such an agreeable and gentlemanly eleven as it has hitherto done, we will answer for it that they will always be most cordially received at Repton.’ A story of July 1875 from the Victoria club, from a Congregational chapel in Derby, shows the other extreme. A member told the Mercury how Spondon players and their friends took offence when the Victoria umpire gave a Spondon man out: ‘They rose up in a very threatening manner …. bats being flourished and anything else that they could get hold of being used to intimidate the Derby umpire who deemed discretion the better part of valour and left the field ….’ The witness was presumably sending a message to Spondon, and any club thinking of inviting Spondon, when he said this was ‘the first time that the Victoria have played Spondon and it will be the last’. Clubs could come together in leagues against the selfish and unruly, and bad time-keepers. When Tavistock visited Okehampton in July 1864, wickets were ‘pitched considerably too late’, ‘a fault committed at most matches and which generally results in their not being played out’, the Western Daily Mercury reported. The fielders, batsmen and umpires taking the field were like an armada of ships, or a flock of sheep shepherded to market; only as fast as the slowest. Worse still, as Derby School complained in June 1875, only three or four of the visiting Albert club arrived by 1.30pm, ‘the fixed time for pitching the wickets’. The school let Albert bat first; they made 60 and 18 to the school’s 46, so that the school only needed 33 to win. Rather than return the early favour, ‘the Albert club were unwilling to play after they had received their second innings’. This left the school, so the Derby Mercury reported, ‘surprised and exceedingly annoyed’. A league could set standards. The Burton Hunt league, forming at the White Hart Hotel in Lincoln in January 1931, told each club to provide its own umpires (and white coats), and forward a list of umpires to the league