Cricket around the corner

 Cricket around the corner

In just under a month the summer game of cricket will return to the shire counties amid the stunning cathedrals which tower over the county grounds for the best part of three months. Then there are the quaint market towns which always burst into life after the sport's winter hibernation. Cricket breaks out like a stirring brass band that goes marching past its county grounds with perfect civility and grace. Everything that had been discreetly hidden behind dark streets, now reveals its most glorious display of light, rich colours at the height of summer.

Shortly, in Somerset, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Kent, the Garden of England, very rural Essex, Yorkshire, where the dales remain snugly beautiful throughout the year and Lancashire, provide the wondrous backdrop to the County Championship. From the end of April to those uplifting acoustics of the game in mid- June, July and August, nature is at its prettiest and most ornate. The pigeons who love to go into conference mode at the Oval, Lord's, Trent Bridge and Old Trafford, gather together privately at cover point or deep backward square leg and you know where the vast populations of cricket lovers will discuss the merits of the T-20 Blast, the familiarity of the County Championship and much more. Life is perfect and always will be.

Every summer, cricket dons its finest clothes, the white flannels and white trousers that have almost become synonymous with cricket at both county and country level. Cricket's sweetest and most dulcet tones can be heard murmuring good humouredly by its placid boundaries. They will sit on their most trustworthy deckchairs in the heart of the English countryside, open up their pristine copies of the Times and the Daily Telegraph before just allowing acres of print to fall gently over their faces. It is England at her most contented and settled but then this is the way it should always be since life is just perfect.

Then the huddles of devoted supporters will swallow their first pints of Taunton's cider, laughing uproariously, joking vigorously and then cheering like their footballing counterparts as if they were still at Old Trafford, the Etihad and Emirates, St James Park, Anfield, the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and the London Stadium. Occasionally the salty vulgarities will bellow from throats of blue. But then you'd hardly expect anything else from football and yet cricket does occasionally blow its top. It does though express itself in a way that is somehow regarded as harmless and inoffensive. Football and cricket. They're like blood brothers at times, even joined at the hip.

And come May the first cricket pads will be tied securely to their athletic legs and the opening batsmen will come clattering down from the timeless  pavilions that once knew of Don Bradman, Geoff Boycott, Len Hutton, Colin Cowdrey, Ian Botham, Ted Dexter, Tom Graveney, Alan Lamb, Viv Richards and Clive Lloyd. These were the mighty bastions of cricket's greatest generations. They were cricket's noble characters, stylish exponents of the game, lethal big hitters, bowlers of hale and hearty hostility who were so fast that they once hit the most notorious headlines during the Bodyline Ashes tour during the 1930s. One Harold Larwood, England through and through, threatened to knock off the heads of Australia and then discovered a wave of controversy and anger that would overshadow that summer.

But first things first. The new cricket season will once again open towards the end of April amid the scholarship and learning of England's most stately universities. Oxford and Cambridge will crack the first red ball of willow into the drinking taverns and fine, upstanding tents. This has now become stitched into the fabric of the regular cricket season. Besides the boundaries, England's most knowledgeable students will produce their score cards, compare notes about the opposition before retiring at the end of the day to a grudging appreciation of each team's qualities.

And then the County Championship, once dominated by Yorkshire and then won handsomely by most of the rest of the countries at various times, will shortly take its opening curtain and reveal audacious reverse sweeps, full blooded lofted drives over the rooftops, graceful cuts and pulls to the boundary, hooking, heaving, nudging, forward defensive prods to  mid wicket and the gigantic six that lands in the fruit and vegetable aisle of the local supermarket or the top of the vicar's church roof. It is cricket at its most sedate and decorous, cricket obeying its traditional protocols and always striving for improvement.

Come the end of the cricket season, the gulls and the pigeons will finally take their leave, autumn will dawn and the summertime cricketing pageant will make way for football. Amid the fading lights of early September and the final flourishes of brutality from beefy village batsmen, cricket will pack away its helmets, pads, its red cricket ball and then look forward to next April. Cricket always knew how to make its grandest entrance.