The Bacchus XI vs Wytham CC

My Lenten penance is finishing these.

MATCH REPORT – The Bacchus XI vs Wytham – Williamstrip Park – 30 July 2023

And he imagined himself with Pooh, saying, “Did you ever see such rain, Pooh?” and Pooh saying, “Isn't it awful, Piglet?” and Piglet saying, “I wonder how it is over Christopher Robin's way,” and Pooh saying, “I should think poor old Rabbit is about flooded out by this time.” It would have been jolly to talk like this, and really, it wasn't much good having anything exciting like floods, if you couldn't share them with somebody.
-- A A MILNE, Winnie-the-Pooh

WITH THE bourgeois hostility that settled cultivators have always shown the marauding classes, every cricket pitch in Oxfordshire declared that whatever the Bacchants planned to do with Wytham on the last Sunday in July, we weren’t going to do it there. The county has never been kind to even the most brazenly hypocritical anarchist: as Catwater’s earnest efforts to acquire a bank account and a stake in late capitalism for the XI faltered, our protestations that any association between the team and revolutionary syndicalism was purely conjectural met contemptuous dismissal. Besides, said the groundsmen, our sentences had too many unwieldy clauses.

Eager though we were to join the corporatist conspiracy, Bacchus faced at least one more outing as a soviet. We searched low and high for a venue beyond the blacklist, regretfully turning down offers from Sussex and Hampshire as, not inaccurately, Nowhere Near Wytham. Ben Mills – scourge of BBC bowling – raised his hand. How did we think of Gloucestershire? Mightily, we said. Would we pay? I went to a field in Orkney and dug up the club coffers, where we keep money for a rainy day.

As we drove towards Williamstrip Park and Nick Champness told us more stories about his heartbroken friends, it rained. When precisely on the journey it began is subject to debate: the water hitting Larken’s screen which he thought worthy of the moniker I first dismissed as mere humidity, and then as high-velocity moisture. By the time that we had followed the Williamstrip groundsman’s directions (“You have to be lost to find a place that can’t be found…”) I had begun to accept that the Met Office’s 40 per cent chance of rain spanning all possible playing hours was perhaps the reality we were inhabiting. I started laughing in a very unfunny way. It was at this moment that we found the ground, behind some cows.

The rain got heavier (or as I preferred to say, lighter) and the teams rolled in, luxuriating in the prospect of a cancelled match. Wytham players dawdled in the puddle where the outfield used to be, grateful that after their perilous expedition to find the ground at least they wouldn’t have to play any bloody cricket. But the groundsman had handed me a bag of sawdust and announced that we were welcome to do as we chose, before he disappeared cackling into the mist; Herr Vittenklopp, the noted botanist, was calculating the quickest route around the cattle to his friend’s water ski lodge when I made the not-self-evident announcement that Since We Were There, We Might As Well Play Something. And we would, of course, bowl first.

CATWATER DIDN’T actually slap me for this, but his black trackies stung and I nearly hit him anyway. Instead, I made my feelings felt by wading into the storm and putting myself on to open the bowling – for while I was wearing foul knackered deck shoes that merely framed my socks, my whites were immaculate above the ankle. Catwater sledged me from mid-on.

Champness seemed quite unsurprised by the torrents, animosity and wides of my opening spell, which hurt me. He gamely tried a bit of short stuff, which splashed water in his eyes. The sodden outfield ought to have made it slow going for the Wytham openers, but our cunning nemeses noticed that our deep fielders were sinking up to their shins in the mud – or, in Harry Deacon’s case, periodically disappearing to answer emails in the pavilion. Skying the ball, provided it wasn’t directly over a fielder who wasn’t Fred, wasn’t going to put them in trouble.

So we called in the cavalry, which in the best Napoleonic tradition was bogged down in a muddy field and massacred. Catwater came on after my last hellish, ten-delivery over which I still haven’t woken from, and was pasted all over the place. With weatherproof good cheer, Leo Wright was assisting the scorers and collecting the ball from the obscure parts of Gloucestershire whence it often went; the utterly tiresome Wytham umpire called me over to say that if Leo were to stop the ball before it passed the boundary (as he might reasonably have done to save himself scouring the Williamstrip prairie) he would be obliged to consider him part of the boundary and therefore blah blah blah blah. Rather than singing “Ilse of Capri” back to him, I cravenly asked Olly to ask Leo not to do that and immediately felt cretinous: the buckeen was showing vastly more enterprise than anybody in the formal outfield, and could probably have strung more legal deliveries together than any of us. He channelled his industry into putting sawdust in the scorers’ hair instead.

The egregious Australian ran himself out during the twelfth over as the score ticked past 100, and Olly Wright kindly allowed us our delirious celebration before pointing out that it had clearly been deliberate, on instruction from the bored pavilion. This failed to quell our giddiness, and the cross man who came in at three twice stepped away as the bowler ran in due to chatter in the field. The Bacchants struggled to suppress an Ooooooo in response while the other Ollie – shipped down from Cheshire especially for the purpose – quietly manoeuvred himself to third man. It was to third man that our conversationalist promptly guided a beauty from Catwater. Proper cricket, if only any of us had been in a fit state to recognise it.

By the time the other opener had run himself out with utterly flagrant intent, the wicket looked like it had been harvested of sugar beet. This should have alarmed a team with any sort of aspiration to bat on it one day, but the Bacchante don’t worry about the future, we just live, love and laugh for the now. And it was much too much fun seeing Wythamites bowled by balls that reared off the sludge where the pitch ought to have been, or rolled onto the stumps along the furrow where the batsmen had scraped middle-and-off. Even Dominic had a twirl of whatever he claims to bowl at the moment, though this sadly necessitated my taking over as ‘keeper just as I seemed to lose all depth vision; watching from mid-wicket, Seb Taite-Ellis might have worried that I was going to claim his trophy for All Time Shocker Behind The Stumps. Only the wetlands of the outfield saved me from conceding a frightening number of byes, but wickets apiece from Nick and Jeffers – plus three from Dominic, even though I told him not to – kept Wytham under 200 for their thirty overs. Which honestly didn’t seem all that bad. In the interval, each member of my family came over to tell me how shit all the other members of my family had thought my ‘keeping was.

WE HAD spent the latter overs with nine-and-a-half in the field, as Larken was designated to catering and Deacon flitted back and forth finalising the sale of Gran Canaria to the Guinean Sovereign Wealth Fund. Everybody went to eat key lime pie in the pavilion. I walked around and gave people numbers.

The weather did not tangibly improve between innings, but everybody was now damp to the bone so suffered less from osmosis. Ollie From Cheshire gallantly accepted the bitter cup of opening with Larken, perhaps not realising what he’d be forced to witness from the non-striker’s end. The trundling in-swingers of the Wytham openers had Larken spread with precision and delicacy across a selection of wholegrain crostini – a sight that drove Ollie to a despairing swing and one of those trundlers clattering his stumps. Larken survived, filthily enough, to welcome Herr Vittenklopp, the noted botanist, to the crease. Fred looked in grand nick: after filthy Larken single gave him the strike, he thrashed the ball into a gap and steamed off for the run. The gusto of his charge for the one was matched only by the eagerness to turn for the second, so as his head swung in one direction his feet stormed on in the other, ploughing a Freddie-length trench into the turf as he hit it. The whole motion had a tectonic elegance. After that, Freddie was run out, and Larken’s canapé existence ended with another of those depressingly undeniable LBW appeals.

With ten overs gone, we were three down with 36 on the board – Wytham had been 84-0. Noli timere: Harry Deacon and Olly Wright brought real sense of batting to the middle order, at least until Deacon was bowled by a foul ball squirting off a pitch so malevolent that it then sucked the sole off Olly’s shoe. Some bloke who had opened the bowling for some skool or other (Hard Knocks? I forget) came on as second change, and bowled some very dangerous no-balls. “Aha!” thought the anonymous, cretinous umpire, “I shall no-ball this geezer out of the game.” So brilliantly worked my scheme that he used the extra deliveries to bowl Olly and then Seb next ball, and then Dominic, and then Nick. I should like to rebuke Catwater for failing to marshal the tail as he battled to 16, but must acknowledge that the tail was so fleeting a phenomenon that our technology was scarcely able to register it. Jeffers went for a duck to some doughy spin, and I – needing only to survive one ball from their demon to see out his spell and deny him a five-for – fucked it. The Caramel House supercomputer has logged us as statistically insignificant. In any case, what would we signify?

SCORECARD

Wytham
D Webster run out D Hudson 78
M Smith run out D Hudson 46
T Hollis c Paul b Riley 4
A Glennie b D Hudson 21
Speight c Paul b D Hudson 2
C Howe b Jefferies 0
J Green b Champness 4
N Thykkathu b D Hudson 0
P Wheeldon not out 3
P Newman not out 3

Extras 10b 2lb 12w 3nb 27
Total (30 overs) 192

Bacchus XI
E S T Larken lbw b Thykkathu 9
O Paul b Thykkathu 5
F Gate run out Newman 1
H Deacon b Thykkathu 19
O Wright b Howe 23
S C Riley not out 16
S Taite-Ellis b Howe 0
D A Hudson b Howe 3
N Champness c Green b Howe 0
W Jefferies b Wheeldon 0
P H Hudson b Howe 1

Extras 2b 2w 14nb 15
Total (24.0 overs) 95

WYTHAM WIN BY 97 RUNS