nan and grandad had bought it for me from a flea market for 20p and I spent ages bowling with it in the back garden. I was desperate to have a bat against it as well, so Dad took me up to Crawshaw playing fields, where they had a concrete wicket covered with green rubber matting, which made the surface quite bouncy.
I was really excited about going up there and I ran up the dirt path that led up the side of the field. I couldn’t wait to play on that pitch with a PROPER HARD BALL. We were going to start with one of us bowling and the other one catching, just to get a feel for the ball, so Dad got ready to bowl and I got ready to catch. He ran in, turned his arm over and the ball pitched halfway down the wicket. Because of the green matting, it bounced a bit more than I expected and it leapt up and smacked me right in the chops. There was blood everywhere, I bawled my eyes out and we went straight home. So much for playing with a hard ball.
That might not have been quite as much fun as I had hoped, but the best cricket games I played with my dad were with a red Incrediball down at Post Hill, a short walk from our house. This was an overgrown field with trees all around it, and it was the place we used to go when I got my first dog, Pepper (there’s another dog to look up in the index). I’d been pestering Mum for years to let me have a dog and she finally let me when I was 13. Pepper was a crossbreed, part Staffordshire bull terrier, part Labrador, with a few more breeds thrown in as well, but he looked very much like a Rottweiler.
He was a lovely dog, very loyal and friendly, and he generally did as he was told. I trained him to fetch my socks and shoes for me, and when we went camping on a weekend (which was almost every weekend in summer), Pepper would bed down in my tent alongside me. We were very good pals. But probably the best thing about him was that he absolutely loved to chase and fetch a ball. So when we took him for walks down to Post Hill, Pepper became our fielder. Wherever we hit the ball, he’d sprint after it and bring it back to us. He was an absolutely brilliant fielder. He made Jonty Rhodes look like Monty Panesar.
Those games at Post Hill with my dad (and occasionally my mum) were incredibly well organised and we developed hundreds of rules over the years. As a bat, we used a stick that I’d found in the woods and ripped the bark off, about the size of a baseball bat. I think it was bent in the middle as well. Batting was a tricky business, because the pitch was nowhere near flat, there were stones all over it, so one ball could bounce over your head, then the next could roll along the floor.
Not only that, but we had the biggest set of stumps in the world. Whoever was batting would stand in front of a sapling that must have been three feet wide and six feet high. That was our stumps. So if Dad bowled me a bouncer, there wasn’t much point in me ducking underneath it because I’d be bowled out. And if the ball hit me on the shoulder, I could be lbw. As I said, batting was far from easy.
If you managed to connect with the ball, and sent it flying into the trees for Pepper to fetch, there were some trees that were out and other trees that were six. If you hit the ball over a track behind the bowler, that was six as well. And if you edged the ball, there was a bigger tree behind the sapling that served as a slip cordon. If you nicked it past the tree, you were okay, but if it so much as clipped a leaf, you were out.
As you can imagine, wickets fell at regular intervals in this game, so we played ten-wicket innings. I would bat until I’d been out ten times, then Dad would do the same and try to beat me. Fifty or sixty† all out could well be a match-winning score. I’m not sure who won the most games. I think that I did, but my dad would probably say that he did. Actually, why don’t I go and ask him? Or better still, I’ll ask my mum as well. I’ve a feeling that we might need an independent adjudicator.
| Me: | Mum, who do you think won the most games when we played down at Post Hill? |
| Dad: | I definitely won the most games. |
| Me: | I wasn’t asking you. |
| Mum: | Oh, I don’t know, it probably ended up about even. But it was always very competitive. Not just when you were playing cricket, either. Whatever you played together was competitive, even if you were just whanging a ball to each other on the beach. Most people just do that to play catch, but with you two there was always some sort of competition involved. |
| Dad: | That’s the way it should be. All games are competitive. |
| Me: | Did we have many arguments about the rules? |
| Dad: | No, because I was the sole umpire, so there were never any arguments. You just had to put up with that. |
| Me: | I must have won most games, though. You were useless. |
| Dad: | I wasn’t, I was absolutely brilliant. Unorthodox, maybe, but brilliant all the same. |
| Me: | You couldn’t bat for toffee. And you bowled like my mother. |
| Mum: | Erm, excuse me, Matthew. When I went down to Post Hill with you, I was going to walk the dog. I didn’t want to have to play cricket as well. |
| Me: | It was boring playing with you, Mum. I could just smack it anywhere when you bowled. |
| Mum: | Cheeky sod. |
| Dad: | My bowling was good enough for you most of the time, anyway. |
| Me: | That was because half the time you didn’t bowl it, you threw it. |
| Dad: | You’ve got a point there. I did throw it from time to time. |
| Me: | Yes, whenever there was a danger of me beating you. |
| Dad: | Well, if you’ve got a lad who can hit every ball when I bowled it, what was the point? I wanted to keep challenging you. And I didn’t just throw it, by the way, I sometimes threw it with sideways movement, so it spun as well. It was a good test for you. |
| Me: | Especially when the stumps were six feet high. And I bet when you were batting you wished that you’d never sorted out my bowling action in the garden that time. |
| Dad: | No, that was well worth the trouble. It was hard work, it took all Sunday morning, but we got there in the end. I got the run and jump sorted out, then I asked Bob Richardson about some of the more technical stuff. Bob taught at my school and he used to play in the Bradford League, so I’d ask him during the day about how to use the front arm, or how to hold the ball, and then I’d come home and tell you about it in the evening. You were a quick learner, but Bob deserves some credit. |
| Me: | Yes, he deserves some credit for me bowling you out all the time. |
| Mum: |
Anyway, there were never any hard feelings when the two of you came back. You always seemed to have had a good time. And at least when you were playing down there,
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