The Evils of Garden Cricket

Wickman is worried about technique. After a sleepless night he has come to the conclusion that all his major flaws go back to his formative years of garden cricket. While Bradman caressed a golf ball around a Bowral back yard with a cricket stump a billion times a year, Wickman was playing in the back garden of a Kent home.

When I say formative years Wickman doesn't mean his tweens, or teens, he means his early twenties. That's when Wickman believes techniques are really forged. When a man is in his early prime, has achieved some strength and is no longer burdened by the words of the cricket coach (Wickman - just pad everything away and leave it to Tompkins to win the game and whatever you do, don't play that ugly hoick you call a pull shot) he begins to find his natural game.

Sadly Wickman believes that at this point his technique became constrained and hemmed in by garden cricket. Wickman and Wickman minor would, in their twenties, play a viscious form of cricket in a suburban back garden. The bat was armed with a blue plastic toy shop number that had been gaffer taped for greater strength. The bowler had a particular kind of ball. These were ex-boule balls. The ones from the plastic sets you could get from garages on the way to the beach in Devon. The water that gave them their main gravity defying properties was drained from them. The resulting piece of hard plastic was lethal, would swing like a middle-aged couple in Surbiton and could be propelled at phenomenal speed.

The pitch was approximately 18 yards long. It seldom played that long because the front foot rule was seldom applied with a version of the old back foot rule in operation. (Wickman is not sure he understands what it must have been like to play quick bowling when that rule was in place in international cricket). The pitch, by mid-Summer was dusty (much to the annoyance of the head groundsman), uneven and included tree roots along its length. The garden contained many mature trees a number of which were positioned close in on the off side - imagine three close fielders on the off - and there were a number of shrubs in a bed at 1st, 3rd and 4th slip. Other trees were randomly placed.

Any tree struck on the full - however tangentially - would lose the bat a wicket. Any boundary cleared on the full would acrue a six at the expense of a wicket. The batsman would, of course, have to retrieve the ball, on one side braving a derranged pint-sized-yappy-type-dog. All other rules apart from LBW applied, although a bat could not simply stand crabwise in front of his stumps to obscure them as this transgressed the spirit of the law. Games were played to strict test match rules - ten wickets per innings, two innings, no game could last more than 5 days. In effect this was two days at the weekend plus evenings after work minus whatever time was lost through alcoholic incapacity.

Batting was, to say the least, hazardous. The boule ball could, off a long run, be propelled at no small speed taking into account the length of the pitch. The wearing of shorts was unwise. Dug in, it could rear alarmingly and many was the time a good stinger was administered or received. If you could get a bat on it trying to keep it down and away from trees and shrubs was a dashed tricky business. And this is where technique went out of the window. There was no point trying to get your foot to the pitch. The bat was so short you would have been bent double trying to play a classical cover drive which - if an inch off the ground - would strike one of the trees resulting in a wicket down.

The only guaranteed profitable shots were a sqaure cut or drive along the floor to a ridiculously short boundary or some form of block or nudge in that direction OR a shovel to leg avoiding a tree stump square. If you could keep it below the top of the fence, turning it to leg allowed for all run twos or threes as it was difficult for the bowler to get to a particular area becuase of impeding shrubs. Even with the advantage of electric wickets, fielding was a chore because trying to throw down the stumps from any distance was almost impossible as the ball would not fly straight. Accuracy was a question of incredible phyical understanding and the use of parabolas.

Games were attritional. Long periods would be spent with the bowler experimenting with grips to bowl the perfect inswinging yorker. We hoped to pitch the ball on a root to change how it would behave off the pitch. As a bat, you needed to remain hunched to stop the ball going under your ridiculousy small bat and alert to the danger of one dug in. Your best strategy was to allow the opponent to bowl himself to a standstill so he had to bring on his "spinners" due to tiredness. At this point you could go on some form of run spree.

There were some marathon games. Wickman can recall a team called Dead England (including Hutton, Grace, Tyson etc) ammassing more than 750 for the loss of only 3 wickets (Hutton made a treble) against Famous Guitarists who included Hendrix and someone called Satriani (who had a particularly fluid bowling style). So exhausted were the guitarists at the middle of the second day that Dead England promptly declared and Larwood and Voce destroyed the guitarists twice in a session as Wickman minor could hardly stand straight.

Happy days - but it has taken years of senior cricket and corrective nets for Wickman to be able to drive the ball straight or hit the ball in the air to leg. There was simply no value and too much risk in those shots in the garden. Wickman wonders how many other young men's careers in club cricket have been similarly retarded...