Now I know that there is some dispute about what game is actually played in heaven, Rugby Union or Cricket. Now I may be biased, but what would be more fitting, a graceful cover drive from an opening batsman, or some thug act from a front row forward with a short neck? Biased? Not much!

Now of course I am not talking about that “hit and giggle” game they call T-20 but Test Cricket. Oh, but I forgot. There are a number of readers of this blog from North American and Europe who may not understand what I am talking about.

What then is cricket?

“I travelled through the dusty alleyways, the run down dilapidated mud brick homes, and the rag tag market of the village our church had sponsored, looking for where our church’s pasture improvement aid package had been spent.

Moving through the ancient monuments to long lost Kings and the tombs of generations long gone, I suddenly came upon the most wonderful of sights. A pristine verdant oval bounded by a white picket fence. In the middle were a group of men, one throwing rocks at the other, who tried to hit them away with clubs.

I asked a bystander what was going on and he replied:

“You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game”.

I later learnt that George Bernard Shaw wrote, “cricket is a game played by 22 fools and watched by twenty two thousand fools.”

Surprisingly, amidst the chaos going on around that verdant place, there was a serenity and peace that was only shattered by the occasional sound of “Howzat!

From the apocryphal 1904 Diary of the American Episcopalian minister, Benedict Maximilian Fraser.

So now you are an expert!!!

The “Sarissa Precision” cricket pavilion was purchased for my Very British Civil War project and what could be more “Very British” than this.

A “spidercam” view of a game being played:

You will not that the Walmington-On-Sea oval has that “new fangled” modern technology called a “drop in pitch” because the dastardly Hun had the audacity to crash a bomber on the oval, destroying the wicket. The attempt to destroy the Home Guards morale failed miserably as we will see in a coming blog.