The Bacchus XI vs the V&A CC

Those with a keen sense of the passage of time might have noticed that our fixtures have lapped our match reports. Still, we struggle on:

MATCH REPORT – The V&A CC vs The Bacchus XI – Stonor Park – 9 September 2023

“Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”
-- HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick; or, The Whale

WERE WE asking too much? Candidly, I was beginning to think so. There were many Good Things about our picnic in Philbeach Gardens on the Thursday evening, but as the shadows lengthened and the whiskey got less they lent an awful clarity to the one Bad Thing: arithmetic. The roughly 20 – twenty – Bacchants notionally available for a merry intra-club game on the Saturday was revising itself in real time towards a figure more suitable for a ménage than for playing cricket against the V&A. In answer to the gentle reader’s whatthefuck, I should explain that in the absence of a ground for our intravenous frolics, I had accepted an invitation from our sadist friends in Henley to play them for a second time in the season, sincerely believing that true Bacchante would not flinch from the admittedly stinging prospect.

I’ve been wrong before. I recognised the dizzy sensation even as we ate pasta salad and Alex Chalk arranged to have his life and worldly possessions moved to the Netherlands simply to manufacture an excuse not to play. Around midnight I declared that I was leaving to walk to my fiancée’s home in Surrey, two-thirds romantic gesture and one-third anguished protest at the wimpishness of the world. As I walked in the dark through Richmond Park, I remembered that it was where the bloke who had just escaped from HMP Wandsworth was last sighted, which was a useful distraction from the grim cricketin’ prospect. I was sitting on the grass by the Stonor pavilion 32 hours later, feeling dizzy and resting my blood blisters in the sunshine, beginning to question our devotion to the pursuit of whatever it is we pursue. Did we need to have a match on such a glorious day? To my name, I had some unwashed whites, a broken, sweat-soaked laptop, and the promise of six teammates. Victor Hope was unwell. Michael Hudson was driving from Cheshire.

The V&A were only nine but pretty unimpressed by our condition. Their skipper was, appallingly, Lachlan, who received my report of the disappearing squad with the hearty smile of a man who would have chased us with dogs if that had been the only sport available. Their treasurer, opening bowler and antiquarian bookdealer Christiaan Jonkers sympathises with the Bacchus, insofar as he too wonders why the V&A keep inviting us back. It was something to have found a way to increase his contempt. I felt dizzier and dizzier until Lachlan announced that we would admit one of their players – confusingly called Dominic – to our number and thereby play eight a side. A clever ploy: we countered by announcing that Brassington was trapped in a burning train on the branch line between Twyford and Henley. Larken hopped in the clown car and pootled to his rescue. The match, meanwhile, began.

OUR FOUR men in the outfield acquitted themselves heroically. What else could they do? Memories vary, records are unsought and unkept. The openers were Carpmael père et fils. They weren’t in much danger of being out caught, but that variable wasn’t affected by the number of Bacchants on the field and Catwater knew his business. He bowled junior with a screamer I could only admire from behind the stumps; admire screamers and dwell on my blisters was pretty much all I could manage behind the stumps. Our scanty field was made more indecent still by the need for fine leg to move ever finer.

And then time passed. Mr Carpmael scored with classical shots befitting his pre-war cap. (The Peloponnesian War, since you ask.) The other batsman was Shepherdson, who scored groovy, skateboarding shots that took him rapidly into the thirties. Larken and Brassington returned and the field suddenly felt rather crowded, but Catwater and Dark Satanic Mills bowled on in the grim knowledge that nothing but shattering stumps or sudden death would relieve them. Then Shepherdson swiped across the line to an awkward Mills number and skied the ball high above the stumps and I reflected sadly on God’s inscrutable plan for my life as it dropped from the heavens straight through the gap between my gloves. While Mills and I waited for the earth to swallow me up, the cricket – for want of a better word – continued and we went in to lunch at 193-1, feeling rather as we would were we at the wrong end of those figures in soccer.

There was no drink. Nicky Bird said some kind things about how graciously we lose. Our conversation wasn’t up to much. Red kites circled in the clear blue sky and the sun warmed the last leaves of summer to their deepest green, and the grumble of every passing motorcar seemed to say: “What are you doing here?”

The interval was at once too long and too short, heavy with pastoral detail and self-reproach but our only stay from doing it all again. Shepherdson resumed with a jocular remark about the post-lunch slump, and after slumping to his century retired. There’s only so much fun you can have smashing Larken’s bowling into the life to come. Still, Lachlan wanted his fill and strode out at four while our hearts sank and those fielders who could discreetly vomit vomited. He treated Larken’s first gently floated delivery with a Bourbon courtier’s deference, and then strode out to meet the next – failing to spot the gleam in the eye of a bowler who has remembered that it’s always worth trying a full toss against the new batsman (even one who, contrary to reportage, did get his Blue and now eats Sam Riley’s cloud-covered bowling for breakfast).

When the ball hit Lachlan’s thigh pad, which was about halfway down the wicket, Larken’s meek, inquisitive “howzat” sounded more like the call of an endangered wading bird than anything pertinent to the match in progress. But the finger went up. “Are you serious?” asked Lachlan, with chilling moderation, and strode off the pitch. The umpire, Carpmael junior, was promptly summoned to the pavilion and efficiently throttled, while Carpmael senior, still at the crease, defended his son’s judgment but found no sympathy outside the deranged mind of Larken, who now insisted on a marathon spell and glory forever. But instead we were thrashed afresh by Jasper, who had done the lovely food.
Somehow the V&A finished on 275-5, but nobody can remember how the other wickets fell. Did Jake Who Is Ben bowl somebody with his offies? Did Mills bowl Mr Carpmael and have Jonkers leg-before? Did Jasper sky one off Mills’ bowling that was taken gratefully by the ‘keeper? No – another ritual-suicide-worthy howler from me. My father asked if the sun was in my eyes, and his words carried the chill of fifteen years’ experience detailing his other sons’ worthier sporting failures.

WE BATTED, but what did that matter? Lachlan carved through us like a band saw through microwave-softened butter: 5-1-6-4. We couldn’t even complain about him keeping himself on for an unreasonably long spell. I came in at eight after about fifteen minutes and tried to put a stop to his cool and livid slaughter by edging one into my jaw. Rather giddy, I then hit a couple of fours down the hill off the bowling of the elder Scott-Ram and was too excited to register that his next ball bounced a little more; the same swipe across the line edged the ball high, high into the sky and I turned to camera like Wile E Coyote under the fast-widening shadow of a grand piano. Did the V&A ‘keeper sympathetically let the ball plummet through a gap between his gloves? Did he fuck.

Each Bacchant will likewise tell his own intense and pathetic drama for his teeny-tiny innings. The match ended with some untidy bonus appearances for our shredded top order, until the V&A had satisfied some unspecified carnal need and wandered off the field. Lachlan came up to me to say thank you for…what, exactly? “A cricketing gesture,” I said, and Lachlan smiled winningly, as no doubt he would have done at my bloodied remains had he elected to chase us with dogs instead. Jonkers, meanwhile, was charm itself as we drank and drank in the Golden Ball, confident that he really wouldn’t ever have to see us again. (O pity poor Jonkers his mistake!) Our expeditionary efforts at the boundaries of glory had taken it out of me somewhat, such that in the West Oxford Democrats’ that evening I completely lost the plot and began shouting libellous nonsense at the Rev Doc and needed Brassington’s help to walk back to Campion Hall.

It is testament to Fr Phil’s outstanding hospitality (the kind that would insist on getting his round and a couple more as the Titanic’s second-class bar listed past 45 degrees) that I nevertheless discovered the next morning I’d been put to bed in one of the guest rooms. The season over, their revels ended, the Bacchants had melted into air, into thin air. I went to the High to meet Matilda Warner, who three weeks earlier, in the most desperate attempt yet recorded to win a mention in a match report, had agreed to marry me. Somebody was playing a saxophone by the Magdalene College School pavilion as we popped the cork of a midget bottle of champagne into the Cherwell; she decided that the antique sapphire number we had seen in the shop on Turl Street would do nicely as an engagement ring.

SCORECARD

V&A CC
W Carpmael b Mills 54
G Carpmael b Riley 0
E Shepherdson retired 102
L Nieboer lbw b Larken 0
J Arnold b Swann 85
C Jonkers lbw b Mills 3
D Pitlarge not out 7
S Scott-Ram not out 4

Extras 20
Total (30 overs) 275

Bacchus XI
B Mills b Nieboer 6
E S T Larken b Nieboer 1
J Brassington b Nieboer 0
J Swann b Nieboer 0
S C Riley c Arnold b Nieboer 0
D Scott b Jonkers 0
M H Hudson lbw b Nieboer 0
P H Hudson c Arnold b Scott-Ram 10
J Swann (again) not out 4
J Brassington (again) b G Carpmael 0

Extras 5
Total (13.1 overs) 26

THE V&A WIN BY 249 RUNS