Backyard cricket: The greatest game on earth

Sunday, 26 January 2025

Mike White is a senior writer and columnist for the Sunday Star-Times.

OPINION: The bat was yellow and plastic and went donk when it hit the ball.

The ball was yellow and fuzzy with an emerging split.

The wickets were yellow and prone to toppling in the breeze.

The pitch was yellow and bumpy with prickles.

Everything was as it should be, for the king of summer sports, BYC - backyard cricket.

In a world of professional sport where players are cosseted and indulged and overpaid and under pressure, backyard cricket still produces the greatest of contests.

It’s the most wonderful leveller of egos, and sees people in jandals flare like meteors for an afternoon, and become part of family legend.

I grew up playing cricket - there was little option.

One constant of my mother’s disrupted English childhood was the soundtrack of Ashes cricket commentaries, the empire’s rivalry played out on 22 yards, washing in and out over hazy airwaves.

My father was a cricket fan too and was like fathers the world over, imagining their sons might become sporting successes where they had not.

By and large, I failed at that, and thus, failed him.

But not for want of trying.

When summer holidays arrived, I’d march onto the concrete of our backyard, already radiating heat from the climbing sun, and practise.

I held a tennis ball, and a stick, which was about an inch in diameter, and largely straight.

I figured if I could master hitting the ball with only a thin stick, it would be the equivalent of middling it with my normal bat, and my game would inevitably improve.

Clutching my stick and this belief based on the scantest of science, I persevered, hour after hour, after dinner, after pink dusk.

I would stand by the corrugated iron fence, hurl a tennis ball at the laundry wall, and when it bounced back, attempt a blazing drive past the asparagus bed towards the bike shed.

A circle of brownish laundry wall emerged where the paint flaked and fell from continuous ball throwing.

Mum never said a word about this damage. Or the relentless sound of ball on wall.

She was a saint.

So progressed summer. Boink, bounce, thwack.

But dreams of such ascetic practice resulting in cricketing honours were bound to be demolished, like a middle stump uprooted.

I was OK, but to others the glory deservingly accrued.

Decades on, however, BYC offers us all a brief opportunity for redemption.

The dodgy pitch, the Warehouse bat, the fickle tennis ball - all give hope to no-hopers. Dreams are rekindled amidst motley teammates and relaxed rules.

When Mum got too old to bat, she took on umpire duties. She’d sit in an old armchair on the veranda of my sister’s house, and adjudge fate, like Caesar in a cardigan.

No appeals, no reviews, if her finger went up, off you went.

The dog replaced her on the field.

The dog absolutely loves BYC. It’s heaven on a hot afternoon: Plenty of people, lots of excitement, and a ball flying around to be intercepted.

My favourite BYC moment remains one my partner still struggles to accept.

Her well-timed pull towards midwicket almost cleared the house, but clipped the weatherboards just below the roof and rebounded towards the pitch.

The dog never lost sight of it.

He raced in from cover-point, launched, flew, intersected, and pranced in celebration around the plum tree, ball in his mouth, as my partner stood crestfallen at the crease. Up went Mum’s finger.

The dog has unfortunately been banished from BYC now - not as punishment for catching my partner, but because he takes up a fielding position right in front of the batter, figuring this is the prime place to snaffle the ball.

He’s right, but it makes play impossible.

The titanic backyard battles continue though, balls tonked into the neighbour’s paddock, balls lost in a phalanx of flax bushes, nicks, near misses, cheers heard the length of the street.

The best sound of summer.

When Mum died last year, we all went to a beach near Nelson after her funeral.

We kept seagulls at bay from the fish and chips, snuck bits of batter to the dogs, and went back for ice creams afterwards.

Then a game of BYC evolved, with Mum’s great-grandsons at the crease, bats at 45 degrees, only a vague sense of what to do.

Occasionally contact was made with the ball and the great-grandsons would be shepherded down the pitch for a thrilling run.

The dog strained desperately at his lead in the outfield.

Catches were spilled and sometimes spectacularly clung to.

It was a perfect evening, still and warm, overflowing with excitement and hilarity.

Mum would have loved it.

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