Summer of cricket...

Awesome post over at The Rose and Dragon: backyard cricket meets the tests. I remember those backyard cricket games - The Rose said that sometimes the ball was a piece of plant life, but I remember this as only when the dog had finally punctured all of the tennis balls we routinely used instead of the official red version (the red version hurt too much if it hit you!) - although, to be fair, there were those trees on the bank that produced little round seed things about the size and appearance of rumballs, which sometimes did duty as cricket balls too (those little balls also made great ammunition for storming the castle/pelting each other/siege warfare).

The run up around the corner of the house had distinct advantages - at times. It meant if you wanted to bowl fast, you had more room to run - it also meant that you could potentially deceive the hapless batsman as they had approximately half a second to assimilate where the ball was coming from and what kind of delivery it was. The slight disadvantage was that you had to make a 90 degree turn at a dead run and had approximately half a second to sight the stumps and line up your delivery, which meant that fast bowling wasn't always all that accurate... Slow-medium left-armers like me had a small advantage, but it didn't seem to improve my accuracy all that much!

Some of my favourite games of backyard cricket were the ones at the New Year's picnic with all the cousins and uncles (and occasionally aunts too), although these were rather more serious affairs as several of our cousins were rather good. Like representative good... But the little games of the three of us kids were awesome: one batter, one fielder, and one bowler. All you need really - and one wicket, and a tree to mark the other end you run to. Just a bit of a pain when the raspberry canes got in the way....