Match Of The Day & Play Of The Day, Z/Yen v The Children’s Society, Holland Park, 22 June 2004

By 2004, the Z/Yen v The Children’s Society cricket match had become a well-established fixture in the social calendar.

In the few years preceding this 2004 match, we had settled on Regents Park as the venue of choice, but Regents Park was unavailable that year, so we thought we’d try Holland Park’s non-turf pitch for a convenient change.

Two extraordinary things happened on this day in 2004. The handful of relics remaining of the event leave only tiny clues about those things, but in this Ogblog I shall deploy my forensic skills and reveal those memorable happenings.

Here is a link to the Now and Z/Yen write up of this match, which reads thus:

Longer than the Longest Thing

The annual Z/Yen versus The Children’s Society cricket match was held in Holland Park around the longest day, 22 June. And it must have seemed like a long evening to the largest ever crowd of friends and spectators, huddling under the trees in the cool drizzle. Perhaps it was the bottles and pin of superb beer sponsored by Youngs brewery (via George, Giles Wright’s brother) that kept the crowd motivated and audible throughout.

Z/Yen batted first and accumulated 91 for 4. More or less everyone got a bat with several players, even Ian Harris, retiring not out. Restricting things to 15 overs per side saved the game from the impending rain, as well as the use of some handy Astroturf. Z/Yen bowled well – John Davies (Helen’s husband) getting man-of-the-match for his efforts – restricting The Children’s Society to 73 for 6, despite some late heroics by Harish Gohil and Richard Britain-Kelly. So for only the second time ever, Z/Yen has regained the Rashes (risk/reward ashes) trophy.

In a desperate attempt to rebuild the devastated relations with this important client, Ian Harris helped The Children’s Society to win (for the first time ever) its annual Tufty Stackpole match a few weeks later. Ian’s help was mostly vicarious of course (p-lease), lending The Children’s Society Z/Yen’s star ringer Mat for the 45 overs-a-side Sunday marathon.

Yes, the original write up records one of the key features of these quintessentially beer-match-style cricket matches. Giles Wright’s brother George being an essential ringer for our Z/Yen team, not least because he was the head of marketing at Youngs Brewery and would insist on donating lashings of beer for the event. No wonder we started to draw sizeable crowds during that era.

I also have the scorebook for this match:

Play Of The Day

The casual reader glancing at the above relics would not settle upon the name James Pitcher and imagine that the play of the day might have anything to do with him. Did not bat. Did not bowl.

James was a reluctant member of the team. That’s not to say that he was an unwilling participant in events, far from it. But James was convinced that everyone else in the team deserved their place in cricketing terms more than he did. So when time was running out and I offered him my place in the batting line up, James deferred. He also stated firmly that he could not and should not bowl.

Importantly, James also implied that he couldn’t really field that well either, but he could run, so we agreed that the outfield would be best for him.

When my friend/nemesis Charles “Charley The Gent Malloy” Bartlett came out to join Eugene Kinghorn at the crease, the match was still well poised, but the Children’s Society knew they needed to get on with it; they were falling behind the required run rate.

Charles drove his first scoring shot (it might even have been his very first ball, you know) extremely well, straight down to long on, quite near to the location where James was peacefully grazing in the long grass.

Eugene, gazelle-like compared with most of us, set off at Charles’s call of two and I’m pretty sure again yelled “yes, one more” on the turn, as he would be running to the danger (non-striker’s) end.

But James didn’t throw to the non-striker’s end. Why would he? How could he? James, the non-cricketer, simply ran as fast as he could, picked up the ball and hurled it (he’s not named Pitcher for nothing) vaguely in the direction of the action.

Had James thrown to the non-striker’s end, Eugene would have been home easily even if James had hit those stumps directly.

Instead, James’s throw somehow managed to hurtle an additional 22 yards past the non-striker’s stumps and directly hit the stumps at the striker’s end, with Charley still running a few yards short of the line. Run out.

It was an incredibly long throw for a direct hit. As James has subsequently agreed, we could set him that throw as a deliberate exercise and he might hit the stumps one time in a couple of hundred attempts.

I am reliably informed that Chas still has nightmares about this dismissal.

Match Of The Day

But even that incredible dismissal was not the most extraordinary thing to occur that evening. In fact, both the score book and contemporaneous match reports are silent on the momentous occurrence.

I mentioned earlier Eugene Kinghorn as Charley’s batting partner during the unfortunate run out incident…the run out described above in some detail…the one that Charley still has nightmares about…

…anyway, Eugene formed another partnership that evening…

…with Fran Birch, one of the Z/Yen players.

By the time we all returned to “the scene of the crime” – three years later we again needed to decamp to Holland Park, those two had got married, Eugene was no longer working for The Children’s Society and he thus ended up playing for Z/Yen.

These are the lengths some Z/Yen folk are prepared to go to in order to strengthen the Z/Yen cricket team.

Joking apart, I really do believe that Eugene and Fran’s initial meeting at one of our silly cricket matches is one of the very most wonderful things to have come out of all of those events.

The 2007 match is Ogblogged here and below:

Z/Yen v The Children’s Society Cricket Match, Holland Park, 26 June 2007

As luck (and a little bit of tactical captaincy on my part) would have it, Eugene and Fran even ended up partnering each other at the crease to knock off the winning runs in the 2007 game. Funny old game, cricket.