FSOM: Why club cricket tours are still alive despite demands on time imposed by work, family commitments and – dare you speculate it – fewer people playing

HOWDY-doody!

FSOM is back!

He’s been away a little while, but you know how it is.

You nip down to the Co-op to pick up a loaf of sourdough, a pint of milk and some chocolate hob-nobs, you bump into somebody you haven’t seen for a few years, you start talking gabbling and….

Anyway, it’s been some time since FSOM’s pudgy little sausage fingers danced lightly over his laptop keyboard and quite a lot of sporting water has flowed under the bridge.

There was the World Cup, won by Spain, spoiled by Argentina’s antics, meddled with by US president Donald Trump who tried to hijack it for his own egotistical reasons, and his bestie FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s antics which almost prompted open warfare in world football.

The World Cup provided the usual opportunity for England to display its unrivalled talent for building a nation’s hopes like a party balloon, only to touch a fag butt on it and burst it.

We’ve had the demise of Ben Stokes as England cricket captain and post-match booze-up organiser. We’ve had Spygate at Southampton and other sporting events which merited FSOM’s waspish wit and waffle.

But the big event of the summer was FSOM trotting off on a cricket tour.

Yep, FSOM joined a bunch of lollygaggers and ne’re-do-wells to decamp to Devon for a few days.

FSOM didn’t don the whites, wield the willow or turn his arm over. His bionic body, which contains a titanium hip (it had better be titanium and not plastic – I paid for top of the range, although suspiciously it doesn’t set the airport security alarms off) limited him to a strictly watching brief.

And that was the idea of going on the tour. It was the prospect of visiting some of the most idyllic rural cricket grounds, flopping down in a deckchair in the shade of the pavilion balcony. sipping on long cool lemonades and nodding off in between-times on a drowsy, soporific afternoon. What’s not to like about that?

Another reason for trotting along was an academic one, a bit of scientific research, if you will.

Cricket tours were once a common thing, almost a rite of summer passage. FSOM’s experience was more of playing for hosting teams. It helped having a sports editor who was a cricket fan and would happily turn a blind eye to FSOM bunking off on a weekday afternoon to do battle somewhere up the Meon Valley with a touring team.

These tended to be jazz-hats from London. Former public schoolboys who slipped their City trading desks to zoom down to the boonies in their Porsches to teach the local yokels a thing or two with their private school immaculately coached cover drives (‘keep that elbow up!’) and off-spin bowling as tight as two coats of paint.

The boots of the latest German sports model may have been small, but there was enough room for a coffin big enough to bury Geoff Capes but containing a selection of top of the range bats, whites so pristine and white they hurt the eyes, and caps which matched colours of old school ties and looked like a Liquorice Allsorts bag on the head.

During the halcyon days of high summer, rural clubs with their own grounds (preferably picturesque and with a pub on the boundary) could expect to stage at least half a dozen midweek games (weekends – especially Saturdays, being reserved for league action) so it’s not a quantum leap to multiply the number of clubs wanting to tour by the number of clubs willing to host, to work out it was a proper cottage industry.

But even while FSOM was still able to stay upright to deliver his left-arm filth, tours appeared to be in decline. The demands on time imposed by work, family commitments and – dare you speculate it – fewer people playing cricket pointed to cricket tours meeting the same fate as flared trousers.

So, part of FSOM’s justification for jollying along was to examine the state of not only cricket tours, but to place a cold stethoscope on the chest of grass-roots club cricket.

Cricket tourists have changed. Time was, a club would have hired a charabanc (and driver) for a week, and tootled off to their base, which would have been a means for a sharp-eyed farmer to make a few shekels. Thus, a barn, from which the dairy herd had been booted out, or a large army surplus tent (the product of a hooky deal made in the local pub with the quarter-master sergeant from the army camp up the road), with the facilities provided being a tap, a trough (borrowed from the dairy herd), straw from the barn to stuff the palliasse, and a few copies of the local weekly threaded on a string in a dark, dank and secluded corner of the woods from which the nettles and brambles had been cleared.

Tourists back then would have sniffed and coughed at the effete and mollycoddled cricketing nomad of today who requires a little more comfort, base for the week, in this case, being a comfortable four-star hotel in Barnstaple.

The Southampton-based touring club FSOM latched on to like a leech on to a wild-water swimmer, was marking its FORTIETH (yes 40th) successive year of touring in North Devon. The playing strength was 16, along with a couple of guys happy to do umpiring duties, and although the squad was a bit light on bowling resources, there was clearly no big issue in recruiting personnel.

Getting time off work is still clearly an issue, so four games were squeezed into four days, the first starting Sunday lunch time (meaning an early start and four-hour drive from Southampton) and the last beginning on Wednesday lunchtime, with a drive home straight afterwards.

The fitter members of the squad were happy to play all four games, others content to sit one of two games out. The tour organiser (and de facto selector) managed to please most people by juggling the starting XI about, but there was one major strop which saw one player flounce out a day early and go home.

The touring party was of mixed ability, with ages ranging from mid-twenties to 60s and there was clearly a lot of experience, with the brain and muscle-memory compensating for limbs which were willing to work but struggling to remember how.

Some of the players were not exactly sylph-like gazelles and some of the resulting fielding was not exactly Jonty Rhodes, but nobody minded or blasted team-mates for mis-fields.

Such was the attraction of the tour, that one guy came over from the Netherlands (where he lives and plays his club cricket) to play and was rewarded with his first-ever century.

Not all the batting was MCC-coaching manual textbook style, but they managed to put 200-plus on the board every game which was enough to win three of the four games.

Having established there was little trouble in populating the tour party, the next issue was fixtures. Are there enough clubs who can muster a midweek XI to host games? Well, encouragingly, yes there are.

The first game was against Lynton & Lynmouth, a club on the North Devon coast where every club wants to play. Their home ground is in the Valley of The Rocks and if there is a more dramatic setting in the country, drop FSOM a postcard. It’s as if Sauron decided to set up a Mordor CC and plonk a cricket ground in Middle Earth’s wasteland. Like Hambledon in Hampshire, it’s one of those grounds every club wants to play at, and L&L CC find themselves turning clubs away thanks to a packed fixture list.

Matches here are played among puzzled Japanese and Chinese tourists who wonder what this strange ritual is but snap away to their hearts content. If you play at Lynton & Lynmouth, you do so in the knowledge you could end up on a wall in Osaka or Quangzhou.

The second match was against Braunton CC, just down the road from the hotel. Given an 1pm start on a Monday, one might be forgiven for thinking the home team might struggle to get a side out, but not so. It might not have been their strongest, North Devon League Saturday XI, but there was at least 11 of them.

Ditto for the third game at Newton Tracey, a small village 10 miles south of Barnstaple and the fourth at Thorverton. The host teams had a good complement of teenaged players and one way of looking at this is it was out of desperation to pad out a full XI but the positive viewpoint is that there are lots of younger guys playing cricket (and not spending their time doing wheelies on e-bikes) and just as importantly, being given the opportunity by clubs to play.

Newton Tracey provided the biggest surprise of the tour, a torrential 10-minute downpour, literally out of the blue. Nobody moved to cover the pitch. The ground was so hard the rain slithered off like a shower tray and action resumed five minutes after it passed.

Only a dimwit would argue that everything in the club cricket garden is rosy but from the hosting clubs on tour, it’s in a decent state of health.

Every host ground was immaculately maintained even in the hottest summer on record. In conditions that would have made Death Valley seem a cool haven, grass on outfields was whiter than Abe Lincoln’s morals with watering limited to not even the square, but just the next wicket in use.

All the clubs had a bar, which is the life blood of many a club, and a glance around the ground showed plenty of advertising which indicated plenty of sponsorship.

Lynton & Lynmouth’s sponsorship by a pub was symbiotic, as it ensured both teams went there after the game, where a meal of sausage and mash was laid on for everybody.

Not all clubs put up a tea (or if they did, they charged for it) and the cricket tea provides enough material for a whole column of its own.

The cricket tour is possibly a good barometer of how the game is shaping.

No doubt, there are those out there who will shoot FSOM down in flames by producing statistics as evidence.

But the visual evidence is that clubs still rustle up enough players to embark on a tour, and there are still clubs and players who can buck the apparent trend and find time to play at what might seem the most difficult time.

The cricket tour still appears to have plenty of legs left in it, even if for some the legs are used to get to a comfy deckchair.