Sloggers and Bloggers

During the 1980s and early 1990s I played cricket for a wandering team from south London. We were called Totterdown CC and took our name from a road in Tooting where the club's inaugural meeting was held some time way back in the early 1920s.

We weren't very good.

I first played for Totterdown when I was thirteen: that day the oldest member of the team was 72. An age spread of nearly sixty years would correctly suggest we weren't the greatest team in the world, but still, nearly all my teenage summer Sundays were spent playing cricket around south London and Surrey thanks to a fixture list comprising insurance companies with beautifully-appointed grounds and village greens spattered with dogshit and broken glass.

Totterdown CC doesn't seem to exist any more. I'm sad about that but not really surprised. With no ground - and hence no return match to offer - filling that fixture list was hard even back then. The driving force behind the club was Len, the secretary, who would somehow persuade teams who played a good standard of cricket in their Saturday leagues to accommodate us, an itinerant bunch of chancers in a startlingly idiosyncratic array of kit, on a Sunday.

Len was pushing eighty yet still pulling off miracles every weekend in just getting a team out. The Tuesday phonecall asking, "are you available to play on Sunday, if selected?" was a summer ritual as important as the matches themselves. The "if selected" was the killer, as if we had an enormous pool of talent fighting for a place when most weeks just getting eleven players capable of standing upright and gathering in the same postcode was an achievement.

I can't remember Len ever missing a game except on one occasion - the weekend after his wife died, and even then the phone rang as usual on the Tuesday night with a familiar voice asking, "are you available to play on Sunday, if selected?"

Len had been with the club for more than half a century and as I'd see him shuffling slowly around the boundary to impart some nugget of advice to the next batsman, who'd be sitting nervously on a picnic chair in his pads and smoking furiously, I used to picture him as a young man in immaculate flannels and brylcreemed hair zipping around the same boundary to stop the extra run and keep the new batsman on strike while dark clouds gathered over Europe and war drew near.

Len was Totterdown CC, and when he died I presume the club died with him.

In The Totterdown Chronicles the old club name at least will live on in some form. The inevitably chaotic, unreliable and barely competent nature of the site will also echo the spirit of the team to which I devoted most of my formative summers; summers that could otherwise have been spent reading improving literature, doing charity work or, you know, trying to get a girlfriend or something.

With no Totterdown CC any more this is my cricketing outlet. Like my own cricket career it may score higher in enthusiasm than technique, but if it's over quickly we can always have a beer match afterwards to kill the time until they open.