A day that slipped through our fingers

It was the weekend cricket’s corner of social media lost its mind over a finger. Up in North Yorkshire, a Saltburn CC slip fielder had allegedly clicked his fingers to manufacture the one sound this game takes entirely on trust, sold the umpire an edge that never happened, and woken up famous as “Clicky Ponting”. Down at Barnes Elms, Salix were occupied with fingers of their own that weekend: minus the cunning, plus a good deal of swelling.

Quokkas won the toss, took one look at a firm, straw-coloured outfield, and batted. It proved an inspired call. Salix had turned up having forgotten how to catch.

The match was lost in the field, and it is only fair to be honest about how. Quokkas had two batsmen who liked the look of the day, and Salix put both down early and then, once they were set, put them down regularly. Eight catches went to ground in all, two of them sitters that stick ninety-nine times in a hundred. Both reprieved men helped themselves to half-centuries and kept going, to 78 and 69. A total that should have been strangled in its cot swelled to 262 for 7. Somewhere, a nomination form is already being filled in for this year’s Lurpak Award, presented each year to the club’s clumsiest fielder. On this showing, entries may already be closed.

There was one exception to the general butterfingering, and it wore the big gloves. Adam Darling kept wicket for half the innings, swapping the duty with Richard Cox each time the other took the ball, and the only two chances Salix clung on to all day were the pair Adam pouched standing up behind the stumps. The lesson was hard to miss: hand this team a pair of oven gloves and, now and then, it can be trusted not to drop the dinner. Irwin Sarif offered a better lesson still, without needing any gloves at all. The oldest man on the field by some distance, he fielded every ball that came to him with his hands, the proper way, while players young enough to be his grandchildren tried their luck with their feet. Salix cricket could use more of the standard Irwin sets.

The bowling deserved friendlier fielders. Deepak Winston eventually bowled the man on 78, putting a lid on the carnage. The find of the first innings for Salix, though, wore a debut cap. Thirumegan Yogarajah, playing his first game in Salix colours, bowled as though he had already read his own scouting report. Mega, as the captain had been calling him since the day he signed him, made the nickname look like an undersell: he removed the other of the two big men, had a third plumb in front for a duck, and finished with 3 for 40, including the only maiden anyone managed all innings. Richie and Achintha Mendis claimed a wicket apiece, both of them snapped up in those magic mittens. So did the captain.

Your correspondent’s dubious contribution came later, and against medical advice that predated the first ball. A troublesome back had very nearly ruled me out of the fixture altogether. But I did turn out, with clear rules of engagement: no bowling, whatever the state of the attack, with batting to follow when needed. Fielding, however, is never really optional. The side was short of numbers, as it usually is on most Sundays this season, and eleven bodies were needed regardless of what any of them could still safely do. It was in that borrowed capacity, well into the afternoon with both set batsmen in full flow, that a lusty blow accelerated towards cow corner. A gentle jog would have conceded the boundary clean, the ball long gone before arrival. The sprint that followed, the sort the back had expressly forbidden, at least made a contest of it. This is not the first of your correspondent’s poppadom fingers to give way chasing one, and honestly, it will not be the last. Contact came flush on the little finger; your correspondent got up, said nothing, and walked off with blood already working its way out from under the nail. “Catches win matches” is the oldest line in the village game, and it has seldom come with a doctor’s note attached.

Consolation, when it came, wore new caps. All three of Salix’s debutants were signings of Saineethan Balasubramaniam, the club’s head of talent acquisition and, for the afternoon, its captain. Sai has a fine eye for a cricketer and, it turns out, a generous heart: three personal hires, onboarded just in time to watch the rest of the department misplace the ball all afternoon.

The reply began beneath a small cloud of history. Salix’s lowest total in 503 games is 40, made against Regals back in 2017. It is the one figure nobody at the club will say aloud. Set 263 to win, that grim little entry stopped looking like the past and started looking like a forecast. Wickets went early and kept going. Four were down for 31, and in a collapse of that shape, nine runs is no distance at all from infamy.

Sai’s wicket, the sixth, left the total on 52, safely if quietly clear of 40 by then, though nobody stopped to raise a glass with the innings still folding around them. By the twelfth over the board read 63 for 7. The fear in the camp had changed shape entirely. The record, at least, was safe. What was not safe was the prospect of being bowled out for not many at all, and out on the boundary Sai had simply swapped one dread for another.

Cricketers being cricketers, the dread needed a spreadsheet. A sweepstake went down the bench on the final total. Your correspondent, hope triumphing over evidence, went for 85. The next man said 120. The one after that, blessed with the serenity of someone eager to bat again, called 140.

What rescued the innings, and a good deal of dignity, was a second debutant finding his feet. Shelvin Chand, the second of Sai’s new men and Shelly before he had reached the crease, put himself alongside Mega in the conversation for man of the match for Salix: a stubborn 22, comfortably the top score, that turned a possible rout into a merely heavy defeat. He was matched to the run by Extras, forever the most reliable name on any village cricket scorecard. Irwin added a handy nine at the far end. Inch by unlovely inch the total reached 99, and your correspondent, alone in the sweepstake, briefly resembled a man who should be charging consultancy rates for his forecasts. Nobody else had come within fourteen.

With your correspondent already off the field and unable to bat, Sham Ruparelia padded up a second time to fill the gap, and was bowled for 1. He had departed for the same score earlier in the innings. Consistency of that calibre deserves its own line in the averages.

Salix lost by 163, a margin that flattered nobody and shocked no one who had watched the fielding. And yet the day delivered two quiet victories, each of them a near miss with infamy. The 40 stood unthreatened. So, as it happened, did the club’s other unwanted record. Tony Fletcher, the club’s founder and long known as Herr Direktor, was asked whether the fielding had set a new low. He answered like a man who keeps such things filed. A previous game, he recalled, had produced thirteen catch-and-drop events. Ours had fallen short even of disgrace. This year’s Lurpak Award, it seems, will have to go to somebody who spreads it more thinly. Small mercies. Bank them.

The captain’s message landed on the group chat that night, far kinder than the scoreboard. “Unlucky boys, good effort today, but ultimately it was our catching that really let us down.” No argument here. He saluted Mega’s three wickets and Shelly’s 22, and rightly so, with a word too for Krishna Thayaparan, the third debutant, who made a modest start and then promptly left the country: a summer of work in India beckons, so this may be his only outing in Salix colours before next year. He reads physics at Jesus College, Cambridge, exactly the sort of talent this club is always short of. Worth the wait.

Then the Red Lion, a round or three lifted in slightly tender hands, and a corner of the internet still arguing about a slip fielder in Saltburn. Next Sunday cannot come soon enough. Fingers will be crossed for a better one, though not, for a few weeks yet, your correspondent’s. The hand trauma clinic at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital will see him again this week: a fourth visit, and they know him by name.