To the Interweb!!!

Not much going on this week, so I thought I should pick up again on my playing career. In a previous entry (Beginners in the rain) I talked about how I finally got off my ass and started playing college cricket. But this was never going to be enough; over the course of the 2nd half of the college year there were only 8 or so games (most of which I did play to be fair). But even with just this, the regular training sessions were tiding me over.

That was, of course, until the ODI World Cup.

There was little or no hype before the tournament – as I’ve mentioned before, Ireland is a place where most people are at best completely disinterested in cricket; and at worst hostile towards it. In a lot of cases, telling someone you play cricket will elicit the same response as telling them you enjoy flower arranging (not that there is anything wrong with flower arranging of course).

But after the first game, when we tied with Zimbabwe, you could feel a change in the air. Suddenly people were noticing that Ireland have a cricket team! And that they’re not bad!! Believe it or not – cricket was even replacing GAA and Rugby on the TV in nearly every pub in the country!!!

By the time the infamous Pakistan game rolled around on St. Patricks Day, it was as if the entire population had been cricket supporters all their lives. You could overhear conversations about run-rates and duckworth lewis on random street corners. And can you imagine what it was like after the game? After beating one of the super-powers of world cricket and qualifying for the last 8?? You couldn’t have avoided cricket if you wanted to!

And in this atmosphere, college was on a mid-term break … meaning absolutely no hope of cricket. There was only one thing to – to the Interweb for to find a club!

Google threw up a few sites for clubs around Dublin – but most of them were rubbish - more of a web page than a site so to speak. And you got the feeling even though they said “Beginners Welcome”, they didn’t really mean it. But then I came across by far the best club website in Ireland – www.sandyfordcc.org. And apparently it’s no accident that it comes up first in google when you search for cricket in Dublin, if you look at the page source, there is a list of keywords as long as your arm!

And most importantly, they did actually seem like a nice bunch of people. There is a very active forum on the site, where people seem to spend all day slagging each other off – there’s no way people spend that much time talking to each other unless they actually get on OK really ;)

And so, club picked and with two of my mates in tow (they never went back btw), I headed down to start a summer jam-packed with cricket (when it wasn’t raining of course ::/). I was by no means the best player in the world. I could just about hold a bat, and my bowling was at best straight if lacking a bit of pace (my 9 balls in league cricket went for 9 runs :S ). But I was enthusiastic to the point of being annoying; I only missed two practice sessions during the season (both with valid excuses); I never turned down a game if it could be helped; and when fielding I never gave up on a ball, or a game, no matter how bad things looked.

This was the only advantage I had over more experienced cricketers – guys who pitch up to have their bat or bowl, then spend the rest of the game catching up on their sleep in the outfield :angry: It got me a good few games over the course of the season, especially where a captain had their batting and bowling in reasonably good shape but needed to fill a place in the team with someone who’d be happy batting at 11 and fielding :) At the end of the season, as numbers thinned out, I even got a few games on the 1st team.

Best of all though, at the end of the season I won the Achilles Cup for “Captains Player of the Year”. Which goes to someone who might not have the best figures from the season, but goes the extra mile for the club … which was nice.

I was also on the winning team for the end of year double-wicket competition – the “Double-D Cup” :D. Apparently I bat better with a few beers taken :)must try it in a league game ;)

This year obviously hasn’t gotten off to the best start for me personally, but as it progresses I hope to rectify that. As I see it, my first year was to learn how the game is played – and this year is going to be about learning how to play the game.

If, by the end of the year, I’m getting regular spells of bowling where the captain actually wants me to bowl rather than giving me a bowl because I’m there, I’ll be more than happy. Any wickets, catches and runs I take after that will be a bonus as far as I’m concerned.