When I was at school, cricket-lovers talked about the rarity of a batsman scoring 1,000 runs in first class cricket in May or (to include early games in April) before the end of May. It has only happened nine times in history and only twice in my lifetime. Only one person, Don Bradman, has done it twice. Although he was generally thought to be a ruthless captain, Bradman’s generosity was needed for an opposition player, Bill Edrich, to complete his 1,000 runs in the second of those years, 1938. Not that Australia gave away runs in the field or with their bowling but they declared at the end of a rain-affected match against Middlesex to give him a sporting chance in the last few minutes of cricket in May, which Edrich took.

For some reason, this has stuck with me. It is not that I have ever had any chance of scoring 1,000 runs at any level of cricket in my whole life, let alone in one month. But I like the idea of marking the first full month of the season in some way. I had thought, when I became captain of Middleton Stoney Cricket Club in 2016 that a 100% record of victories would be good but we lost the first game, in April. So the next target was to be unbeaten in May but we lost the last game of that month.

Still, from school to college to friendly club cricket, I have always believed that the captain should encourage fellow players by putting the best possible gloss on both the team’s record and its targets for the season. You aim for 100% and if that becomes impossible, you aim to be unbeaten. If you lose on a Sunday, you try to win all your Wednesday T20 games. If you lose at home, you try to win every game away. We have no away fixtures this year, and rarely more than two or three away in any year, so that ruse does not work too well here, but you get the idea.

In 2017, 2018 and now in 2019, we have been unbeaten in May and, indeed, unbeaten before the end of May. Our record this year has been draw, win, win, draw, draw and win. I think we could legitimately call all three of the games we did not win ‘winning draws’. (But then we always think that.)

Of course, there is a huge difference between an individual professional batsman scoring 1000 runs before the end of May and a team being unbeaten at the end of May. Those batsmen, W G Grace in 1895, Tom Hayward in 1900, Wally Hammond in 1927, Charlie Hallows in 1928, Don Bradman in 1930 and 1938, Bill Edrich in 1938, Glenn Turner in 1972, Graeme Hick in 1988, and all the batsmen who nearly made it, had many factors working against them. For example, bad weather made their task much more difficult whereas bad weather would make a club remaining unbeaten much easier as games might be abandoned. The first class fixture list has been truncated in May in recent decades to accommodate one day cricket whereas clubs choose our fixture lists and could make it easier by finding less challenging opposition (although that is not the Middleton Stoney way).

Actually, in 2016, 2017 and 2018, we had an early season President’s Day game involving two teams selected from our club, with names such as Middleton Stoney Villagers v Rest of the World (dividing the teams between those who actually live within a few hundred yards of the ground and those who come from neighbouring places, some as far away as Chesterton and Wendlebury) with a victory for either side counting as a win for the club. So this 2019 achievement is the real deal: six games against other clubs with two being new fixtures, one won, one drawn, and the four matches against sides we have played before yielding two wins and two draws. Unfortunately, we have been known to lose a succession of games in June but there is no equivalent phrase.

So, at a time when ‘the end of May’ features in news headlines reporting on the fate of the Prime Minister, we have reached this first landmark of the cricket season in good heart. The spirit of the game yesterday is conveyed by some of the reaction on Twitter, where Old Leightonians had been playing mind games, as ever, while our match report, when it comes, will reflect the joy of previous year’s matches between these two clubs.

https://twitter.com/MiddStonCric/status/1132739292340588549

http://www.middletonstoneycc.co.uk/club-news/2017/mscc-vs-old-leightonians-2017/

http://www.middletonstoneycc.co.uk/club-news/2018/mscc-v-old-leightonians-2018/

By the time of the second bank holiday in May, having some kind of record also adds to the elation of the club. And even if we had failed to remain unbeaten by the end of May, we would soon have found some other way in which it could plausibly be our best ever start or middle or end to the season.

For example, Nick Moorman scored a century in our first game of this season and his son, Joe, on finishing his university exams, scored a century for us yesterday in his first game of the season. That must be some kind of record, mustn’t it?

Of course, it would have been delightful if Peter May, P B H May, England captain, had scored a thousand runs in May but I do not want to leave the impression that the month of May is all about the batsmen. The real spirit of cricket is that there are always a thousand stories before the end of May, at least in our club and in the way our opponents yesterday also play the game.

My own favourite May encounter with Old Leightonians, in 2016, was missed by our match reporter and in their score-book, although the evidence lives on through our score-book, the memories of those involved and my email to the then chief executive of the MCC. We had first met when Derek Brewer was chief executive at Nottinghamshire and was looking to develop Trent Bridge, as it was the idea of Stewart Regan, then chief executive of Yorkshire CCC and myself, as vice-chancellor of Leeds Metropolitan University, to build the Carnegie Pavilion at Headingley in a partnership – a pavilion of distinction for county and Test matches, designed by Will Alsop, and a campus for our students throughout the rest of the year.

Fast forward a decade and I was invited back to a one day international there and was sitting next to Derek Brewer, who was by then running the MCC, at lunch. The discussion was about the spirit of cricket, so I explained that I was in my first few weeks as captain of a club which had its own statement of the club ethos on its fixture card. Did I have one on me? Of course I did. Derek Brewer took it off me, read the ten principles of Middleton Stoney cricket and then started looking at the fixtures. He said that he was one of the founders of the team we were playing the following Sunday, Old Leightonians, together with Andrew Moss who he was sure would still be playing. He said to pass on his best wishes. For other reasons, I said I would write to him after that game. This is the relevant part of that email:

‘In other news, Old Leightonians won the toss yesterday and put us into bat. I declared a couple of minutes ahead of the scheduled tea, so that I didn’t have to go out as number 11, at 218 for 9.

I then deployed ten bowlers cunningly so that Old Leightonians were all out for 83, with 4 of the last 20 overs remaining. Most importantly, our scorebook shows these two lines:

Andrew Moss bowled Simon Lee 1

S Lee 1 over, 1 maiden, 1 wicket for 0 runs.

This crucial encounter was missed by the Old Leightonian scorebook which could not keep up with the subtle changes of bowlers but Andrew will confirm.

Before all that, I passed on your regards and therefore heard great things about your bowling records and captaincy. What a great club!’