It’s the silly season of village cricket and we need it more than ever

It was the most gloriously peculiar sporting result in history. Last weekend, the cricket pitch on the estate of Wedgwood in Staffordshire saw the home team second XI score just eight runs, their batsmen decimated by the bowling of the opposing Checkley second XI in just 10 overs. This was humiliating enough. Then Checkley took to the crease. The opening batsman hit the first two balls for four, the second of which was a “no ball” (for which Checkley were awarded one run), bringing their score to nine. Which meant that Checkley reached the target set by Wedgwood in one legal delivery.

This is very much in the spirit of village cricket, which at its heart must encompass eccentric chaos.

Passion is more important than professionalism, although decorum must reign. The game must be taken very seriously, with tactics discussed as if the nation’s future depended upon it. Victory is to be celebrated as if one’s country has won the World Cup, but modesty must be assumed the moment one leaves the pitch. Defeat must also be immediately forgotten, as must all resentments that build up during a game. When one’s captain makes decisions that see your team snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, it no longer matters when the game has ended and you step over the boundary.

What really matters is the quality of the tea and the merriment in the pub after. And one’s personal triumphs.

I’m an occasional player so I understand the importance of village cricket. There is no other activity, sporting or otherwise, that unites people like cricket does – and yes, mainly men, although no team I have ever played for would deny a (fun) woman a position on the team.

Men of all shapes and colour, size and class unite as they don whites in the dressing room and then bond further on or beside the pitch. And it’s a leveller. Little compares with the glee of seeing the flash guy who turns up in his fancy car, with all the gear, stride out to the wicket, pad at the turf, cast an eye around the ground, take a scornful measure of the fielders and then see him bowled out first ball by a 12-year-old. Or the shared joy of watching some old boy against the odds, miraculously, for the first time in his life, nudge up 50 runs.

Whether you can sprint or barely hobble, you can play a role. And what other game demands and tests the virtues of honesty and courage? The courage to face a fast bowler, to venture a catch, the honesty to give one of your own men out LBW as you umpire while your team bats.

On a bad day, there is humiliation as your team is dismembered by old men and children. On a good day, there are golden moments you’ll never forget. You may have sold your company for half a billion pounds but nothing comes close to the moment you catch or bowl out their best batsman.

I, personally, can think of no achievement that will match that day in July 2011, at a cricket ground in Cork, Ireland, when I bowled out Galway, eight for 31 runs.

They are achievements that offer a sort of private redemption, moments of exquisite glory that are equal to the birth of a child. And if you relish such stories, I suggest you feast on some fabulous cricket-related summer reading in Richard Heller’s A Tale of Ten Wickets. Heller, like me, plays for one of this country’s greatest “village” cricket teams, the White City All Stars, a touring team named after the former west London greyhound stadium.

This year, the White City All Stars conduct their 40th annual tour of Ireland. The first game was against the Irish army in Curragh. The army won by one run and it was the first in a tremendous display of Anglo-Irish friendship.

Somehow, every match, 11 men (or women or children or borrowed players from the opposition, or people found in the pub or on the street, or fishing in a nearby river), are mustered. Over four decades, this is a feat equal to getting astronauts on the Moon.

I joined the Irish tour in between having small batches of children (I’m currently mid-batch two) and I can tell you that no place in the world has that combination of idyllic pitch settings, incredible tea and pub jollity. I can’t recall the results of games, but my mind is embedded with the memories of friendship, generosity, hospitality and some epic mishaps along the way (leg wrestling in the main street of Thomastown, the sleeping captain’s trousers being set on fire in Kavanagh’s Drinking Emporium).

Now that we are in the midst of an election, when division, attack, partisanship, tribalism, class war, envy, retribution, revenge and loathing are the mantras of the day, village cricket – with its eccentric peculiarities, its friendly rivalry and its tea – is more vital than ever.