[Full text below]
Cricket can ruin your weekend. For some
people, getting out takes a whole week to get over. Despite my rich and varied
catalogue of options for getting out, I’ve never really suffered from this.
No, what really makes me
throw-stuff-across-the-changing-room angry, is being rained off on a lovely
day.
If it’s sheeting down all day, then obviously
you’re not going to play. But heavy rain the night before or morning of a
match, when come 2pm it’s warm and sunny? Nothing is more likely to induce a
weekend-long sulk in me.
The only answer is covers. The snag with
which is that covers cost about four and a half thousand pounds. Unless…
A few years ago we ‘invested’ in an ancient
set of steel cricket cover frames. I’m sure you can sense the sarcasm in those
inverted commas.
The frames were so big that they had to be
cut in half and transported to our ground in the bucket of Dave’s massive
tractor, and then welded back together again.
Marky H is a welder, and brought a portable
MIG kit to the ground for several consecutive weekends, joining the bits back
together and replacing lost or broken elements with new box-section steel.
We sourced some old lorry curtain-sides and
fashioned them into the right size coverings, tensioned underneath with ropes.
Experiments showed that even under tension, water would collect in the gaps, so
to prevent sagging, Joel, H and I spent hours covering the frames in ‘pig wire’
fencing, donated by sportsfield chairman Rob.
Our groundsman Derek spent days with the
garage trying to refurbish the wheels, which under the weight of the frames
would deflate or burst. Mark fashioned brackets for makeshift gutters. More
welding. More wire. More inner tubes. More 25mm fish pond hose.
Goodness knows how many hundreds of volunteer
man-hours went into trying to make those cursed things work. I’ve never really
understood the expression “throwing good money after bad” (there was nothing
bad about the initial money) but that’s definitely what we did.
They never worked. The uneven sides would
leak all over the pitch, the wheels were perpetually flat, the gutters would
collapse when moved. They were so heavy they needed four of us to shift each
one. Even when they were deployable, more often than not they added to the
problems rather than solving them.
Now they rust beyond the boundary, quietly
mocking our lack of four and a half grand.
The other Saturday morning we had a crazy
amount of rain in a very short time. An hour before the game was due to start,
the carcasses of the failed covers looked on sarcastically as large puddles
formed on the cut strip, the white lines of the crease washed away along with
all hopes of playing.
Two hours later we were up at a local rival’s
watching them play in glorious sunshine.
And I had a right sulk on.
- ends 487 words -
No comments:
Post a Comment