Managing editor Matt Thacker makes his selection from the Autumn 2024 issue. We publish one article from each edition on the website, but you can see the rest if you subscribe or buy a single issue or four-issue bundle. Matt has chosen Mark Rice-Oxley’s wonderful piece about returning to club cricket after a long time out.

• • •

I reckon I’ve known Mark for about 25 years. We had kids about the same time, about the time we met in fact, as near neighbours in Kingston. We had both played; we had both stopped playing; we would both play again. Like so many others. A bit of tennis ball in the close, the odd chat about the game, but mostly we were getting on with lives which had no room the kind of dedication we had once shown. I started again in 2012, and Mark a few years later. And as his piece shows, things had changed. Sort of.

Matt Thacker, Autumn 2024

Plus ça change

Mark Rice-Oxley comes back to cricket after a quarter of a century

I suspect I’m not alone in taking a long break from playing cricket. There was a 26-year gap between my last game as a young man and my first as an old one. Work, travel, family – none were conducive to a sport that can take all day. And all summer if you let it. But as the family got older and my son started playing for a club, I thought I’d give it another go.

It was strange. The game I rejoined was essentially the same, only different in subtle ways, like going back to your primary school to find the rooms are smaller, the coat pegs lower and the head teacher not nearly as menacing.

Bats, back-lifts, bags, banter, boundary markers – all updated for the modern era. And that was by no means everything. I started making a list – and now that I have got to 11, a full team of changes, I think it’s time to let it loose upon the world.

1 Chat

In the late 20th century, cricket was a rather quiet game, peaceful enough so you could hear the ice cream vans tinkle and wood pigeons coo nearby. Not any more. Now the game chunters along to a constant commentary by the fielding side designed to unsettle the batters, a sort of sledging-lite that makes you want to throw your wicket away, just to make it stop.

Not all of it is as witty as the Barmy Army. “He’s here for a good time, not a long time… more misses than Henry VIII… it’s all binary, fellers.” (I’ve used male pronouns throughout here as I’m just not sure this noise is a feature of the female game).

The bowler is often subjected to a bewildering range of different advice from teammates in between deliveries. Bowl faster, straighter, wider, shorter, fuller, but at the same time, don’t go changing anything. Often a fielder will bellow the same thing twice, for absolutely no reason. “Good for us, lads, good for us, lads… you and me, Fitzy, you and me Fitzy… your man here Mylo, your man here Mylo.”

This “chat” continues even when the batting side is starting to do well. A nicely judged single might be met with, “doesn’t like facing you, J-dog, keen to get off strike.” A mighty six that disappears out of the ground: “Don’t mind that guys, hitting up in the air, catch is coming next, lads.” A filthy wide might elicit nonsense like, “no problems, Compo, use the extra ball now. Extra ball is good for us.” Is it though?

Sometimes, it feels like you’re playing with subtitles. Often it makes little sense.

2 The kitbag

It’s remarkable to think now that 40 years ago, many players would not possess their own batting equipment and would rely on the faithful club kitbag. This was usually a huge, battered leather holdall with a solid clump of ancient materials inside: rust-buckle pads, mismatched gloves with green rubber spikes on the fingers, dull bats, a single, promiscuous box protector and an odd number of bails.

But its days were numbered even then. No one wants to share a box, or even an odd pair of gloves that someone else has already used in the course of scoring a laboured 29. Now of course everyone has their own kit and their own bag. I sometimes wonder where all those old leather cases went to.

3 Teas

Food has improved beyond measure in the UK in the past 40 years, but teas have certainly got worse.

Often they don’t even involve tea.

4 Jumpers

Is the dear old cable-knit going the way of the kitbag? In my youth I was never without one. Cricket in the 80s was usually a cold affair. Now I have a short-sleeved polyester thing, but rarely use it. In the UK at least, our summer sport has become a much warmer game. I swear the climate must be changing or something.

5 Coaching

It’s just vastly better, even at the most modest levels of performance. No one ever gave the younger me advice on how to bowl outswing, or keep still as a batter, or practise slip catching, or think about game strategy or opponent weaknesses. I’ve had more coaching in my 50s than I had in my teens.

I asked Tom Ellen, another recent returnee to cricket, about this. Tom manages a team in which his son plays, and says that coaches even get kids to field differently nowadays.

“The long barrier is something for dinosaurs,” Tom says. “The way it’s coached, and therefore the way that people try to field, is much more about getting the ball in quickly. I’m not sure whether that means fielding is better, but it’s different.”

6 Attacking

Long before Bazball, the club game was becoming more aggressive. I’m not saying batters don’t bother with defence any more but it does seem to be a secondary skill these days whereas a couple of generations ago, it was the first thing a young cricketer was taught. Forward defence. Backward defence. Don’t get out.

Nowadays, the emphasis is on hitting the ball hard. I wonder if this makes the game a lot more fun. As an eight year old, I once scored 10 in 20 overs. No one wants to see that.

Perhaps cricket’s symbiotic relationship with statistics is partly responsible for this change. Digital scoring means you can keep tabs on previously elusive metrics like strike rates. Kids seem to focus on this far more than they do on traditional stats. Me, I’m still happy with a nice little 7 not out to boost my batting average.

7 The high five and the fist bump

When you got a wicket in the 80s, celebrations were usually fairly muted. Someone might pat you on the shoulder or shake hands, or make a crude joke about the departing batter. Often the fielding side wouldn’t even bother to throng together in the middle.

Now it is more complex. The bowler – and catcher – must high-five everyone in the team, a tricky operation involving lots of clumsy flapping and inevitably one or two total air shots. It actually takes quite a lot of concentration, more than it did to bowl the wicket ball. And don’t underestimate the deflating feeling of getting this operation wrong: a fumbled high-five somehow takes the gloss off the fact that you just bowled the ball of the century to get a small child out.

The batting side’s version of the high five is the fist-bump. Every single boundary must be accompanied by this well-worn act of mid-pitch celebration. Everyone does it now, but it’s a bit like pulling crackers at Christmas: some people are vigorous, others rather limp. One young player is so violent that I breathe a sigh of relief when he gets out. Another guy I played with insisted on a more enigmatic ritual of fist bump, mutual bat tap and man hugs for all major and minor milestones. We looked like Morris dancers who’d lost their way.

8 Bats

In the 1980s, bats were rubbish, needing knocking in for hours (with a cricket ball inside a long sock) and oiling regularly with a product (linseed oil) that seemed to have no other purpose. When you hit the ball (or at least, when I hit it) there was no satisfying ping but a splintering echo, like a wooden leg kicking an anvil.

People were not so strong either in the years before gyms and workouts and personal trainers. I have no data to back this up, only memories of stick-thin lads throwing everything at half volleys only to see the ball move slowly across the grass like a safety shot in snooker.

These days of course, superior bats have totally changed the game – even at junior level. The first thing I noticed on returning to cricket was how hard the ball was hit at me. Most weeks I have bruises in slightly odd places.

9 The all-run ‘3’

Is the exhausting three – 60 yards or so of madcap dashing back and forth – going to slowly disappear from the game? Because of modern bats (see above) and outfields that are often parched, balls tend to go all the way to the boundary. Because of savvier fields, there is usually a sweeper out there to stop you at 2.

Sometimes I wonder what is the highest score ever made by a batter who scored only in 3s. Has anyone ever got to 50 in this way? 

10 Inclusivity

As a white man, I need to be careful here. Clearly there is a way to go before cricket can claim to be an equal opportunities sport. The professional game has been found sorely lacking in recent years. But at club level it is surely so much better than it was. In the 80s and 90s, the cricket I played was relentlessly white and male. Girls hardly featured at all. I almost never encountered players from Asian backgrounds. Nowadays, it’s rare to come across a side without cricketers from minority groups.

I asked Dipesh Morjaria – another 50-something who returned to the game after a long break – for his thoughts. He said that when he was young “I always felt that cricket was fairly closed – a game that was difficult to break in to.

“Clubs could be intimidating places, particularly if you weren’t middle class and white,” he said. “There’s a big change now, encouraging diversity, growing the sport, being inclusive. That’s probably the biggest things that has changed in cricket.

“That, and I now wear a helmet.”

Which brings us to…

11 Helmets

One of the biggest changes. Back then, virtually no one wore them. I do remember being afraid a few times – particularly when facing a pro quick from Barbados who for some inexplicable reason ended up playing in the same match as me. I liked my face, and didn’t want to lose it.

During my wilderness years, helmets became almost obligatory and wearing one took a lot of getting used to when I returned to the game. To start with the ball seems to hide behind the blind spots created by the grille. Predictably, my first helmeted innings ended in a myopic duck.

After a while, instinct takes over. Still, many players of my generation don’t bother. 

12th man: The cost

We’re all familiar with the cost-of-living crisis, but what about the cost-of-cricket crisis? A decent bat costs as much as £500 today. That is the equivalent of almost £200 the mid-1980s – when I bought a new V12 for about £60. Shirts, boots, training tops, pads, gloves, whites, T20 pyjama strip… the barrier to entry is high, particularly for a parent of several enthusiastic youngsters who grow out of their kit every year.

No wonder cricket still has a reputation as a game for the middle classes.

The last thing that has changed about the cricket I play is me. I love this new game, thrilling, risky but full of mutual support – love it so much more than I did as a teenager. Back then, I would sometimes be secretly pleased if a game was rained off. Now I’m distraught. At 54, you never quite know how many games you have left.