It has well been said that a village cricket match is won or lost, not on the field of play, but on the telephone in the days before the match.  A nuanced approach is required: cajoling some, bribing others whilst always being careful to circumvent any involvement of wives or partners who might be inclined to put the kibosh on a weekend’s cricketing.  The life of the 21st century captain was made somewhat easier with the introduction of email as a ready means of communication, and more recently by the What’sApp.  Nevertheless, the tactics of team gathering remain just as important to a captain as field placement.  The V&A rotates its captains to varying effect, but it also has Adam Jacot, cricketing personnel manager extraordinaire, and it safe to say that without his efforts, supreme even by his lofty standards, no cricket would have been played at Stonor this Saturday.   We began the week with nine […]

This match was the second encounter with Sky CC of the year.  The had gracefully got us out of a hole earlier in the season when our prescribed opposition had cancelled late in the week.  This fixture was in the list from the beginning of the season and apparently much looked forward to by the opposition, some of whom had travelled for two hours to attend.  The weather was pleasantly warm, but remained stubbornly overcast for most of the day before redeeming itself with a couple of hours of dappled evening sunlight; the sort in which village cricket in the late summer becomes a most beguilling spectacle. Sky won the toss and chose to bat, but made sluggish progress in the light of some tight bowling from self and the evergreen Enzo Nicoli.  Enzo was complaining of a dicky back, born of painting his ceiling, which caused Jasper to retort with the wonderful non-sequitur, […]

The Invalids fixture is one of the longer standing on the V&A list, and the Invalids themselves are a club of rich history who have recently brought up their century.  They were founded in 1919 by the poet and critic, J.C.Squire, as activity for chaps injured in the First World War and were soon immortalised in perhaps the most famous of cricketing novels, England, Their England by A.G.Macdonell.  Happily, such distinction has not gone to their heads, as we have seen with other clubs of similar longevity, and they are as affable and convey the same degree of pleasantly organised chaos as Macdonell depicted back in 1933. During the week, our captain, Jasper Arnold, had informed Adam Jacot that he would be batting at number eleven, an act Adam found demotivating.  Nevertheless, Adam was on good form throughout the morning, batting off Nicky Bird’s frequent barbs with some panache.   In life as in cricket, Adam hides […]

The Howitzers hail from Conington in Cambridgeshire, not to be confused with a village of the same name a few miles downstream.  It’s an easy mistake to make as the V&A know to their cost when we arrived to the wrong Conington a few years ago only to find no cricket pitch and the locals unwilling to raise a team.  To have two identically named villages located so close together seems unwise to me, but perhaps they had tasked an intern writing the Cambridgeshire section of the Domesday Book that day. The Howitzers style themselves as “friendly, sociable and inclusive” and they are as good as their word, playing in good spirit and even laughing at Nicky Bird’s jokes.  Nicky likes to describe the V&A as inclusive.  When asked by some funding body to demonstrate the club’s inclusivity he replied, without hesitation, “well, we have players from minor public schools as well”. Both sides […]

This game was about the sixteenth iteration of a fixture which has its origins in the connection between our erstwhile tea lady and doyenne of the side of cold roast beef, Sarah Jenkins and the Winters family.  Martin Winters had bought Sarah’s house in Cornwall and as a consequence had been introduced to Nicky Bird.  I can only assume that Martin wasn’t firing on all cylinders at the time as it is reported that he found Nicky both polite and amusing and suggested that his son, George, who had recently moved to Wargrave, gather a team to play the V&A.  In the early days their team was made up of George’s school friends and a rag tag of fellows from nearby Wargrave, who were for the most part, not very good at cricket.  They always won the toss, but seldom the match.  One one occasion that had the misfortune to come […]

It used to be said that village cricket matches, and it doesn’t get much more village than the sort of cricket we play, were won and lost on the telephone: those feverish calls made in the days leading up to a game to gather a team.  Then came email and now it simply a matter of posting a request on the newly minted V&A WhatsApp group and watch the numbers come rolling in. But this works both ways.  By Tuesday both sides had ten men with every prospect of a full game.  By Friday afternoon, an unsettled weather forecast and some lilly-livered sentiment had meant it was down to eight and nine and the viability of the fixture was being called into question. When it comes to matters meteorological, I am usually first port of call.  How being local to Stonor should give me a special insight into something as unpredictable as the British […]

Bowling is arduous enough in 30 degree heat with a full complement of fielders, but when you only have six men and number six has just disappeared off to Henley station in search of number seven, so that you have a bowler, a wicketkeeper and three rather lonely fielders, the modest dimensions of cricket ground at Stonor take on Saharan proportions. “A good day to bat early”, quipped Ed Shepherdson as he smote his first ball for four and proceeded to smite further boundaries more or less at will.  Finding the fielder in these circumstances was about as likely as I am to find the pocket at snooker.  The Bacchus XI, for it was they who found themselves in this hapless position, had gamely stepped into the breach after we had been let down by The Refreshers, a team of barristers, in the middle of the week.  Eventually the Bacchus emissaries returned […]

A fine day in the Stonor valley saw the V&A play host to local visitors from across in the Thames in Berkshire, a fixture which has been running for some fifteen years.  The Town & Country Folk used to turn up with a cavalcade of 4x4s which distributed hoards of youngsters around the ground.  The youngsters have grown up, and now make up half of the team giving the T&Cs some players who can run and throw to compensate for their ever more creaky parents. Nick Derewlany won the toss and chose to let the opposition bat first and before long they were reeling somewhat at 65-4 in the light of some tight V&A bowling.  Their innings was singlehandedly saved by a fine innings from local farmer, James Hunt, who took time to play himself in before lunch followed by a series of crisp straight drives and lusty pulls to […]