The Summer Field

23 players turn up for an away game – or six, as when Culm Vale played at Torquay in August 1857 (‘emergencies were accordingly substituted’, the Torquay Directory reported). As Evans added, a league club might drop you if you batted selfishly and hindered a win, even if you did well. When Leamington declared at 250 for seven after two hours and ten minutes at Rugby in June 1934, they left the hosts two and a half hours; Rugby ended on 198 for one. As the Leamington Spa Courier said, ‘it evidently never occurred to the two [not out] Rugby players that the remaining eight batsmen on their side might like to have a knock’. Worse still, in May 1898 Walton-on-Trent in Derbyshire batted all day for 179, ‘much to the disgust’ of the fielding G.W.Webb’s eleven. These club friendlies incidentally showed that most cricketers preferred to bat. Did you ever hear a team complain about having to bat all day? Once belonging to a league, a club could avoid responsibility for hard decisions. A league, too, could pass on responsibility, by appealing to MCC, like a grand master in Freemasonry. On the death of King Edward VII in May 1910, for instance, the Duke of Devonshire told Derbyshire club secretary Frank Newton by telegram that Lord’s were playing, so Derbyshire could play Sussex. Then came news that the MCC had changed their mind. Sussex sent a telegram to Derby, urging Derbyshire to think again. Derby telephoned Yorkshire and Northamptonshire; were they playing? Newton decided on playing, as the captains had already tossed and Sussex and the umpires were about to go on the field. We can suppose that what mattered above all to office-holders was not so much whether to show the right respect to the dead king but how to make sure they did not stand out, whatever they did. Or, an appeal to MCC may have been a way of hiding ignorance, as when the United Churches League in south Devon in July 1933 asked MCC about a batsman taking a stand outside the crease; if he made runs, could they be counted short? Or, a league might write with a problem to MCC like a child handing a knotted shoelace to his mother. In September 1968 the Burton Hunt league ended with three clubs each on 24 points; who was the winner? Donald Carr, MCC assistant secretary, solved it with a prompt reply that the championship went to the team with the most wins. In short, a league was not the answer to everything, any more than a club. Some shunned what leagues stood for. The Derbyshire journalist Plaindealer holidayed at Exmouth in August 1933; an old, amateur club, he wrote afterwards, ‘who care nothing for points and averages, and bowling analysis, and it was extremely pleasant to lie on the grass in the shade or sit on the benches under the trees and look across the sand hills where golfers were foozling and doffing and topping and pulling’ - presumably he was describing the other side of the river mouth, at Dawlish Warren - ‘while the sun shone from a sky as blue as sapphire’. Plaindealer hailed ‘a slice of real cricket’ at this seafront ground, hosting clubs rich enough to travel to Devon, such as Cotswold Wanderers from Gloucestershire, Chiswick Park from west London and Gravesend in Kent. County cricket too made a virtue of its slow pace. In the Leicestershire county jubilee Making The Grades