Social / Works Cricket

I have always been a keen sports fan, especially football and cricket and I had always participated in the works matches and works sporting events when they were arranged. At work there was always a lot of talk about company sporting events and my employer had a very ad hoc attitude to them. They were a construction company and the games, whatever the team sport, were more about marketing than anything else.The first involvement I had with works / social cricket was quite a stuffy affair. The annual game against a professional quantity surveying practice was about the limit really. The team was mostly middle aged ex. players donning their whites which barely fitted anymore with a few younger guys like myself.The first serious involvement I had with works cricket came when I was a site engineer on a hospital project in Taunton. I played in a cricket team in a Saturday League and early in the season we used to have a few night matches of 20 overs per side as cup games organised by the League. Today, they would be called T20, but back then, they were just midweek cup games.Well, one afternoon I was trying to leave early and headed off to the car park to “sneak off” to play cricket. I had to do this as the Project Manager would not object to my leaving early but we had our new Area Director on site on this particular afternoon and I wasn’t sure how well it would go down if I disappeared to play cricket.Anyway, as I put my stuff in the boot of the car, I felt a hand on my shoulder and it was Roly, our Area Director, asking where was I going as it was only 3.00pm? he would have seen my cricket gear in the boot of my car so I had to be honest and told him the truth saying I was off to play cricket for my cricket club and he didn’t seem to bothered, but he did ask me to make an appointment to go and see him in the Bristol Office in the next day or two. I was to call his secretary and make an appointment to see him. This sounded like I was in trouble and it bothered me until I actually got to see him a few days later.I went into his office expecting to receive some sort of telling off for leaving site early, but quite the contrary. He asked how we got and then he went on about his own love of cricket. He was West Indian and played cricket to quite a high standard before choosing a career in construction. I was later told he played for the Leeward Islands at Under 19 level but I don’t know if this was actually true as he never said it to me. He was keen for the company to play cricket against the Architects, Engineers and Cost Consultants we dealt with as part of a business development programme and he wanted me to arrange it. He would play and all I had to do was make contact with a list of people at the various companies he gave me, arrange the dates and let his secretary know. She would book the venue for the games, organise people to play, although I could help with team raising if I wanted to, but it wasn’t essential and she would sort out the refreshments afterwards. This would involve going to a pub or using the bar of the cricket club we were playing it. He wanted to play once a week, preferably on a Tuesday or a Thursday from May and we could go on until the end of July as long as it was light enough.Well, needless to say, I didn’t expect anything like this and I duly went about organising the games. We had a good turnout of the staff and I was surprised as we had some fair players in the team, people you would never think of as playing cricket. Roly captained the side initially but as soon as he felt comfortable with the arrangements and saw I actually understood the game, he passed the role over to me. At the end of the summer he advised the cricket season, as far as the company team and the benefits it had generated were concerned, it was a great success.The organisation of the company cricket team did have a downside though. He would ring me up on site periodically, usually the day before the game to ask how things were going. There would not be an issue with this normally but as all the telephone calls to site went through the Project Managers secretary, it was a perceived issue by the site management. I was initially quizzed on why the Area Director wanted to speak to me, an Engineer, well down the management chain. The fact I essentially ran the company cricket team was a good reason which was accepted although I don’t think they were over enamoured with it. However, when our season was over the calls continued and generally it was Roly calling me to the telephone to tell me, in his West Indian accent, “Hey, man, you are all out again” as it was the time of the West Indies Blackwash tour of 1984. When I was asked why I was still getting calls from the Area Director after our season was over, I was happy to say he just wanted to speak to me about the Test Match which was going on. I wasn’t believed for one minute, even though it was true and I am sure the Project Manager thought I was a spy for Roly, which could not have been further from the truth. We never once spoke about work, only cricket and his love of Viv Richards, Clive Lloyd and company. The following year things changed, Roly had seen a national competition for company cricket teams and entered us into it. There were over 200 companies who entered and initially it was regionalised. We started off with a home game which we played at a local cricket ground near the office. We arranged for tea in the local pub and also for drinks afterwards. The games were 40 over affairs, much along the lines of the old John Player Sunday League, but it was a knock out competition.We manager to win our first game, which turned out to be very close and very exciting. The whole day went really well. We were drawn at home again in the next round, with our opposition not being quite so local. We held the game at the same ground with the same arrangements and it went very well, as it always does when you win.Sadly, this was where our story and participation in the competition ended. Our luck on home draws ended and we were drawn away to a company in Penzance, some 4 hours from our office in Bristol. This shouldn’t have been an issue but most of the people who normally played wanted to travel down the day before, stay overnight in an hotel and play the game the following day, all paid for by the company. This was not something Roly was prepared to do, so we scratched from the tournament as we could not raise a team prepared to take a day’s holiday to travel to Penzance to play and ther would not be an overnight stay. I was disappointed, as was everyone else, but there was no consultation on it as Roly would not be swayed.We still continued to play works / social cricket and it was back to our 20 overs format, with everyone bowling 2 overs and batsmen declaring when they got to 25 runs.They were great social events but the competitiveness the cup competition gave was lost.We played generally once a fortnight throughout the summer against anyone who would play us. After the first game of the new regime I started issuing a report to all staff after the game from “The Chronicler”, which gave an update on the game, but was also used to poke fun at some of the players / members of staff. The news reports from The Chronicler were anonymous, although everyone knew I wrote them and the issue of these news bulletins were always eagerly awaited after each game. We carried this on for several years in the cricket season and I didn’t think any more of them. However, in 1995, a colleague left to go to work in Thailand and lo and behold he had kept all these and bound them in a book. He presented them to me and I still have them to this day. They are a wonderful memory of our happy times together playing social / works cricket and the fun we had.I retired a few years ago and for the last 20 or so years of my working life nothing like it existed and I doubt it ever will again. Nice memories though.The Inter-Company 5 – a – side Tournament at LilleshallIn the early days of our football, we just played 5 a side games as the team was in its infancy and we were coming to the end of the season. Tarmac, as we were then, annually ran an intercompany tournament at the National Sports Centre at Lilleshall, Staffordshire.We entered the tournament not knowing what to expect and we found winning our group to be very easy indeed. We progressed through to the quarter finals where we knocked out the winners for the previous couple of years. In the semi final we were coasting and then the worst happened as far as I was concerned. The second half had just started when I was tackled from behind and my knee buckled under me. I was in extreme pain and the medical staff were called from the Centre to treat me. After what seemed an eternity, I was taken to the treatment centre on campus where they decided it was straight down to the hospital for me. Their own ambulance was summoned and I was whisked off to the North Staffordshire Infirmary. As we went into A & E there was quite a queue but we bypassed all of these and I was seen almost immediately. I could not believe it. I had an x-ray and a scan and before I knew it I was seeing the surgeon. The diagnosis wasn’t good and I had damaged my knee ligaments and they would operate in the next day or so to repair the damage. I was still in a lot of pain but the pain relief started to work and I began a discussion with the surgeon. He went on about the seriousness of the injury but he was confident I would make a full recovery. However, things took a turn for the worst when he asked me what club I was with, clearly thinking I was a professional footballer having been brought in from Lilleshall. He also asked would he have seen me on television and of course I had to say no. when he determined I was just a member of the public who happened to be playing there the mood changed. They went off for what seemed like an eternity and cam back to break the news to me. They were going to take the crutches off of me and send me home, suggesting I go and see my own doctor if it wasn’t any better within a week or two. I was devastated and I had to sit in the waiting area for my team mates to come and see how I was. As it was, I didn’t have to wait too long as they were beaten on the semi final after it restarted and they wanted to see how I was before they went home. As luck would have it, I was picked up at my house on the way there so after a tortuous struggle to get me in the car and an agonising journey I was home.I spent the next couple of days recuperating and contemplating a lengthy lay off from work. The injured knee was my left one and there was no way I could drive in this condition, which was a problem for the company. The project I was leading was nearing completion and they were keen to get me back on site as quickly as possible, In the few days I had been off already the client was already asking questions and getting very concerned for the project. My boss was in contact several times a day and after a few days off he asked did I think I could drive an automatic car. Well, I had no issues moving around the house, the injury was to my left knee, so an automatic should be fine. He arranged to have one delivered and I managed to get to work after all driving the automatic. We handed over on time so I guess it was money well spent, but the team would have done that anyway in my absence. The injury turned out to be quite serious and opting for a physiotherapy programme rather than surgery probably wasn’t the right option as I didn’t play again for nearly 6 months.The Archive TrophyIn early 1992, I was given my next project which was to be an archive building for the RCHME, who were the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England.It was a two stage contract and in the second stage I had a lot of dealings with Tony Rumsey, the man behind the guiding principles of the archive building and what we were doing. Tony was a keen sports fan, especially cricket and we would spend ages talking about the game, both historically and at the current time. He noted one night we were leaving early as we were playing football and the following day he took a keen interest in how we got on. The conversation developed and he advised the RCHME also had a cricket and a football team and he was keen for us to play each other and so The Archive Trophy was born.As the signing of the Contract approached, Tony proposed it was written in we would play each other once a year at both football and cricket, once in Acton and once in Swindon and a trophy be presented to the winners after each game. I still have the trophy at my house having won it the last few times it was played for.Cricket in Acton, London.The first game we had was cricket in London and we went along to a very nice cricket club in Acton. It soon became apparent they had quite a pool of talent to choose from. In the first game we were skittled for little more than a hundred and 40 odd of those came from me. They soon rattled off the runs to win and we had a 20 over game afterwards where we were suitably hammered again.