I really like the notion of a team withdrawing from league cricket because of the poisonous atmosphere that can infect some leagues.
The vast majority of games I played were hard but fair, but over the years there were some really nasty ones.
I played one game where one of our lads deliberately targeted one of their players over his fairly public and well known divorce. This guy, to his credit, put up with it for a while. He then lost it and brought up the subject of our player’s dad who had died of cancer.
I was embarrassed and ashamed to be on the pitch at the time. I had tried to calm our player down a couple of times before the eventual blow-up, but no one was listening. The whole game was an endless stream of abuse, much of it personal, downright cheating and bad feeling.
That was one of the worst I can remember, but there were others.
I did let myself down a couple of times, but not outright cheating.
One incident I do regret was one later in my playing days, when I had dropped down to our seconds. I was still quick enough to do batters for pace. In that league it wasn’t unknown for the square leg umpire to be from the batting side. We had a cut and dried stumping. Miles out. The batter started to walk, but then came back. There was a ‘scene’. Anyhow, when they were nine down and I was trying to clean up the tail, in walks the square leg umpire at eleven. No lid. Our keeper told me to bounce him first up. I had my doubts, but did it anyway. It floored him, hitting him smack in the middle of the forehead. Thankfully on a thick bit of bone.
He should have been wearing a lid. There was nothing in the rules to say I couldn’t do it. But it wasn’t the ‘right’ thing to do. If he’d hung around for a few overs, yes, but first up to a number eleven?
You have to have some compass and responsibility, whether its verbals, catches, bouncers. Whatever.
