Cricket Comeback...flannelled fool?

"Immortality is a long shot, I admit. But somebody has to be first."
Bill Cosby (1937- Comedian)


Hello Dear Friends!

This winter I decided after much consultation with my good wife that I was going to make a comeback to club cricket after twenty-six years out of the game. I had thought about it so many times...dreamed about it, but somehow there was always an excuse not to get back playing the game that has meant so much to me on so many levels throughout my life.

Cricket has always been much more than a game to me.

It is not merely a man hurling a hard leather ball at another man with a piece of wood in his hands with a posse of other men standing around waiting for the ball to come their way - no it is much, much more than that.

Cricket has a life force all it's own. It is at once a sport, a game it is true, but it is also a level playing field that brings competitors together in equal combat. It is a metephor for life - we have all heard the expression "it is not cricket" for any situation which is considered unsporting or unfair.

It was a sport introduced to the colonies of the British Empire by well meaning public servants who paternalistically felt that they were somehow civilizing the savages of the outposts of the glorious Empire by introducing them to this gentlemens game.

I somehow doubt that these British civil servants would have envisaged that one day these semi literate savages and descendants of convicts would beat them at their own game.

Perhaps because of these ancient beginnings, cricket has it's own literature that other sports can never hope to match. Wonderful writers and commentators on this wonderful game such as the venerable Neville Cardus could transport the reader through time and space with their colourful prose on games long past and players who have answered a higher calling. To spend hours engrossed reading a Wisden Almanack is something that only another cricket fanatic could understand - the statistics, the match descriptions and the wonderful stories of sometimes famous matches and at other times obscure...but always fascinating.

Heroes.
Villains.
Romantics.

Cricket has a place for them all.

My life long obsession with cricket has never abated and it never will. It is a game that is in my blood, in my brain - and most importantly - in my heart. Whenever I walk or drive past a cricket ground with a match in progress, as the bowler is running in, I feel compelled to watch what is going to happen next - that great unknown is what makes cricket such a fascinating, engrossing experience.

Cricket is a team game, but out on the pitch it is a man with a ball in his hands running in with a plan to dismiss the batsman while being supported by ten of his team mates who are strategically spread all around the field in order to prevent the batsman from scoring and to help in getting him out. For the batsman, when he is waiting at the crease for the bowler to deliver the ball, he is alone. Well not completely alone for he has a teammate at the non strikers end, but in his battle of wits with the bowler, it is one on one...a battle within battle. A game within a game.

This blog will be my inner thoughts of my first season back after a lifetime out of the game. A game I started playing when I was eight years old...forced to play by my brother who was nine years older than me. A game that I started playing at club level at the age of ten. A game I stopped playing at the age of sixteen for reasons that still do not make any sense to me.

The last twenty six years I have never ceased dreaming about playing...that adrenalin rush that comes with a well executed cut shot or a powerful pull shot that scorches to the boundary. I can close my eyes now and remember the feeling that comes with playing a stroke off the middle of the bat. I am ashamed to admit that I thought my playing days would be forever in the past and that my passion for cricket would be merely relegated to the realms of reading and dreaming.

Now, I can say with great excitement, that I will finally be able to yet again call myself a cricketer. I cannot thank the South Yarra Cricket Club enough for welcoming onto their playing roster and I hope I can repay the club with some honourable performances this year and beyond.

This blog will aid me in my efforts to articulate my weekly experiences so that I may one day be able to look back and read about my come back season and have a jolly good laugh. It will also record it for all time for the sake of posterity. But as Groucho Marx famously quipped long ago "Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?"

For those of you out there who feel I am being self indulgent - I beg your forgiveness - but all rationality has gone out the window and it has been replaced by a mindless enthusiasm that has arrested all logical, dispassionate thoughts and suspended them in place of childhood dreams being relived.

I'm nervous, but I am excited!

Vic Nicholas
Melbourne