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CRICKET, THE PERFECT SPECTATOR SPORT

'TIS THE SEASON | MAY 3rd 2008

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Village cricket is a spectators' delight. No stands, no roaring crowds, no need to understand the rules to join Stephen Hugh-Jones for the most beautiful scene in England, sun high in the sky, birds circling overhead ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

For me, living in the countryside of southern England, the start of May is something special. I don't dance round maypoles or traipse behind trade-union banners. This is the start of the season for village cricket.

At my age, I don't play the game either. But it is the perfect spectator sport, not least because at most village games there is only a handful of spectators. No standing in line to buy a ticket for your seat: no tickets, indeed most often no seats--just turn up with your own folding chairs, or watch from your car parked near the edge of the ground.

No stands, no roaring crowd, no abuse. Instead, if you're lucky, the warm sun of an English spring day (it does happen) at one of the most beautiful scenes in England: a roundish field of close-mown grass, surrounded by beech and oak trees, pasture beyond them to one side, bright winter wheat to the other, and maybe a pair of buzzards circling lazily overhead. That's my favourite ground, a few miles away, and there are many like it.

The whole game will last maybe five afternoon hours, with breaks for drinks and tea. Each side will have a maximum of say 40 or 45 six-ball "overs" to bat--a formula that in recent decades has entered top-level cricket. Addicts of the professionals' usual three-, four- or five-day game denounce this version as a degrading novelty, as if village cricketers hadn't been following it decades before that. But no need to turn up at the start or stay to the finish: unless your loyalties are involved, the game, not its result, is the thing.

No need to understand the rules, the rituals or the finer points of the game either. Baseball can entertain people like me who haven't the faintest idea of its niceties. Cricket can do the same. If it doesn't, take a walk round the ground and chat with the players' partners and kids, the handful of pensioners, their wives and dogs who are probably the only people watching or not watching with you.

Not that the sport on-field is slow. Village cricket is a brisk game, hard-fought, full of incident and far from unskilful. The players, at least in my part of England, are all unpaid, and not a few are in their 40s and 50s. But some of the grander sides will include a county professional on an off-day, and many have a sharp young overseas player--they're allowed one such--eager to make his way in the game, whose means of support are best not examined too closely. And in these days of the car, "village" cricket is increasingly a misnomer: many of the players come from outside the village they play for, and performance standards have risen as a result.

The sad thing, to my mind, is that so few visitors from abroad will ever set eyes on this English scene. It's often mocked, as if village cricket were the quaint and private preserve of the squire, the vicar, former prime minister John Major and genteel people eating cream teas in about 1913. Not so. It's alive and well--far more so than the professionals' county game--and it is truly English.

Find the time, drag yourself away from lumpish Buckingham Palace and the tourist tat of Stratford-on-Avon. Pick a sunny weekend, drive into the country, ask around for a pretty nearby cricket ground, and go see. And, hell, if you don't enjoy it at least your drive will have shown you something of England beyond the raucous (sorry, "vibrant") and often ugly display of its cosmopolitan cities.

(Stephen Hugh-Jones is a former writer and editor for The Economist, where he wrote the Johnson column from 1992-99. He lives now in West Sussex.)