The Bacchus XI vs Wytham CC

We have left undone that which we ought to have done.... Another Lent, another futile bid to finish the match reports before next season. But I trust we're all excited?

MATCH REPORT – Wytham CC vs The Bacchus XI – Wytham -- 5 May 2024

I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.
-- WILLIAM MORRIS, The Dream of John Ball

SHELDON PLANKTON had Mr Krabs; Chiang Kai-shek had Mao Zedong; we have Wytham. Though it’s not always clear that they appreciate the emotional weight of our relationship.

When Aidan Glennie, their freshly-squeezed fixtures sec, said they were struggling for numbers for our season opener, we smelled blood. The Bacchants aren’t too clear on the laws of cricket but we’re whip-sharp on the Law of the Jungle. For those seven of us who’d rallied to the flag to be massacred by the V&A six months earlier, it was a little galling to see names like Cubitt and Polding on an already-crowded roster. There were probably similar feelings when Greece and Brazil joined the Allies in 1917.

All this pre-season excitement and raptor instinct meant we turned up at the astroturf heavily overstaffed. Catwater had even come good on years of wild archaeological conjecture about the Anglo-Saxon burial site Sutton Bill, and finally dug out a terrifying Dark Ages cricketer complete with Gray-Nicolls grave goods. The whole unwieldy caravan included travelling reserves, backroom staff, friends, family, itinerant artisans and a brass band, amply catered for by the Yugman & Co’s Special Deluxe Service. All that was missing was Larken – in the Aegean – and the five players Wytham needed to make an XI.

What followed resembled a version of the US invasion of Grenada, if the CIA had secreted Jeffers, Linden and me into the Grenadian military on the grounds that this would lend it a semblance of a fair fight. Not that this didn’t make worthwhile viewing: which of us hasn’t dreamt, while drifting out of consciousness in a bubble bath, of the Inevitable Jeffers opening the bowling to Herr Vittenklopp, the noted botanist? When an unstoppable force meets and immovable object, when fishes fly and forests walk – it all behoves that Freddie’s off stump is in trouble. He returned to the pavilion for a duck, muttering herbaceously, and everybody wondered whether the Bacchus was about to pay dearly for three years of jokes about the International Man of Mystery.

It was not. In a jarring change of writerly conceit, Sutton Bill strode forth from the Dark Ages and began slaughtering Jeffers’ bowling like the decadent remnant of Roman Briton civilisation it is. The whole thing was pretty difficult to watch if you were in the field, which might have contributed to the cascade of boundaries despite Linden flinging himself around. Felicity, channelling Gildas, kept a mournful record of ruin in the scorebook.

Ben Mills, meanwhile, who had opened with Freddie even if Freddie hadn’t really opened with him, was batting like he wasn’t trapped inside a British History I paper. He hit some beautiful shots off the tattered fragments of Wytham bowling, one of which landed in my hands. “Hooray!” we all said. Mills looked at me darkly, nay satanically, and the big screens in the grandstand played sepia footage of me dropping two much, much easier catches of his bowling during the benighted V&A game the previous September. Sutton Bill fought on, pausing only to warn the next man Brassington not to do anything to endanger his century, before slaughtering the rest of the bowling in a manner that doesn’t provide good copy outside of Beowulf. Over the curry later, we asked Bill why he’d come to the match.

“The noblest and wisest counsellors of my people advised me to come to you, lord Hrothgar, because they knew of my great strength,” he said, chewing a bhaji. “They themselves saw me when, stained with the blood of enemies, I came from battles, when I bound five giants and destroyed their race, and killed water monsters on the waves at night; I endured great hardship to avenge their persecution of the Geats – they had asked for trouble! I ground down those fierce creatures, and now I will fight against the monster Grendel; alone I shall settle the dispute with the demon.”

Grendel’s all very well, we said, giving due credit to Constance B Hieatt for the translation, but can you bat against Lachlan?

FOR THE epically minded, there might have been something bathetic about Bill holing out to one of my demon half-trackers for 82. But for the plain men of Wytham, with whom Jeffers, Linden and I now quite bloodily identified, it was a treasured bit of punctuation for purgatory.

Brassington enjoyed liberation from his Larken-manque role for not very much time at all, before guiding a beautifully uppish on-drive – and you must remember, best beloved, that Brassington scarcely has legs, let alone a legside game – into the clammy hands of the field, for 27. A score of 140-odd for four a little after the twentieth over didn’t especially excite Linden and the Wythamites, but they don’t know the Bacchus like Jeffers and I do. It can make calypso from anything.

Sure enough, while Ramsy played with suspicious panache against some dismal spin bowling, Cubitt could only prod at it as he might the corpse of a grey squirrel in his airing cupboard. He prodded gently at one, shepherding it to Linden at third man, and stalked from the field wondering, like us, why Destiny ordained this as one of the four games he will play for Bacchus this decade. Herewith, the partnership was the scarcely-tested Ramsy and a box-fresh Catwater. Some said that Jeffers and I returned to the attack with unseemly haste.

IF YOU don’t know what Blades and Yeggs are, buy Dr Tudor Jones of Jesus College a goblet of chardonnay one evening in the Rose & Crown. Suffice that the former were batting and the latter were bowling (Ramsy, in fact, is the bladest of the Blades). And the Blades put us thoroughly in our place. As we tottered off after a few more dismal overs for the best part of forty runs, we tried to explain to our Wytham friends that in these sorts of circumstances we should just be glad to have kept the score under 200. No we shouldn’t, they said, and we’re not your friends.

They were perfectly amiable between innings and Glennie helped us find teacups, so we shouldn’t complain. But they still refused to eat any of the lavish Bacchus fare that covered about half an acre of the recreation ground, clearly suspecting it would turn to ash in their mouths. The Bacchants chewed away merrily, tasting nothing and caring less that more than half of their 197 total had been scored off the bowling of Bacchants.
Catwater has been a martyr to my sentimental captaincy too often for him to do anything other than put the frail opposition to the sword pour encourager les autres. Wytham would be razed, the astroturf salted, and all the ghosts of his twenty-first birthday banished. It was chilling to watch. He and Cubitt galloped in with all the gallantry of the Peterloo Massacre, and soon I – batting seven – was picking my way to the crease over filleted bits of batsman, to enjoy the customary Jeffers briefing about how to face a rampant bowling attack. The Yeggs were under the pump again.

I hit a single and overheard the Rev Doc in the stands announce something about “Pat’s big score”. I hit the next ball – a nice one from DS Mills, arching the unplayable parabola between Paradise and Pandemonium – to mid-off before anything worse could happen. There was time only for Michael Hudson, another ragged survivor of our last bout with the V&A, to claim Jeffers wicket and avert any danger of Riley nabbing the XI’s second-ever Michelle (on the same ground as the first – but modesty forbids ect ect … and I’d rather nobody actually checked my figures). Even discounting the hundred-odd scored at Jeffers’ and my expense, the Bacchus had a very creditable 60-odd-run victory to have stuffed and mounted on the wall of the West Oxford Democrats’ Club.

OVER CURRY, some of the ancien régime muttered that this victory didn’t have quite the savour of the good old days, that much as we longed to beat Wytham we wouldn’t have chosen to do it this way. The young bloods told us to shut it. A starving man doesn’t ask whether the chicken in his kebab was corn-fed.

SCORECARD

Bacchus XI
F Gate b Jeffers 0
B Mills c Hudson b Nowers 30
W Sutton-Mattocks c Glennie b Hudson 82
J Brassington c Vallance b Hudson 27
R Polding not out 27
R Cubitt c Grigg b Wheeldon 4
S C Riley not out 15

Extras w8 nb4 12
Total (35 overs) 197

Wytham
A Glennie c b Riley 0
Pob b Cubitt 1
Minton c b Riley 1
L Grigg b Riley 2
T Valance c b Mills 9
W Jefferies c b M H Hudson 6
P H Hudson c Sutton-Mattocks b Mills 1
P Wheeldon b Mills 0
P Nowers not out 1

**Extras b1 w6 nb1 8
Total (14.0 overs) 29

BACHHUS WINS BY 168 RUNS**