What cricket means to Yorkshire

Let us think about time. Let's think about Ordinary Time, as scientists call it, and cricket time, and its refinement, the measurement we as Yorkshire know cricket time.

It would be the mid-1970s were, I believe, and I watched Yorkshire Leicestershire at Headingley play. The game was interrupted by harsh Leeds a few times raining, and I and the boys had taken refuge and whether the bloke debating with long hairs there was really Eric Clapton, and if so, we should be as uncool as go over and ask for his autograph. Suddenly, like a cheap hotel, shower had broken, heard the rain and the game began again, and the guitar god has been forgotten.

Nothing happened for a few overs; a man who looked like a half-inflated balloon stood up and shouted in a voice that was sanded and polished on the streets of Ossett: "Come, Yorkshire: they onny mek shoes" The rain began to assert themselves again.

Fast forward, or run quickly between the wickets, until the late 2000s; I am with Mad Geoff's barbers in Darfield, near Barnsley, the village I lived in always. Geoff gives me a trim or, as he calls it, a "glancing blow" and my six year old grandson Thomas has come as an interested audience. It is raining outside and the discussion focused in general and the Yorkshire Cricket particular to cricket. A man "wearing" a jacket that, as Raymond Chandler said almost, had been taken too young by his mother to Thomas leans over and says: ". I bet play again soon for Cricket Yorkshire" Thomas did not know what to say; he just started playing for Brierley Cubs football, but he sometimes plays cricket with me in the garden. At this moment in the space-time continuum, he prefers in the goals and not to be the networks.


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"If he was born in Yorkshire?" Another man asks, and I nod. A hitherto silent man pipes up: "Tha has come to be not only for Yorkshire play in Yorkshire born My uncle Keith said THA was born with a cricket stump yer ass.." There's a shocked silence. Thomas laughs, then we all do. A man comes in and says, "What do laugh at yer Hat Rotherham ovver into't sea tumbled?"

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Move forward again in time, slowly as a test game. It is September 2015 and Thomas has become a cricketer; he's still playing football, nor the boys helps to win the league, but his true love is cricket, encouraged by his mother's friend Steve and endless idyllic hours spent in the garden. He plays have been for Darfield and my summer a series of visits in the beautiful village of terrain in places like Monk Bretton and Upper Haugh. When Monk Bretton it was a bit of a mix-up and they went to Darfield and we went to Monk Bretton; it was a bit of a cricketing version of Waiting for Godot. On the Upper Haugh he took wickets and I almost cried when the stumps spiraled into the sky and my wife, her eyes moist, said not I be so stupid.

We had been to a couple of T20 with Steve fits in Headingley, but I wanted him to at least take match experience one day from a four-day circuit, in my humble opinion, the game at its best. It helped, of course, that Yorkshire on the title of the closure were in. It helped that the weather was good. It helped, it is crucial that Thomas a insert day had from school.

So we have a lift in Barnsley and waited on the platform for a train to Leeds. We had sandwiches and we had a bottle and a couple of bottles of water. We had a pork pie Potters Wombwell, one of the best in the country. We looked up and down the platform and took from the people who would go to Headingley white blossom against Somerset increased observed. Who is on the pilgrimage with us? It's the bloke in the flat cap; the couple with the piston as large as the splitter; the boy and his father, the boy in his cricket whites, hoping for a game. I wanted to scream in my mind that I would someday: "Come, Yorkshire; they make cider only!"
How do we explain Yorkshire and Cricket? As we try to understand it, they pin in a muffler like a butterfly fluttering down? It has something to do with the story, of course, all these heroes in my time as Trueman and Boycott close and. It has something to do with collectivism - the idea is not often articulated, that team sports a metaphor for how this pitmen and steelworkers and Millworkers is made, each of the other views, helping to shine each of the slowest. And, inevitably, it has much to do with politics, with the idea of ​​masters and players.


One of the first pieces that I've ever written, with my buddy Dave Harmer, was called slow bowlers and it was around the 19th century Yorkshire cricketer Ted Peate. He was born in 1855 in Leeds, and although he began to play for a team called the Clown Cricketers, he landed for Yorkshire to play and has has been described as one of the best bowler in the world at its peak, eight for five Shot in 1883 against Surrey. Unfortunately, he came to the arrogant and insufferable old Etonian Lord Hawke, the Yorkshire successfully captained but was actually a Yellow infiltrator of Lincolnshire. He was very keen on the intellectual and spiritual life of his team, and Dave and I dug up and embellished (we're writers, after all) a quote where he said, more or less, that the Yorkshire team time was himself and Ted Peate and nine other beer cans. The game went as part of a double bill with Barry Hines two men from Derby, to be signed by a young soccer players for the team First Division. Both pieces were. In a way, about class division, although our game does not have a set containing a ton of coal, as did Barry Yorkshire these days is the revenge of the players against the men. Maybe I should write another game.

In Leeds we have the train and followed the small but growing group of fans to the train for Burley Park from; there was excitement in the air, but it was a kind of muted, four-day excitement. A rumor began, and spread like spilled tea that Joe Root allowed from duties England could play. It was nonsense, of course, and it would never happen, but we flushed a rumor and some of us, like Thomas (and if I'm to be honest: I'm naive), swallowed it whole.

A walk through the streets of Headingley towards the cricket ground is one of the great sporting pleasure; as a football fan and a supporter of the mighty FC Barnsley, I know that the moments before the game are often the best moments. But if you go to see Yorkshire, the moments before the game just the moments when the orchestra tunes and plays the overture before the real action begins. A trickle of us walk past the row houses; a disheveled student stares us through a dusty window, as if we academics to tell him to come, that he lacks a learning experience, which of course in some ways we are.


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Thomas and I am sitting with some men who highlighted by a box "Yorkshire four-day cricket fans" might have been shaken. The youngest of them is probably, like me, in his late fifties. All of them, and I'm not kidding, have copies of the Yorkshire Post, they open as Ordnance Survey maps cover. It has a sandwich-box that seems to have a huge sandwich in it. Two wearing straw trilbies. One writes obsessively in a book manuscript that looks like runes limp. They all seem to have the option of rolling a glance upward at the moment the ball and then back to their cryptic crossword or her sandwich or their fast fill notebook.

To this golden moment I am as happy as I'd ever be to watch. I am with my grandson cricket loves so much like me, and now gives me even more reason to go and watch the game to Darfield. I support a winning team, playing with verve and poetry. I sit with my fellow Racker, who know a lot more about the game than I ever will. As Somerset bowler's run-up begins, I say: "You can do with Ted Peate" And I am to know through a clutch, giggles rewarded.

This is Yorkshire Cricket time here at Headingley; the past, present and future all coexist. Mr. Hawke is here, and Fred Trueman, and Joe Root and our Thomas. We're all together under a Yorkshire sky; an aircraft makes its slow run in Leeds-Bradford and I think that trying to look vacationers and honeymooners through the tiny window cricket starved to catch a glimpse of the true field of dreams. I lift up my hand to them; It's okay, there is no jet lag. This will be a four. No, six.