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 […]