Village grounds provide the greatest prizes cricket can offer

PAUL EDWARDS: I’m not sorry there are no awards or teams of the year in this column. There is no shortage of tributes and you can be bloody certain there is no shortage of love

It is the month when journalists select their teams of the year and cricket clubs hand out their awards. I shall be doing neither of these things in this, my last column until at least the spring.

Instead, I should like to tell you about two October Sundays, each of which ended a season for me. On the first I left a match before it had ended; on the second no cricket took place but I could have stayed on one particular ground for hours.

On the first I was sitting in the press box at one of the most famous stadia in the world; on the second I was walking around the boundary of a field you might be pushed to find without an Ordnance Survey map and a tough will. They were, to quote John Lennon, strange days indeed.

The first is easily dealt with but not so comfortably forgotten. Vitality Blast Finals Day in 2020 took place at a virtually empty Edgbaston. Three games dependent on noise, uproar and raucous support and a big dollop of daftness were played with only strident announcements and blaring music for accompaniment.

You might recall that the Saturday on which the games were due to be played was the wettest in British meteorological history; it was tempting to think the climate had come out in sympathy for a season we had all struggled to complete. Then late on a miserable Sunday evening, a friend and I watched Nottinghamshire all but achieve their deserved victory over Surrey in the final.

I take nothing away from the triumph of Steven Mullaney’s side – perhaps it was all the greater because of the circumstances – but it was difficult to give a monkey’s about it on such a de-spirited occasion. “Let’s go,” said the mate who was giving me a lift home but would have stayed had I wished to do so. We left.

Now let us travel forward 12 months, to the Sunday (October 3) just gone. My reporting year had ended with Warwickshire’s thumping victory over Lancashire in the Bob Willis Trophy match. There were only a scattering of spectators at Lord’s to watch the final morning of that game but after the last 18 months, we know that even one bloke enquiring about a scorecard makes a difference.

However, my personal season was not due to end until Sunday when I was going to watch, and probably umpire, the London Erratics’ match at Peper Harow, a ground where cricket is believed to have been played as early as 1727.  Saturday’s rain put paid to that little game but my two oldest friends and I decided to have a pub lunch before visiting some Surrey village grounds on which it was virtually certain that the game would not be taking place.

Tilford was our first stop. You will have seen it on the covers of books, for it is a postcard-perfect picture of village cricket. Of course, there is a pub, The Barley Mow, and naturally, the cricket field itself is oddly shaped and sloping. When the BBC decided to film the famous cricket match chapter from A G Macdonnell’s England, Their England in 1973 I doubt they searched too strenuously for locations.

^{The Bob Willis Trophy provided an underwhelming end to the professional season}

But what took my attention amidst this idyll was a photograph on the pub wall of a celebrity game, perhaps a charity match, in which the professionals Dave Halfyard and Peter Richardson, presumably in their Kent days, were both playing. It is, though, other cricketers that commandeer the lens, all of them comedy stars of the early 1960s: Tony Hancock smiles engagingly at the camera, as does Sid James; John le Mesurier is rather more guarded as if knowing what these games are all about; Graham Stark arses about. Everyone is perfectly decked out in crisp cream flannels. Another England. We lunched at The Red Lion in Shamley Green and then drove into deeper Surrey.

Unless reassured by trusted friends, a man might doubt that Blackheath CC exists. The signposts hardly help. On one of them, the wooden fingers point in three directions: “This Way, That Way, Somewhere Else.” (It is intriguing to think what invading Nazis would have made of that.) 

We went somewhere else and found one of the finest cricket grounds I’ve ever seen. On one side there is the wild heathland that presumably gives the place its name; on another, there are houses detached from far more than each other; at one end there is the rich aroma of the pines and at the other, there is a pavilion. Benches circle the ground at something like thirty-yard intervals. Apparently, it is easy to lose balls during games but I can testify that it is even easier to lose oneself. Even if it sounds perfect I’m not sure I’ve got close.

And so the afternoon drifted on. There was the rather famous ground at Abinger Hammer where families picnic on the far side of the River Tillingbourne in high summer and watch balls land in what is barely more than a babbling stream. There is a separate scorebox and the tiniest tiered seating I’ve ever seen.

^{Sight screens and nets will soon be packed away for the winter}

At East Horsley, there were fine houses set back from the main field and what looked like a second ground at the far end. Two men were moving the sightscreen to a place of safety. They tried towing it but the rope broke and so they were forced to take out each of the slats by hand and stow them away in the shed. All over England this is happening, I thought; people who care about their clubs are taking down the nets and putting their fields to sleep. Groundsmen are busy with their end-of-season work. They will never meet but they all share these gentle early autumnal rituals. I thought of my own club some 240 miles away and felt suddenly a little homesick.

But what of it? Three old friends walk circuits of village cricket grounds. Next to the last of the summer wine although we’ve all got a good few decent glasses left in us yet. Who should give a damn? Nobody, perhaps, but still I thought of Edgbaston, where people make the occasion, and of the cricket fields I had visited where people I would never know had laboured in former seasons, filled in forms and mowed pitches so that these hidden glories might exist. And of course, so that young cricketers growing up in and around the Surrey Hills might have somewhere to play.

So I’m not sorry there are no awards or teams of the year in this column. There is no shortage of tributes and you can be bloody certain there is no shortage of love. This jaunt was a perfect way to end a season. It reminded me that just as it was the people we missed in so many ways during the pandemic, so it is the people that sustain us now. And I think that will do until next April…perhaps. Be kind to one another, winter well and thanks.