Sir Neville Cardus wrote of cricket that, ‘The game itself is a capricious blend of elements, static and dynamic, sensational and somnolent. You can never take your eyes away from a cricket match for fear of missing a crisis. For hours it will proceed to a rhythm as lazy as the rhythm of an airless day. Then … A sudden bad stroke, a good ball, a marvellous catch, and the crowd is awake; a bolt has been hurled into our midst from a clear sky. When cricket burns a dull slow fire it needs only a single swift wind of circumstance to set everything into a blaze that consumes nerves and senses.’

What is true of a particular match applies also to a club’s season. Yes, the Middleton Stoney caps have arrived! They were delivered during yesterday evening’s T20. Their driver, and orderer-in-chief, our Honorary Secretary, had teased us for months with news of their progress. Even last night, he was unavoidably detained and so missed the start of the match. He assured us that the caps were in his car but rushed in to get padded up, as instructed by our Treasurer who was doubling up as scorer. By the time he was ready, one of our umpires, our Fixture Secretary, had completed his stint and conveyed the message that the captain of the day (our Team Secretary, who was on his way to a 50) had demoted the Secretary for being late. So the cap-deliverer drove away again to attend to the matters which had delayed him. Would the caps return? Eventually, they did.

Suddenly, the opposition, our superbly named friends, Far From The MCC, with their modernist fancy numbered shirts and nicknames, were outflanked by a look which one of their number described as ‘Edwardian’. Middleton Stoney’s caps did indeed look like they had been worn in this place for more than a century.

I wasn’t playing yesterday but didn’t want to miss the arrival of the caps. When our side went out to field, I strolled around the boundary, counting the caps. In the photo above, I was focusing on the cap as worn by our cap-master at long leg. By accident, I caught in the background our Treasurer bowling the opposition’s top-scoring batsman. We won by 50 runs and the twilight demanded head-torches more than sun protection but the stars of the night were the caps.

Half a season of whingeing about the delay in the supply of the caps had given way to a sense that all was right in the world. Of course, all is not right. We are approaching the meltdown foreshadowed by Cardus when he wrote, in the same preface to one of his many books on Cricket (as a music critic, he called his preface the ‘prelude’),

‘If everything else in this nation of ours were lost but cricket—her Constitution and the laws of England of Lord Halsbury—it would be possible to reconstruct from the theory and the practice of cricket all the eternal Englishness which has gone to the establishment of that Constitution and the laws aforesaid.’

This appeals to me in my day job as a law professor although legal purists would say that the Constitution is of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and that, within its various legal systems, the ones that apply to Middleton Stoney are of England & Wales. Similarly, cricketing purists would know that what is reduced to ECB is really the England & Wales Cricket Board. Cricketing realists would also point out that, notwithstanding yesterday’s semi-final defeat for India in the World Cup, the game of cricket is nowadays weighted towards Asia rather than English villages.

Nevertheless, Cardus was on to something in the fragile balance between underlying values enduring forever and the fortunes of an individual innings or season changing in an instant. It remains to be seen whether our current form (a hat-trick of victories in our last three games – just saying) and spirit continues to be as capacious as our caps.