TWO RAVISHING YOUNG girls came to cricket last Sunday. It was their first visit, they said. As their carefully ironed cotton dresses flapped frantically against their blue frozen legs, and through the blizzard the white distant figures of their boyfriends might easily have been mistaken for polar bears, they looked utterly bewildered.
Now that spring finally appears to have arrived, many more girls all over the country will be experiencing their first cricket match. As a grizzled campaigner of twenty-four summers, I feel I should give them a few tips.
For a start, as a cricket groupie, you abandon all lie-ins. Most cricket matches are at least fifty miles from home and go on all day, so it’s up earlier than the lark.
Secondly, one’s clothes are always wrong. If it’s tropical when you leave home, it’s bound to be arctic or pouring when you arrive. The only answer is layers: a Barbour, over a Puffa, over a Guernsey, over a shirt, over thermal underwear, so you can peel off. Don’t forget the shirt. Zero temperatures at home, by the law of sod, mean heatwaves at the ground, and you’ll be microwaved in a cashmere jersey.
Not that it matters what you look like, since you abandon all sex appeal the moment you reach the ground. There is something about donning virgin white and playing cricket that temporarily de-sexes the male. Cricket, remember, is the only sport – like a strip in reverse – where the crowd clap a player for putting his jersey on.
Rather like prep school boys who insist that their mother comes to speech day and then ignore her, a cricketer feels it’s wet to be seen talking to his girl friend, and it’s not cricket to chat up anyone else’s.
Thus an average day will go rather like this. You arrive at the ground to find that the opposition, which is probably called something daft like the Fleet Street Fairies or the Bisley Buffaloes, is as usual five men short. Joyfully your beloved will scuttle on to the field to make up the numbers. When the rest of the Fairies eventually show up, he’ll promptly put on a white coat.
This, alas, is not the cue for you to indulge your handsome-vet-and-comely-pet-owner fantasies, he is merely off to umpire. Umpiring will be followed by a stint in the scorebox, only interrupted when he has to bat at number eleven. Whereupon he takes a spirited swipe and is clean bowled. He then spends the rest of the match fielding.
If a very good looking player gives you a hot, come-hither smile, run like hell. He is not after your body. He is a weekend father, or a father who’s only been allowed out if he takes the children. He will have three little monsters in the boot and will want you to look after them all day. Ditto if he wants you to look after his dogs – unless they’re large and furry, and can double up as a rug.
Take loads to eat. Some clubs only provide lunch and tea for players, and there is a feeling anyway that because the chaps have been indulging in manly exercise, women ought to hold back. Being outside all day, albeit doing nothing, makes you wildly hungry. Cricket in fact is the antithesis of those fasting, resting Sundays so beloved by women’s magazines, when you lie in bed sipping lemon juice with sliced turnip on your face. Last week, I ate six ham sandwiches, three egg sandwiches, half a Battenburg cake and four scotch eggs, to mop up the alcohol which was keeping out the cold – which leads me on to:
Take loads to drink. Many pavilions don’t admit women, and most only provide beer. Last Sunday I got through one bottle of vodka, one of whisky, four bottles of Muscadet and six cans of lager, admittedly aided by two dozen other spectators similarly suffering from hypothermia.
Your survival kit should also include a Jeffrey Archer, or at least two Dick Francis (you have twelve hours to kill), all the Sunday papers (at least players wanting to read them will be forced to come and talk to you) and green foundation to tone down your purple wind-fretted face.
When your boyfriend is batting, you must watch the game. If you find it confusing, remember batsmen tend to run after they’ve hit the ball. If they hit it a long way, for some reason they don’t. If it strikes you on the ankle it’s a four, on the head it’s a six.
Do not clap and jump up and down noisily when someone drops a catch, even if it’s clouted by your beloved: it’s considered unsporting. Do not flash. It’s tempting to keep looking in the mirror to check how ghastly you look, but it may flash sun in the batsman’s eyes.
Do not talk as the bowler is coming up to bowl. If you get really lonely, get up and walk in front of one of those big white screens, just as the bowler is running away from you. Everyone in the ground will then shout and wave at you.
Never go to the loo: something exciting like a wicket falling or your boyfriend hitting a six always happens. However he gets out, say: ‘That was an absolutely brilliant ball. Even Botham wouldn’t have got near it.’
When he’s bowling or fielding, put on dark glasses, so he won’t know if you’re watching, and get stuck into J.Archer. Then just before close of play, nip round to the scorer, and find out who your beloved has caught and bowled and congratulate accordingly.
Keep a fiver for after the game. He’ll be provided with beer from a bottomless, endlessly circulating jug, and will be so engrossed in his own innings, he’ll forget about your drink. If you find yourself stuck for conversation with one of the players, merely ask: ‘What do you think about Boycott?’ The ensuing eulogy/apoplexy will last at least fifteen minutes.
Never offer to do the teas. It’s very hard work, and you always get the quantities wrong and are forced to divide a Bakewell tart between thousands, or to eat fish paste for the rest of your life.
Never offer to wash cricket sweaters, they always shrink or run. Never marry the club secretary. Your spare time will be spent typing out fixtures or team lists. One girlfriend said it was only after four years, she realised A.N. Other wasn’t a player.
Never marry the captain either, or your night’s sleep will be punctuated by players crying off tomorrow’s game on the excuse that they’ve ‘suddenly been laid low – retch – by the most awful – retch – shellfish’. After they’ve finished retching they put down the telephone and say cheerfully to their wives: ‘That’s OK darling, we can lunch with Fiona after all.’
‘Unless you are truly hooked avoid Test Matches; they go on too long. I’ve never forgotten hearing a young man at Lords saying heartily to his shell-shocked finacée. ‘Don’t worry Lavinia you’ll get the hang of it by the fifth day.’
Having said all that, I must concede that cricketers away from the ground are the nicest men in the world. For cricket as a game requires unselfishness, imagination, patience, honour, perseverance, the ability to withstand boredom and to smile at misfortune, never letting it throw you off balance. All crucial qualities in a husband.
And there are blissful moments – in 1961 at Headingley when two mongrels ran on to the field with a banana skin and held up play for two minutes. In 1964, when my husband made a hundred against the Bank of England after a morning wedding reception. In 1976, when there were endless heat waves, and finally in 1982, at a charity match in Somerset, when an inebriated middle-aged streaker rushed on to the field, and Lesley Crowther who was fielding was heard to remark: ‘I couldn’t see what she was wearing, but it certainly needed ironing.’