Nine a Side, and the Argument About It

Two short. This happens perhaps four times a year and every single time we handle it as though it has never happened before.

The options were laid out by Sanjay with the gravity of a man chairing something: nine a side, or eight a side with a floating fielder, or wait for Ravi who said he was ten minutes away at 6:05 and was, as always, not.

We voted. The vote was seven to six with five abstentions, which is not eighteen, because two men were putting pads on and one had gone to buy water. Nine a side won and then somebody immediately reopened it on the grounds that the vote was invalid.

We started at 6:24. The margin, for those keeping records, is the widest late start we have had since March, and every minute of it was spent on procedure rather than cricket.

Nine fielders and a keeper means somebody is missing, and we chose to leave point empty because point is where nobody wants to stand.

Within two overs Deepak had hit three balls through the gap where point should have been, and he had not been able to do that in four years, and the difference was not that he got better. He was simply, for the first time, playing against a field with a hole in it that he could see from the crease.

What was interesting was how fast it spread. By the fifth over their whole side was going for the same gap, including two men who cannot hit square of the wicket on purpose and were now attempting it every ball with no success and enormous enthusiasm.

We moved cover across in the seventh. It closed the gap and opened another one at midwicket, and the whole thing started again from the other side, which is presumably what the eleventh man was for all along.

He came through the gate at 7:20 carrying a bat he did not need and a bag of oranges nobody had asked for, and was greeted with the specific silence reserved for a man who is not sorry.

He fielded at fine leg for two overs. Nothing came to him. He batted at eleven, faced three balls, was bowled by the third, and walked off looking entirely satisfied.

Then he cut up the oranges on the boundary and by the time we were done nobody could remember being annoyed with him, which is a skill I do not have and cannot learn.

Faisal came straight from something. He did not say what and nobody asked, because at six in the morning you take the eleven men who are standing there.

He bowled his four overs in black leather shoes with a hard sole, and he bowled them fine, and then in the ninth over of the second innings he came in to field a ball at short third and went down hard on the concrete edge.

He is fine. Grazed forearm, a bit of dignity. But the whole thing stopped for four minutes and everybody had the same realisation at the same time, which is that we had all watched him bowl a full spell in dress shoes and not one of us had said a word.

We keep a first aid kit in Sanjay's bag now, and have done since 2023, and Sunday was the first time it has ever been opened. There was one plaster in it. It was from 2023.