No injuries this time!

OK... I used to really dislike cricket. Not because I wasn't very good at it, or because it seems to take so long to get to any sort of conclusion. No, I never really liked it for one reason. Many years ago at my school in Wellingborough, I received a really unjustifiable punishment for simply walking across the hallowed First Eleven wicket (the rectangular bit in the middle of the field). Just walking across it. A good shouting at and a detention followed. My argument that cricketers in boots run all over it during a match seemed lost on Mr Prall's (the appalled games' teacher) ears. In fact, if I remember correctly, it only served to increase the length of the detention.

So... the annual tour of the Scilly Isles by Bayshill cricket club always fills me with anxiety. This is my brother's team - a village side from Cheltenham, which does the Scillies' tour every year without fail. Four games against the four main islands. Four games in whites, pads and helmets. Four games which are keenly fought over. And crucially, four games which I am drafted in for... to complete the numbers, which takes the average age of the team to about 95!

Now, I have to admit I quite like cricket now. This is probably because virtually every male member of my family have at some time or other played in these games, including my father when he was in his early 80s and... this year, my niece's little one, Jamie (just 10 years old). It helps of you win, of course. And this year (last week) we actually did. And nearly a clean sweep too. 3 glorious victories and one narrow defeat.

Of course, it helped when three of the best players of the regular Bayshill side back in Cheltenham, rode into town at the last minute, quite unexpectedly, and proceeded to tear the first team we played (from the island of Tresco) to pieces. There was jubilation everywhere at this! Well, not on Tresco, but certainly in our massed ranks of supporters (22 of them), who even managed a Mexican wave and several loud Icelandic 'claps'. We even won a nice silver cup.

We then decimated the island of St. Martin's, had a hiccup against the isle of St. Mary's... before playing St Agnes.

I never really like this game. It's our graveyard match and the cause of much of my anxiety, because it's the place where we get injured. There is a long list, which goes back to The Stone Age of our walking and stretchered wounded. Sprained ankles, broken noses, torn ligaments, ripped tendons, pulled shoulder muscles... and blood everywhere. Oh, and not forgetting my contribution - a broken collarbone two years ago going for an impossible Joe Root catch which I held onto, after leaping balletically to catch a ball zipping at me at a thousand miles an hour on a concrete-hard pitch. My brother said afterwards that it had been a 'dolly' and I had fallen like a shot camel. I always knew he needed glasses.

But this year we got away with it. No injuries (if you don't count a chronic bout of diarrhoea an hour before the game, after I had sucked down a large and very buttery ice cream). And we won too - with ease!

So yes, I like cricket now and can watch the Ashes and sound as if I know what I am talking about when Steve Smith clouts another boundary off Moeen. I also feel that I have earned the right to walk heavily all over any wickets I come across in the future!

The Bayshill Mexican wave crew on silly hat day on St. Mary's!