Thursday, Alone, Against a Wall

There is a stretch of boundary wall at the far end of the park, blank concrete, about four metres of it, and on Thursday evening I stood in front of it and threw a ball at it for forty minutes.

I want to be honest that this was not training. Training would mean knowing what I was trying to fix. I do not. I have never been coached, none of us have, and the eleven of us on a Sunday are working entirely from what we picked up as children and from watching television.

What I got was rhythm. After about ten minutes the throw and the catch stopped being two things and became one thing, and my head went quiet in a way it had not been all week.

A man walked past at about the thirty-minute mark and said keep your elbow up, and kept walking, and did not stop to see whether I did. I did. It was better. He was gone.

They were never cricket shoes. They were running shoes bought in 2021 for running, which I did for about six weeks, after which they were reassigned.

The sole has separated at the toe on the right one, which means that when I run I now make a noise, and on Sunday two people commented on the noise before anybody commented on anything I did with the bat.

I have looked up glue. Apparently there is a specific glue and people have strong feelings about which one. I read about it for twenty minutes on Thursday night, which is twenty minutes more than I have ever spent thinking about these shoes in four years of owning them.

I will probably buy new ones. But I would like it recorded that I looked into the glue first, because for most of my life I would not have.

It exists to answer one question every Saturday evening, which is who is coming tomorrow. That question takes about eleven messages to resolve and it resolves badly, because four people answer, three react with a thumbs up which may or may not be a yes, and two turn up having said nothing.

The remaining three thousand nine hundred are: photographs of the ground, arguments about a professional match none of us watched together, one very long thread in March about a restaurant, birthdays, and a period in June where somebody's cousin was added by accident and stayed for five weeks.

Sanjay proposed a second group, strictly for attendance. It lasted nine days. Everybody was in both, nobody could remember which was which, and the attendance group filled up with the same material because that is what happens.

I have thought about leaving it roughly once a month for two years. I will not. The eleven messages on a Saturday evening are the only reason eleven men are in a park at six on a Sunday, and there is no version of this where the other three thousand nine hundred are optional.