A medium pace bowler about to deliver a ball.
Close up of the same bloke!!!!!!
A batter getting ready to face a ball
A wicket
Players warming up before a game.
THE GAME OF CRICKET
TRY REPLACING THE NAME, CRICKET, FOR ANY SPORT YOU CHOOSE.My father loved sport. He is approaching his 90th birthday in November, but in the 1930's and 1940's he was an athletic powerful little dynamo. He was a very good footballer, a nippy forward who could score goals in the twinkling of an eye, and tackle hard. He was as unforgiving as a lump of oak. He also played cricket. Cricket was his first love unlike the children of today who have to support a premiership football team. Cricket is often a second best sport now. A long way second.
My father was in the RAF, an armourer, during the Second World War. He was based at an airfield near Oxford during The Battle of Britain. As soon as that was won his unit was shipped out to Burma and he spent the following three years stationed at an airfield carved out of the Burmese Jungle. In the lull between action they often played football and cricket in intense heat.
I was born in 1952 and my father was keen for me to get interested in cricket too. For my fifth birthday he bought me a book from the, Play The Game Series," called "CRICKET- HOW TO PLAY." I loved that book. My father often took me into the garden and taught me cricketing skills, batting, bowling and catching but I read that book avidly and followed it too the last, comma and full stop.
I have been looking back at it recently. It is a very moral book. Although it is about cricket and the skills of cricket, it promotes a very moral attitutde to the game which could easily be applied to every other sport and indeed life itself. In "Cricket_How To play, in effect it is teaching you how to live your life. It's very much about how to win with total dedication and fairness.
Morality and sport today are not good bedfellows unfortunately.
The book was produced by the MCC. MCC stands for the Marylebone Cricket Club, which is the headquarters of English cricket in St John's Wood, north London. It sets the rules for cricket world wide.
"THE APPROACH TO THE GAME," could be an approach to living your life honestly and well.
"THE APPROACH TO THE GAME," could be an approach to living your life honestly and well.
In the US most of the cricket I know of is played by people originally from the Caribbean, there are a big group of clubs round New York, and a couple of teams near Washington DC but nothing at all near me. The little indigenous cricket in the US, I think mainly played in the Philadelphia area, had all disappeared by WWI.
ReplyDeleteThis team, "The Compton Cricket Club" from LA probably fulfills all the ideals you were talking about. To quote its own website:
"The Compton Cricket Club was founded in 1995 by Ted Hayes and Katy Haber. This unusual cricket team comprised of a group of homeless men from Dome Village in LA, Ted Hayes and his sons Theo and Isaac, travelled to the UK in September of 1995 as The LA KRICKETS, funded by Prudential Life Insurance and BUM EQUIPMENT.
In June of 1996 the CCC held a cricket workshop in Compton, birthing the world-renowned Compton Homies and the Popz. These young men joined the cricket team specifically to find an alternative to the gang activities that ruled their neighborhoods. Their mission was to provide an alternative path, away from the gangs, violence and prisons and to give them a vision of a positive, productive future." The Compton Homies and the Popz toured the UK three times in 1997, 1999 and 2001, ... In Britain, they played a tremendous diversity of teams, which included a team made up of members of the Royal Family staff at Windsor Castle, The Lord’s Taverners at Lords, and the world renowned Lashings team that included former W. Indies test-captains Richie Richardson, Jimmy Adams and Brian Lara. ..."
http://www.comptoncricketclub.org/history.html
I do apologise it has taken me so long to reply to you. This is the first time I have seen your comment on my post. Thank you so much. It appears that cricket is alive and well in the US. It is wonderful to hear that it is used to help young people out of their troubled lives. Playing a match against players such as those West Indians, Lara and so on must have been really something. I am not sure you will see my reply to you but it was certainly worth a reply even after all this time.
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