The Bacchus XI vs CHAOKS Boys

"Yes, Pat, I've nearly finished it"

Bacchus XI vs CHAOKS Boys -- 27 August 2023 -- Tattenhall, Cheshire

Cree-keet! Cree-keet! Cree-keet!”
-- DOUGLAS ADAMS, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: Tertiary Phase

Imagine yourself as the captain of a travelling cricket team, enduring a run of losses stretching back over a year. As you survey the glum expressions of your formerly merry band, you cast about for ways to return a little joy to their sporting lives. At length, you settle on a novel idea; to invent a team of sacrificial no-hopers, precision engineered to deliver extras by the barrow-load and to guide even the most whimsical vagaries from Jeffers’ magic box onto the very middle of middle stump. You procure the ground near which you grew up, install your brother as opposition captain and provide him with a rag-tag assortment of school friends, but not the ones who made the first team. This achieved, you light the Brook Hall Beacons and summon The Team from the desiccated cricketing wastelands of South Oxfordshire. They answer the call, and you gather them around the piano long into the night (it can hardly affect their sporting powers after all) plying them with drink and song until every one of them would bleed Chilean red for Bacchus. And the next day you still lose, badly. With such context, gentle reader, would you do it all again? Such are the questions that plague the mind of Pat Hudson.

Indeed, discontented Bacchant rumblings were heard to the effect that since the team could hardly be expected to win outside of Oxford (citing a mountain of supporting evidence) it was mere folly that Pat should force them to lose games as far away as Tattenhall, when surely Wantage would do. This took no account of Pat’s ulterior motive, for he had recently become engaged, and was thus unwilling to deviate in any way from the course which had led him to that happy state. If a Bacchus match in Tattenhall had represented even the smallest step on his journey towards perfect felicity (as Sarah Hudson privately calls her), then Bacchus matches in Tattenhall there would be forevermore. A concerning hypothesis if marital bliss relies on consistency across the calendar, as since I started writing this Pat has taken the deviant step of beating Wytham. Matilda Warner may find it prudent to take legal advice.

The event itself began with the traditional realisation that one team was short on numbers (Hugh Hudson was busy showing Australian schoolboys how best to achieve a king pair in one thirty over innings). This need not have troubled us, given that, for once, the Bacchus were an XI in more than name. However, CHAOKS are an embryonic entity, unlearned in the darker arts of ringer acquisition, and we could only watch so many polite entreaties go unanswered before our paternalistic instincts took over. After all, any delight in slaughtering the little squirts would ring pretty hollow if we failed to send a full team to the sporting abattoir, and we did in fact know of a functional cricketer within easy reach. A crack extraction squad dragged Ferg Davidson (for it was he) from the sofa he’d spent the night on, stuffed him into some whites and informed him that he was opening the bowling for a team he’d never heard of. Given the circumstances, he can be forgiven for any slow, floated deliveries outside leg stump. I, on the other hand, certainly can’t be forgiven for missing them.

Perceptive readers will have gained a horrifying truth from that last paragraph; Bacchus were batting first. Precisely when the tactical supercomputer settled on this tactic is a mystery, and Pat won’t give us the login, so Jake and I had only our past experience and native intuition with which to assess the situation. Things, therefore, looked bleak. Our form had been described as ‘patchy’ by kind Antipodean observers and ‘utter shite’ by our captain. And now we were facing a bowler who looked startlingly like Antony Aldous (CHAOKS’ matchwinner of the previous year) only taller, broader, and with a longer run-up. The immediate atomisation of both our wickets confirmed that it was the same man. This brought Herr Vittenklopp, the noted botanist, to the crease, where he soon caught sight of a non-descript weevil in the middle-stump groove. Naturally, this took precedence over the accumulation of runs, and Freddie duly dug in, blocking a series of devasting Aldous deliveries lest they turn his discovery into a fine paste. Occasionally the startled creature scampered to the other end, and here it made sense for our naturalist to guide the ball into the off side and take a single, so as to keep it in view. By the sixth over he had detailed notes and a passable diagram of this interesting new species, so all that remained was to shepherd Josh Thomas’ ball onto his stumps and scamper gleefully back to the pavilion to begin his paper for the Royal Society. Freddie’s Big Score, however, would have to wait.

This left a somewhat bemused Jeffers at the non-strikers’ end, but the arrival of Mr James Brassington rekindled his hopes that there were some on the team for whom competent batting remained a possibility, or even an aim. Brassington understood the tactical situation perfectly, and adopted the familiar Bacchant role of ‘Number Five Who Has To Play Like An Opener Because The Innings Has Only Just Begun’. Their partnership probably saved the match, as Michael Hudson had chosen this moment to deploy Martin Punnett, as fine a classicist as has ever graced The Flacca, and CHAOKS’ ‘swing bowler’. Precisely what a ‘swing bowler’ might be is a contentious topic for the Bacchus, but bitter experience has at least taught our middle order to know one when they see one (or, more frequently, when they don’t). Our men duly entrenched themselves, riding out Punnett’s four over spell with their wickets intact, for the bargain price of Jeffers’ ability to walk; James Le Nisbet took his place to complete the heroic stand. When the existential threat sidled away to recuperate at midwicket, the batsmen were at last free to begin the serious scoring (we had, for some time, been relying entirely on extras). Brassington grimly charged back and forth, a necessary endeavour as the bat he has apparently been wielding since preschool is positively bacchant in its inability to hit boundaries. Le Nis, a keen student of the game, quickly apprehended that running was a jolly useful thing to do, and did so four whole times before his eagerness for a fifth led him to miss a straight ball. Alex Chalk’s career is at a similarly infant stage, a stage at which young cricketers look for examples on which to base their game. Chalky, understandably, felt Brassington’s array of drives and cuts to be above his understanding, and settled on Nisbet’s innings as a fitter subject for emulation. His swift departure, in the same manner and for the same score, is a measure of the man’s devotion to his craft.

By now the match was what tedious folk would have termed ‘finely poised’, a state intolerable to Michael Hudson, determined as he was to bury his son’s sporting aspirations deep beneath The Flacca’s outfield. He resolved to dislodge the limpet-like Mr James Brassington himself, not with one of the 90mph daisy-cutters for which he is justly famous, but with a tempting looped offering on middle stump. Brassington, now at the bitter end of his cardiovascular range, felt the daycare bat could surely manage one lofted boundary. Mid-on begged to differ, and the rock on which we had built our total was dragged from the field in justified despair, for he left the innings to the mercy of Riley and Polding. This partnership promised none of the steadiness on which we had relied, disdaining such things in favour of exuberance and dash. Pat and Charlie frantically raided the club assets for pads and boxes.

The Riley-Polding axis set about the CHAOKS attack. The dash came. Then, somewhat bizarrely, kept coming. Pat and Charlie ceased their brawl for possession of the one batting glove and gawped in stupefied amazement at the unfolding spectacle. Strike rotation. Quick singles. Boundaries, for heaven’s sake. The Reverend Dr even emerged from his cloud of barbecue smoke to declare the presence of ‘strokeplay’ to the company. The pair, in fact, batted out all the remaining overs, and were finally clapped from the field having added a scarcely believable 64 runs, ending things on 160-7. The Bacchus were in dreamland.

True, the inconvenient fact remained that we had left a reasonably chaseable total for our bright-eyed, nay, bushy-tailed opposition. Nevertheless, as long as Gee and Riley (hastily refuelled by the Reverend Dr’s impressive array of smoked meats) could keep things tight in the early overs, and even take a few wickets, we were in with a chance. Pat promptly handed the new ball to Le Nis.

The cricketing manuals have much to say on the subject of bowling technique, but all would advocate a really solid grounding from which to release the ball. Suffice it to say, some bowlers take this advice more literally than others. Le Nis, run-up be damned, planted himself so firmly at the bowlers’ end that, had it chanced to rain, he might actually have grown. There followed a remarkable optical illusion, as Le Nis sent down something that bore none of the hallmarks of good bowling, but that had precisely the same effect. Three overs and only 11 runs later, the obvious thing was to let him bowl his overs out, but by now Riley was circling Pat with a garotte. Reluctantly, the skipper allowed him and Gee their long-awaited fun, on the express condition that they rattled through the CHOAKS order quickly enough for us to snag a table at the pub. Our main men thus produced an extraordinary display of line, length, pace, bounce, and anything else a fan of the XI (I dare not use the plural) could desire. Thomas and Davidson, opening for CHAOKS, refused to be impressed, taking visible delight in the bowlers’ frustration. The fielders did what they could (except, I need hardly add, for catching), unleashing a series of increasingly tasteless and disgusting sledges, all to no avail. When our only two frontline bowlers were sent to the knackers yard we call ‘cover’, all they had to show for their efforts were two thoroughly settled batsmen. 160 suddenly looked like a very small number indeed.

In the traditional sign that he’d abandoned all hope of winning, Pat tossed me the ball. However, as the ancient wisdom tells us, ‘Shit gets wickets’, and being only a short drive from home I had access to my full supply. Ramsy had also fit a creditable amount into the back of his Porsche, no doubt tanking the resale value but equipping him superbly for the task at hand. There followed a series of deliveries which any tailender would have spanked across the Welsh border, but which for the talented top-order types condemned to face them were borderline unplayable. Thomas and Davidson fell within three balls. Ramsy tactfully conceded 19 runs from his first over, just to reaffirm that our bowling was genuine dross, not the synthetic stuff overwhelming the modern market, and then gave a staggering example of its power by shattering Aldous’ leg stump. His next ball clean bowled another. Riley and Gee could have murdered us without a flicker of remorse.

Ramsy’s hattrick didn’t come (Caitlin Thomas is far too good a player to take part in such silliness) and for a fleeting moment is seemed that common sense had been restored. When his next delivery was slapped towards the square leg boundary, reason (and possibly karma) dictated that it should come to rest in the windscreen of the aforementioned Porsche. But reason has little meaning to Alex Chalk, who flaunted his disregard for it by leaping four feet in the air and taking the catch, one handed, in the greatest feat of athleticism the XI is ever likely to witness. Not that his teammates were generous with their congratulations, for few things could be less welcome to a Bacchant than a visual demonstration that catching is, in fact, part of the game (unless it be the confirmation that batting collapses, though clearly integral to any Bacchus match, don’t necessarily have to come from us. Precisely when our top order plan to apply this information is unclear).

Pat now faced a dilemma. Native bloodlust strove with a pragmatic desire to extend the game, the sun still being high and the pub having sent word that they couldn’t accommodate us for at least an hour. Feeling that a new bowling attack of Jake and Freddie should at least give him thinking time, he settled himself behind the stumps to decide upon his best course. However, Bacchant top-order batsmen are the least reliable creatures in creation, and can’t even manage to play like shit when you need them to. Jake broke Caitlin’s stumps with his very first ball, and the next over Pat was forced to watch an actual catch, taken by an actual Bacchant not named Alex Chalk, off the actual bowling of Freddie Fucking Gate; it really was an odd sort of day. Jake’s next over ended a manful rearguard stand from Ben Sellars, leaving only one wicket to fall and forcing Pat into drastic measures to keep the match going. ‘Drastic measures’ is, of course, Bacchant rhyming slang for ‘Jeffers’. Where sound tactical decisions had failed, the best option was now to surrender proceedings to the powers of chaos, and hope the arcane forces would be sufficiently amused to prolong the spectacle, at least until tea. Jeffers sacrificed an orphan to the Aztec god of inswing, and rolled some dice to determine the length of his runup. In a promising development, the process produced an imaginary number. Michael Hudson, solemnly guarding CHAOKS’ last wicket, contemplated the infinite possibilities.

Infinity lasted one over (of ten balls), but none could be disappointed by the variety on show. In the most ‘in character’ display of bowling imaginable, Jeffers produced two wides, a no-ball, and two near-perfect deliveries that missed off-stump by the width of a dream. Finally, the in-swinging yorker he’s always aiming for appeared. No living batsman has yet defended it, and Michael’s status as a living batsman thus sealed his fate. The deed was done; the hopes, dreams and stumps of CHAOKS spread liberally across West Cheshire.

Given that we’d taken two attempts to beat a team who existed for the sole purpose of losing to us, public celebrations were obviously indecent. No Bacchant has ever needed further motivation, and the sight of our sordid band parading our victory across the two hundred yards separating The Flacca from The Letters Inn should at least spare us the ignominy of being invited back for round three. With the spirit of cricket thoroughly exorcised, the company retired for a quiet evening at Brook Hall West, drinking virgin pina coladas around something that definitely wasn’t a piano. Except me, for I was shut away in another room, starting the match report. It’s very important to have these things done on time.

Scorecard

Bacchus XI
E Larken (Bowled, Aldous) 7
J Swann (Bowled, Aldous) 1
F VITTENKLOPP-Gate (Bowled, Thomas) 10
W Jefferies (Retired Hurt) 4
J Brassington (Caught, Hudson) 27
J Nisbet (Bowled, Sellars) 4
R Polding (NOT OUT) 31
A Chalk (Bowled, Aryan) 4
S Riley (NOT OUT) 33

E. X. Tras 38
Total 159/6

CHAOKS Boys
J Thomas (Bowled, Larken) 17
F Davidson (Bowled, Larken) 5
A Aldous (Bowled, Polding) 18
Aryan (Caught (Chalk), Polding) 1
Partap (Caught, Polding) 0
C Thomas (Bowled, Swann) 1
Laurence (Caught, VITTENKLOPP-Gate) 3
B Sellars (Bowled, Swann) 4
M Punnett (NOT OUT) 13
M Hudson (Bowled, Jefferies) 1

E. X. Tras 19
Total 82/9

Bacchus XI win by 78 runs