As it is The Invalids’ centenary season, our match yesterday was an all-day game and celebration of cricket. The Invalids were formed at the end of the First World War to give seriously injured soldiers opportunities to play cricket. They are immortalised in A G Macdonell’s description of a village cricket match in England, Their England.

An 11.30 start meant that I had to find a church in Oxford with an early morning Mass so as to be ready for the beginning of play. It was the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, not perhaps the most exciting of days in the church’s calendar but the appointed Gospel spoke to both clubs in this game. For a start, Luke chapter 14, verse 1, is talking about eating on the sabbath. We had a delicious lunch prepared by club vice-captain Tim House (I’m now talking Middleton Stoney CC, this bit isn’t in Luke’s Gospel), tea by Paul Wordsworth and our annual chicken barbecue by Jay Mumtaz and Mike Simpson.

Then we are advised on joining a cricket club (well, a marriage feast in the Gospel) not to volunteer for one of the higher places (although the photo above is of our three leading run-scorers this season who were, looking at the picture from left to right, deservedly batting 1, 3 & 2 yesterday, namely Tim House, Tim Riley & Mark Ford-Langstaff, who scored 26, 80 & 32) but to offer to bat at number 11, for then the people running the club might come to you and say, ‘Friend, go up higher’.

That may have been Jesus’s experience (and at our Christmas carol service last year I read my account of Jesus’s life if he had been born in Middleton Stoney in our millennium rather than in the Middle East two thousand years ago, ‘Joseph & Son, Bat-Makers’) but I have to say that such a call is a long time coming in our club. I am still at number 11 although yesterday I did get a rare chance to bat. My leg glance for 4 was even implausibly deemed, by the rest of our team, as the champagne moment of the match. When we reached 201 for 9, I had the equally unlikely experience of declaring while at the crease. Later, Simon Pettit took 5 for 50 and George Williams 4 for 45 as we bowled them out for 144 but they had been on 121-3 with 18 overs to go.

It is the next part of the Gospel, however, which spoke to The Invalids in their centenary year. Jesus said, ‘When you set up a cricket club (well, it’s ‘When you give a dinner or a banquet’ in a more literal translation), do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbours … But {when you create a club}, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot (repay you, in the original) play without you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.’ God bless our friends, The Invalids, who graced Middleton Park yesterday and who should ‘go up higher’ as their beautiful thought one hundred years ago of an inclusive team in the aftermath of war means they deserve their place in cricketing Heaven.