It’s February so get your cushions on


Isn’t it striking how normally cricket fits wheezes, doodads, and surprising varieties? Something really doesn’t add up about our game which slopes its professionals to devise unconventional or unusual approaches to playing it, and unreasonable – frequently awkward – circumstances in which to play it. I’ve generally cherished the story – and unfortunately, research has been not able to uncover the names – of the previous district cricketers who organized a match which started a couple of moments after 12 PM on first January 2000. Their (effective) point was to play the principal cricket apparatus of the new thousand years.

It occurred outside with the improvised wicket lit via vehicle headlights

After only one ball, these were turned off, inciting the umpire to announce awful light halted play – so, all in all everybody returned to the bar. The late Harry Thompson’s Chief Scott CC broadly played a cricket match in Antarctica, and each colder time of year the Ice Cricket World Cup is challenged on Estonia’s frozen Lake Harku. Like grass developing through concrete, cricket unstoppably figures out how to exist even in the most outsider conditions. Not as cold, and nearer to home, but rather famously advantageous, is the yearly February Simpletons good cause cricket match, held at the Bank of Britain sports ground in Roehampton, south west London.

As the name suggests, the game happens – outside – in February, whatever the climate. It started during the 1960s (the exact beginnings are somewhat lost in the fogs of time) because of a bet by the late Bertie Joel, an unbelievable robust of London club cricket, about whether it was either conceivable or bearable to play cricket in the snow. In the fifty or so years from that point forward, February Numb-skulls has without a doubt been arranged in the snow, as well as hail, mist, slush, frigid temperatures, and heavy downpour. Anything the meteorology, the players stay on the field all through.

Nowadays, Blockheads is controlled by Bertie’s girl Mandie Adams McGuire, in help of the David Adams Leukemia Allure Asset, a foundation she laid out in the memory of her eponymous late spouse. Throughout the course of recent years, the Asset has raised more than £1 million to pay for leukemia treatment and offices at London’s Imperial Marsden Emergency clinic – the establishment which had the option to draw out David’s life by two years after his finding with the sickness.

February Blockheads is inexactly challenged between a group of entertainers

A group of telecasters, and I have the honor of captaining the last option in the 2014 match, this Sunday, 23rd February. There are in every case a few eminent names in real life, who over the course of the years have included Peter O’Toole, Chris Tarrant, Robert Powell, Nicholas Parsons, Steve Mangan, Greg James, Jim Carter, Colin Salmon, and Max Rushden from Sky’s Soccer AM. So on the off chance that you’re in south west London this Sunday evening, do come around to investigate.

Yet, while we’re regarding the matter of cricket in odd spots or odd seasons, we’d very much want to hear your own accounts. Where’s the most impossible or unfavorable scene wherein you’ve played a cricket match? When did you observe chances being defeated to get a match on? Furthermore, what was the most obviously awful climate you played through? Our game would be a lot less fortunate without its knick-knacks, so inform us regarding yours.


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