The Ship Inn has a fixture card of 10 matches throughout summer. Illustration / Rod Emmerson
The Ship Inn has a fixture card of 10 matches throughout summer. Illustration / Rod Emmerson
Kevin Pilley enjoys a game of beach cricket with Kiwi pals on the picturesque Fife coast northeast of Edinburgh.
"I am a total wreck. I've been washed up for years. So I'm perfect for beach cricket."
Auckland boy Paul Bodger is vice-captain of the world's only pub beach cricket team, Ship Inn CC, in Elie on the Fife coast of Scotland, an hour northeast of Edinburgh and 16km from St Andrews.
"St Andrews may be the home of golf, but Elie is the HQ of beach cricket. It's beach cricket's Lord's," says Bodger, who married a Scot and now runs a sports equipment business, Anytime Leisure.
The Ship Inn has a fixture card of 10 matches throughout summer. The MCC have played there. There's a festival in August. Bodger isn't the only Black Cap. There is also Jeremy Williams, a St Heliers lad.
"I've never seen beach cricket played in whites with an orange windball before. And keepers wearing gloves." Williams now runs Dipnation, supplying artisanal dips to major retailers throughout the UK.
"It's not Mission Bay or Whangamata. But it's close. And the seafront pub is magic."
Landlord and Yorkshireman Graham Bucknall runs the recently - and fabulously - refurbished, 17th century pub and captains their beach cricket side. "I bought a beach cricket club which came with a pub. In that order. It's the only cricket club whose ground is out to sea. It started in 1990 and is unique. The team once went on tour to landlocked Munich. It's a bit different from red ball cricket."
Elie is the Lord's of beach cricket. Photo / Supplied
You change on the mainland. Distress flares are optional. Bar manager George's "Marvellous Medicine" cocktails are compulsory in between innings. Ropes of egg wrack, toothed wrack and bladderwrack provide the boundary edge. If you manage to hit a six up over the seawall into the beer garden you receive your height in Belhaven beer. Only West Indian star Sir Richie Richardson has done it. And the landlord.
Bucknall adds: "It swings around more at Elie than Headingley. And there is some pretty extravagant movement. If the bowler pitches it into the lugworm casts. Or hits a dog whelk shell."
The annual curtain-raiser to the offshore cricket season is a game against St Andrews University's old boys team, The Seagullians. Bodger acquitted himself well and steadied The Ship after an early collapse. Jeremy got nought, clearly not seeing it like a beach ball.
"A windsurfer whizzed past behind the bowler's arm and I was castled," he says. Someone observed that a limpet could have moved into line quicker.
There aren't many LBWs given on the Scottish coastline. "The ball hardly reaches the stumps," adds Bodger. "But it must be one of the most beautiful grounds in the world looking out over the north coast of the Firth of Forth and the town's long sweeping sickle-shaped bay. The secret is batting second. The tide comes in making the boundaries shorter."
The hosts lost. But everyone had a good dig. And drink.
"It's a great day out at a great pub," continued Williams. "A battle between bat, ball and beverage."
"Not many wides are called," said his fellow beached Kiwi. "That would impede the umpires' enjoyment of their icecream cones. And tinnies."
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Getting there: Cathay Pacific offer return airfares flying Cathay and British Airways via Hong Kong and London.
