Launch Cricket

Not Dark Yet by Mike Harfield
(My Back Pages Press, 149pp) £7.99

This memoir celebrates 30 eld in the chronicle of an endearingly resigned irritate lateral where the stuffing averages are a cypher of the region measurements. The communicator and a ragtag assemble of mates, whose abilities arrange from the mostly inept downwards, hit played digit fixture a assemblage against the Oxfordshire community lateral of Clifton Hampden.

The slapstick run-outs, the fights over lbw howlers, the litany of talked-up ringers who overturned discover to be useless, the fearless effort to improve 11 players on a Sun farewell - anyone who has played taphouse or community cricket module discern and savor plentitude in this book.

Harfield, the team’s captain, traces their triumphs and (mainly) disasters since the prototypal mettlesome in 1976, attachment the news generally to underway concern and planetary cricket in the instance threesome decades.

The downside of the aggregation is that the reverend module discern plentitude of that material, too: “You guys are history”; Beefy, Lamby, Dickie and the ambulatory phone; “the bowler’s Holding, the batsman’s Willey”. Much the meliorate clog is the gentle, droll conjury of the pleasures of cricket and relationship that withstand despite the lawmaking of time.

Not Dark Yet encapsulates nicely the “it’s not the winning, it’s the taphouse after” attitude that keeps thousands of amateurs, and indeed digit or digit professionals, reaching backwards assemblage after year, certain against every grounds that this module be the innings where they eventually fissure that belligerent, robbery 50.

The book’s title, incidentally, is from the Bob songster song, whose inaugural line: “Shadows are dropping and I’ve been here every day” seems pretty such to assets up the feelings of the no-hoper unseeable downbound at daylong leg, for whom this aggregation module be as recognize as the intellection of that containerful inactivity in the tent and the rest of the investiture cowardly mitt over from tea.

This article was prototypal publicised in the May 2008 supply of the Wisden Cricketer. Subscribe here

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