Rugby boots and cricket bats – was there ever anything else?

As fixed as the seasons themselves, my school offered two sports: rugby in the winter and cricket in the summer. Decked out in nothing but our thick green (reversible side white) jerseys, barely adequate navy shorts and knee-length socks (which invariably needed tugging at to prevent them from billowing around your ankles) the rugby season was a cold, unforgiving and fatally boring season.

Playing with the smooth-through-overuse rugby ball (which would slip though your cold expectant hands to pound into your chest with monotonous regularity), running directionless and standing motionless, there was very little fun to be had on the rugby fields. So, we (and I assume this must still go on – at least, in my school it must) would spend our time ignoring the rules of the game, comparing the relative merits of our rugby boots, admiring (or crudely insulting) their styling, and discussing the pros and cons of the various shapes of studs – studs that we were required to replace, this being rugby of course and not, as many of us had wished it had been, football.

A ritual of desperation performed by bored schoolboys whose thoughts kept jumping to the challenges that night’s homework was likely to throw at them, this boot comparison took place each week, without fail.

As the days got longer our thoughts would sneak away and find escape in the warming pleasantness that came with a fleeting expectation of summer and the oncoming cricket season. A far cry from our rugby pitch plodding, the cricket season meant being warm but, more importantly, it meant being able to wield, in hands sweaty with summer exertion, the rubber-taped handle of a sturdy cricket bat.

For me at least, it was the cricket bat itself that facilitated my interest in the sport – and not the other way around…

Shopping for cricket bats became a much relished weekend activity in the run-up to the new season. Cricket bats were being manufactured across the area, infiltrating the dreams of schoolboys as they slept.

It didn’t help, of course, that cricket bats were banned the year I managed to successfully purchase one that wasn’t wholly derided by my fellow batsmen – but neither did it matter, as, owning as much to my height as my skill, I always played fielder and remained at the bottom end of the ‘batting queue’.

So there would I stand – either as fielder or incompetent batter – far out on the brink of the pitch, uninterested in the virtues of my friends’ cricket bats, and longing once more to be back in the cold, comparing boots and having fun.

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