In the list of cricket captaincy challenges never faced by Mike Brearley for England, the timing of the annual village barbecue to coincide with the annual visit of the Blue Lion touring side from Yorkshire must rank near the top.

In such circumstances, no cricket innocents beyond the boundary are safe. When a big 6 is on its way and those with greater awareness shout ‘watch out’, the first instinct of panic-stricken barbecue-attenders tends to be to protect at all costs their food and, above all, their drink rather than, say, themselves or others in their vicinity.

There is also ample opportunity for embarrassment on the field of play. The official match report by Mark Ford-Langstaff

http://www.middletonstoneycc.co.uk/club-news/2019/mscc-vs-blue-lion-2019/

creates the impression that nobody can remember when, if ever, we have won this game. I know that we beat them in 2014. I wasn’t the club captain then but did happen to be leading the side on the day. Just saying. We won that year by nine wickets.

This led to them coming back with an even stronger side in 2015 and thrashing us by ten or eight wickets, depending on how you count. David Cole, our club captain in that era, was in charge that day (again, just saying) and made a witty speech to the effect that we were still one wicket up, taking the two games together, given that their openers retired when they had scored 50s, which technically should be recorded as retired out.

Anyway, Blue Lion will return in force for their 25th annual Oxfordshire tour in 2020 because we beat them yesterday by 74 runs! This is despite my decision that we should bat first, unmoved by claims that ‘we can’t bowl sides out’. (By now, you will realise that what people actually say is, ‘Up to you, skip, but we can’t bowl sides out’.) When team-mates repeat this mantra, which is pretty much before every game, I take it personally as more of a bowler-captain than a batsman-captain. Batsmen never whinge that ‘we can’t chase a big score’.

We have now won 5 games this season, as many as in the whole of last season. We have bowled out sides to win, bowled them out on the way to winning, and bowled them out just for fun. We also, admittedly, have let teams get away with playing for a draw when we should have bowled them out. And when I say bowled, no LBWs were given yesterday. Our bowlers hit the stumps four times, including with the last two balls of the game, and we held six catches. Our fielding was as good as I have seen all season.

It was an exhilarating day’s cricket. More than that, it was a day on which various spectators used the word ‘quintessentially’, which seems a Mike Brearley kind of a word. He wrote, for instance, of Ian Chappell that his approach was ‘quintessentially Australian – never walk but never show dissent, either’. I don’t believe that there is such a quintessence to the Australian or English or Middleton Stoney or Blue Lion attitude. For example, Blue Lion’s number three got the faintest edge but walked immediately, whereas their number eight was comprehensively caught and bowled but just stood there defiantly.

Yesterday’s commentators were not talking about such issues as walking or dissenting, however, as what they meant was that the event as a whole was ‘quintessentially England’, as some put it, and ‘quintessentially English’, according to others. In an idyllic setting, and lovely weather, with one in three of a village of 300 people sitting around the boundary, a touring side came out wearing their tour caps and very much looking the part. They all bowled well and our batsmen had to earn every run. Then, after tea, we bowled and fielded to the best of our abilities, winning with four overs to spare, by which time the second barbecue of the day was ready for the third meal in six hours. No quarter was given in the match. No LBW was given, either. Nor any caps to the home team (although they are on order; it remains a mystery why Blue Lion had red caps and exactly what colour our caps are going to be).

The scoreboard kept pace with the state of the game in recording runs and, in the last hour, the number of remaining overs. When the scorebox fell behind on wickets, I jogged off the pitch between overs to put that right personally. Again, you won’t find that example in the Mike Brearley guide to Test match captaincy but, if we are in the field, I like the batsmen, our own team and all spectators to know how many wickets down the opposition are.

There were some other little contributions I made as captain, for instance a series of bowling changes to keep the batsmen guessing and some subtle changes of field-placing, not all of which were ignored by our fielders. I also made a crucial difference by not bowling, or indeed batting, myself, by taking a regulation catch and by winning the toss.

It was the opposition captain, however, who made the biggest contribution to the game. In extreme conditions, the designated pitch had been subjected to intense rain and sun since it had been prepared and that was a day earlier than usual because the honorary ground team were away this weekend. So it was rather green and the grass was rather long. The Blue Lion skipper asked if we could play instead on the pitch we had used for our T20 last Wednesday, which is what we did. We gave him our champagne moment award for this boldness as we don’t (yet) have an ‘Up to you, skip’-‘No, up to you, skip’ award to capture the spirit of that conversation. On the greener pitch, the match might have been over sooner, on a day which deserved a full afternoon’s cricket.

None of this, though, gets to the quintessence of cricket in our part of England which, I imagine, is much the same as its quintessence in other parts of the world. Without the usual volunteers being around, others stepped up to open up the pavilion and ground, to run the bar and host the village. In particular, our club chairman, Peter Van de Kerkhof, was everywhere, doing everything, first and last there, behind the bar, behind the tea, welcoming all-comers.

We only raised a team at all because of a fabulous response to my increasingly desperate email pleas as injuries and other commitments began to take their toll on our original XI. Our club vice-captain, Tim House, was not really available to play but adjusted his weekend when he realised how much we needed him. He opened the batting and scored yet another fifty against some first class bowling. Award-winning young players Danny Clark and George Williams, fresh from university and school exams respectively, offered to step in to the side. And my regular weekly email to club members on Friday was still conveying sufficient doubts about our ability to field an XI for one of our vice-presidents, Richard Lumb, to reply immediately saying his son, Jamie, a wicketkeeper-batsman, would be back from uni and would be happy to help us out. All three of these students played brilliantly, as did those few players who survived from the original team list through to the match itself.

It was quite disconcerting for some of the players to perform in front of such a large crowd, whether they (the crowd, or perhaps, in some cases, the players) were looking in the right direction or not. It was also surprising to some of these players that spectators wanted to know about them: which school, which university, why are you going there for the rest of the summer, what job are you doing here during your vacation, you could obviously play at a higher level so what do you like about playing for Middleton Stoney?

As we pointed out in a club tweet, there was a special spectator there yesterday:

Mrs Diana Curzon is 105 not out. She is in the wheelchair in the photo above. I have tried asking the equivalent questions of her in her twenties but she believes in keeping her own counsel about her time at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, when she was working in the same hut as the genius Alan Turing. The codebreakers were the quintessence of Britishness in wartime.

In peacetime, from England to India (to take just two of the other teams who were playing cricket yesterday), the spirit of cricket has some claim to touching the essence of character and community. It is something to do with succeeding against the odds in a shared endeavour. The quintessence (the hidden fifth element to go with fire, air, earth and water) is this sense that anyone or anything could have ruined the day but that, instead, thousands of little positive touches combined to make our day and our season. From ancient times, people appreciated that there was more to life than the known elements. The quintessence of cricket is something special, radiating energy and giving us a glimpse of the sublime, on both sides of the boundary.