Joe Bennett on cricket: At age 66 I feel like a child again

In the nets there’s no game, no running, and, above all, no threat of dismissal. In the nets you are immortal. You just get to play and play. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

All non-cricketers, please leave now. It’s in your own best interests. You will find nothing but puzzlement here. We’ll meet again next week. Go in peace.

To the rest of you, listen up. Three hours from now, at noon, I’m going for an indoor cricket net. It’s my first indoor net for 50 years. And best of all - are you ready now? - there’s going to be a bowling machine. Oh oh oh oh.

Cricket sprawls. A full field is several acres but a net takes up negligible real estate. It is cricket whittled down, cricket with its extremities amputated, leaving only the pulsing heart, a batsman and a bowler. The bowler bowls the ball, the batsman plays the ball, the net ensnares the ball and then we do it again.

It was the poet Browning who wrote “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world”. Rarely have I felt more like Browning than when, at the age of 10 or so, I was invited to indoor winter nets on Sunday afternoons. Even when it turned out that the head coach was a sexual predator with halitosis and a predilection for rubbing up against little boys, my enthusiasm was not much diminished. Cricket’s a strong drug.

It is good to bowl in nets but to bat is very heaven. In the real game batting comes with strings attached - the state of the game, the need to run, the existential threat of dismissal.

But in the nets there’s no game, no running, and, above all, no threat of dismissal. In the nets you are immortal. You just get to play and play. The one catch is that few people want to bowl as much as you want to bat. The solution is a bowling machine, a mechanical slave that is happy to bowl at any time of day or night in exchange for nothing but a little electricity.

Sadly the bowling machine didn’t exist when I was a kid and by the time it was invented I had moved on to a less wholesome life.

But now at last I am to meet one, and at the age of 66 I feel like a child again. Please excuse me while I fossick in the wardrobe for my bag of ancient cricket gear, including the box that is made of a lewd pink plastic and that is more than 50 years old. It is the only box I have ever owned and I have turned down substantial bids for it from an eminent mycologist. I love it like a son. I shall report back.

Well now, in the interlude between that paragraph and this, I have driven to the centre of town, found somewhere to park within a mere 15 minutes, pushed open the door of an indoor cricket centre that I hadn’t known existed and found myself in the company of three friends and a bowling machine.

“Who wants to pad up first?” said Phil. I kept my head down but my inner schoolboy was squealing, “Me. Pick me, please sir, oh please pick me.”

“How about you, Joe?” said Phil.

Left pad on before right - a superstition half a century old - gloves, bat, and ancient box. The pinkness of its plastic drew gasps of admiration.

“Want a helmet, Joe?”

Shaking the mane I haven’t got, I strode down the net to take guard and it felt as natural and easy as being young.

The machine stood eight foot tall to simulate the height of a bowler’s arm. Phil stood on a little gantry behind it, ready to prime and fire. “Let her rip,” I said.

Out it came a little short of a length and wide of the off stump and I left it alone with the grace of Gower.

The next was fuller, all but a half volley, begging the drive. I went at it but it hit too high on the bat and would have been caught at mid-off, and even as I played the shot I heard the predator’s voice - though a loathsome man he was a knowing coach - “Lead with the head, Joe, lead with the head.”

I batted for 15 minutes and I reached two conclusions. One is that I’ve grown stiffer, blinder and slower with age. No news there. The other is that I haven’t changed at all. The shots I played well as a kid, I still play reasonably. The shots I didn’t, I don’t. The child is father to the man, wrote the poet Wordsworth. In cricket as in all things, the railway tracks we run along are laid down young and very hard to leave. Here ends the lesson.