Cricket at Christmas

It’s fast approaching the office cricket season. Wickman fancies a game of office cricket.

The office cricket season officially starts in December and reaches a peak round about the last Friday before Christmas. There is then a traditional post Boxing Day Test played all over the country.

It works like this.

Equipment and rules:

Roll up two pieces of A4 into a ball together. Wrap round with most of a roll of sellotape to form a lethal, approximately four oz ball.

Take one poster tube. Wind round remainder of sellotape to act as bat tape.

Pitch: Move tables from Board Room or similar large space against wall.

Bowler’s run ups: Leave door at end of room open to facilitate long runs.

Boundaries: All walls and windows. Six if the ball hits full toss, four along the ground. No singles.

Single wicket tournament: Bat until you are out.

Fielders: As many as can be packed into the space.

Bowler: Normally the whippy looking kid from marketing who last played when 12.

In Wickman’s experience the game is normally played near Christmas and between Christmas and New Year. This is when most of the company’s big wigs are doing their shopping or topping up their holiday allowances with cheeky days at the kid's nativity play. Dave from accounts, the financial controller, has been left in charge of the company and no one gives a sh*t because he’s an idiot.

Every male in the office under the age of 30 gathers together after they’ve got back from a five pint lunch. The biggest bloke grabs the bat. Someone starts off bowling off breaks, but gets clagged all over the Board room. The “ball” – which is lethal owing to the hardness and shine of the sellotape – won’t do anything off the pitch. The big bloke races to 42 off seven balls. Someone else is brought on and takes a hideously long run up, oversteps by four yards, chucks it and smears whatever wastepaper basket is being used for stumps all over the wall. An apple core, screwed up fag packet and someone’s balled up paycheck spray across the floor.

The big guy isn’t impressed claiming a no ball. But five pints each have emboldened the mob and he’s banished to mid off, fighting with seven other mid offs to be the main fielder. Then someone who reckons he can play comes in and plays himself in (three balls in a row are patted back) so that when the fourth ball catches his suit-leg flare he’s triggered by the baying crowd who want to see boundaries.

The game then enters a strange phase where a number of people are bowled or LBW first or second ball until the quiet IT guy from Bangladesh (well Bow anyway) comes in and strokes 176* from 62 balls before everyone realises that there are better things to be done. The bat now resembles a loo roll in a hamster cage but the guy’s still middling it and grinning maniacally.

Evetentually only the guy from the post room, who has no mates, is left bowling to the, by now, double centurion.

They get caught by the MD who has returned from a client lunch, massage, happy finish and trip to buy the wife a a guiltlace (this is a piece of jewellery to mentally atone for the happy finish). The post room guy is fired, but the MD doesn't fire the IT guy because he knows about the MD's porn habit.

Or something...