BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
There is a strip of concrete in a yard that slopes so sharply that the word ‘pitch’ feels like a courtesy. It runs uphill. It has grooves in it, scars from some forgotten building project, and when the plastic ball with the seam lands on one, it spits up at your throat like it has taken personal offence.
The stumps are plastic. The bat is plastic. The ball is plastic, seamed, and behaves with all the predictability of a cat. We play a game of balls survived. Not runs. Survival. There is only the question of how long you can stay in, and the answer is never long enough.
We are three men. I am a Christian. One of us is a Hindu. The other a Muslim. We play in the gaps between work, twenty minutes here, fifteen there, squeezed between Zooms and other meetings and the general admin of being alive. The yard is steep enough that bowling is an act of faith and batting is an act of penance. And I would like to tell you, with all the humility I can muster, that I am quite good at it. But humility, as my Hindu friend reminds me, is best practised silently, so I shall say only this: the grooves have been kind to me, and luck is not a skill, whatever my Muslim friend says when I edge one through the gap between the water butt and the fence.
The Muslim is, by his own cheerful admission, rubbish. His top score is four. Four. He will tell you about that four the way other men tell you about a century at the Oval. But here is the thing about him: he bowls a demon yorker. On a steep yard, uphill, with a plastic ball, he sends down this skidding, spitting, unplayable thing that rattles the plastic stumps and leaves you questioning your grip, your stance, your entire cricketing education. He cannot bat. He can bowl one ball that would embarrass a professional.
This is the human condition in miniature: each of us contains one impossible gift and one glaring deficiency, and the game finds them both.
The Hindu bats solidly. Straight bat, still head, the kind of technique that suggests he has read about it, watched it, and taken notes. But his bowling is wayward, genuinely, gloriously wayward. The ball goes where it wants. Sometimes the off side. Sometimes the street. Sometimes, spiritually speaking, mid wicket. He apologises. We tell him not to. The wayward ball is the whole point.
And then there is me. I am the Christian, which in this yard means I am the one who says a small prayer before facing the demon yorker, and who believes, against all evidence, that this time I will survive. I have had my moments. I shall not enumerate them. The Hindu has a phrase for this restraint, and the Muslim has a laugh for it, and between the two I have learnt more about humility than any sermon has ever taught me.
Here is what happens in twenty minutes.
We assemble in the kitchenette. Someone says, “quick game?” Someone else says, “I have got a call at three.” We play. The ball spits off a groove. The plastic stumps clatter. Someone appeals, not really appealing, just making the noise of appeal, because there is no umpire and no law and no need. Someone top edges one into the dustbins. Someone bowls the demon yorker and someone else survives it and we all, briefly, celebrate as though a World Cup has been won. Then a phone buzzes. Someone says, “that’s me done.” The stumps are picked up. The ball goes in a suit pocket. We go back inside, and the yard is quiet again, and the grooves wait.
And when we see each other again, whether in the lift, or over a desk, or waiting for the kettle, we do not talk about work or politics, let alone religion. We talk about yesterday’s match. We laugh about the edge through the water butt. We replay the demon yorker. We argue, happily, about whether the ball that took the top of the plastic stumps was really a no ball. The same three men, the same twenty minutes, relived again and again, and every retelling makes us laugh harder than the last.
And here is what I have come to believe: the world should play a lot more cricket. Not the professional kind. The twenty minute kind. The kind played on a slope with plastic Amazon equipment between meetings, by people who disagree about our maker and agree about the demon yorker. Cricket is a game of long waits and sudden moments. The bowler runs in alone and the batsman stands alone, and yet neither is alone at all, because the whole thing only works if everyone is paying attention. It teaches you to survive rather than to dominate. And it can be played in the gaps, in the twenty minutes between the things that supposedly matter.
We are a Christian, a Hindu and a Muslim, and we have never once, in that yard, discussed any of it. There is no need. The ball spits off the groove regardless of who is holding the bat. The demon yorker does not care what you believe. The plastic stumps fall for all of us. And when one of us survives a particularly nasty over, the other two, the wayward one and the rubbish one, applaud as though it were the most important thing in the world, because for those twenty minutes, it is.
Should some extremist loon come along and nick the bat, the ball or the stumps, he would soon be throttled with the bat, have the ball rammed into his frothing mouth, and we would find a suitable orifice for a stump or two.
The world should play a lot more cricket. Not because it would solve anything, but because it reminds us of the genius of the secular. That a steep yard is a leveller. That a groove can be a mystery. That a man’s top score of four can be, to him, a masterpiece. That the wayward bowler, the solid batsman and the lucky survivor are all, in the end, just people trying to keep their stumps standing for one more ball.
We came out to survive a few balls and left having practised, without saying so, the hardest thing a man can practise: standing next to his neighbour and wanting nothing from him but the game. The stumps are plastic, the pitch is crooked, and the light is already going. Play.
Dominic Wightman is in his tenth year as Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Dear Townies and Conservatism (2024).