Match Reports
Match Reports
14th July 2017
Looking back at old match reports, I noticed that the Jesmond Jaguars were, until 2008 or so, known as the Jesmond Joggers. I don’t know if they felt that changing their name would make the team sound more butch or menacing, or whether the team, made up of Newcastle University graduates, feared that as middle age spread came upon them, their original epithet might not be taken with the irony it was intended. They are however, still young and for the most part can run and throw in a way many of the V&A faithful can barely remember. They were however only nine in number, when eleven is expected. Midway through the week a plot was hatched to commandeer our captain, Chris Mounsey-Thear, originally a Jaguar (or Jogger), but now most definitely a V&A man. Their plan was foiled and instead we lent them a fielder. CMT neither batted nor […]
22nd June 2017
It had been a day of blistering weather and it was a sensible decision to play a forty over game.
17th May 2017
It was a game of ebbs and flows; a game in which each side took turns to appear down and out only to then have it, apparently, in the bag. Rob Taylor had purloined a number of the younger players from the V&A to supplement his cricketing chums. This meant they could do things like run and throw, unlike most of the V&A players, who consider it infra dig to bend down to pick a ball up. Nicky Bird had a dicky tummy and was confined to his bed, which meant we were ten. It was clear that he was not firing on all cylinders, because he had entrusted instructions on using the immersion heater to Adam Jacot. Adam is a man of many and diverse talents, but his knowledge contains vast plains of staggering ignorance and the prospect of being left in charge of such a vital function had […]
6th May 2017
Adam Jacot, who captained, said we were a difficult team to motivate. He might have been right, but the weather was grey and remained so thoughout the day until obligingly brightening up whilst we sat in the garden of The Golden Ball.
2nd May 2017
“They are a small, hardy, intelligent and gentle people, who have eked out life for themselves, while the rest of humanity developed along completely different lives” – John Simpson Our opponents were not the people of the Kalahari desert as Simpson describes but, spiritually at least, from Bush House, the home to the BBC World Service until its move in 2012. Theirs is a distinguished, if eccentric history: their first match, organised in 1942 by Hugh Carlton Greene, brother of Graham Greene and later the Director-General of the BBC, was against the Political Warfare Executive at Woburn Abbey. It was said that match was interrupted by news that Tobruk had fallen, but that the BBC cricketers, not unlike Drake at Plymouth Hoe, played on regardless. This has since been shown, like much of the V&A’s match reports, to be pure fiction. Bushmen alumni include the poet Edmund Blunden, former Foreign […]
3rd September 2016
The rain came down at 4pm, as forecast, turning the picturesque Stonor valley dank and leaden, the trees rustling disconsolately and ruining what had been bubbling up to an exciting fin
6th August 2016
The Legends, as is proudly emblazoned on their score book, was founded in 2004 by the urbane Matt Simmonds, and are a team who approach the game with a sense of fair play and general joie de vivre which has been sadly lacking in recent matches.
2nd July 2016
“It is poor form to take offence at personal comments in a match report”, whined old has-been, Tim Young to me over lunch. He might regret that. The rest of the Thebertons team where rather young and fit (or in the case of local estate agent, Alexander Risdon, young).
4th June 2016
It is said, to get on, it matters not what you know but whom you know. This is why I am second hand bookseller. Dennis de Caires knows plenty, but is also well connected in the cricketing world, a useful attribute when selecting a team.
23rd April 2016
There is, about the start of The Cricket Season, a quite tangible sense of excitement: anticipation of flannel clad heroics to be performed over the coming months. It is a sense, amplified by the fresh smell and rising sap of spring, which I have been aware of from the earliest days of my cricketing youth. Cricket is essentially a bucolic game which, although it has its headquarters in London and is played throughout the world, owes its origins to the South Downs and its soul to the English countryside. There can be few better representations of this than the cricket ground at Stonor, which occupies an elevated site to one side of the ancient Assendon valley, overlooking the Stonor Park estate with a view of rolling patchwork farmland down the valley. It was this scene which greeted us as we arrived on a bright but decidedly chill morning. Well, most […]