The V&A Cricket Club is fortunate enough to have one or two Vice Presidents who are pleasingly quotable. The Rt Hon Sir John Major is one such individual. In April 1993; during a speech to The Conservative Group for Europe (sorry Ross), Major said: ‘Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on Cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and (…) as George Orwell said, ‘Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’ and, if we get our way, Shakespeare will still be read, even in school.’   Well, Saturday’s beer was cold, Shakespeare is still read in school (usually badly, though) and we are indeed a club of canine enthusiasts. What he left out was that we’d also still be the country where, in May, it is common to find 22 flanneled men hiding from a persistent […]

  The world of cricket is rather light on sibling rivalries. There were the Waugh’s, of course, from a time when The Bogans played a form of cricket that didn’t vaguely resemble the histrionics of a soap-opera. It isn’t received wisdom that Cain and Abel fell out over a backyard cricketing squabble, but I think there’s a lot that The Old Testament isn’t telling us. Liam and Noel Gallagher are more into the sport where you fizz a pig’s bladder around with your foot. They fizz tambourines at one another too, so they must have decent arms. Wasted talent.   The Jacot de Boinots, by contrast, play it hard and fair. Adam, our skipper for the day against The All Sorts XI, refrained from any scurrilous remarks as his brother took the crease. He did say loudly that his brother ‘plays it upishly’ on the drive, though, so have some […]

T. S. Eliot’s opinion that ‘April is the cruellest month’ must, I have often thought, been written with cricketers in mind. Many a downpour has dampened the early season zeal of have-a-go heroes across the country. Actually, Eliot didn’t like cricket. Harold Pinter, on the other hand, did. “I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth – certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either.”; clearly, he had his priorities in order. The GTs are a funny old side, captained by one of the V&A’s own. No one could quite explain to me exactly what it stood for. Jago Poynter suggested that it might be ‘Gin & Tonics’, but that’s because he’s a ceramic artist who lives off the Fulham Road. It shall, I fear, remain a mystery. V&A skipper for the day, Rob Taylor, agreed to an uncontested toss […]