Fifteen Seconds of Sporting Fame

One of the Message Boards I post on has the thread “Sporting Claims To Fame”. Yesterday I posted the following:

Do you remember as kids, you would selected two teams to play cricket, there were always two kids left at the end: one with a physical disability, the other who couldn’t bat, bowl, run, catch or even stop a ball. The later was me. I suffered from the Sporting equivalent of dyslexia.

Well by pure chance I arranged a game of cricket with another gang of boys. There was a big debate, whether I should be included in the team. Some of the boys said yes because I had arranged the game, the others said no way. In the end I was allowed to play, not because I had arranged the game, but because the only alternative was a girl!

Our gang batted first; as usual I was bowled out first ball.

The captain knew I couldn’t catch or field, so it was pointless telling me where to field. Rather I was allowed to wander around day dreaming.

It came to the last two batsmen in with one run to get. The ball was hit hard to square leg. I still can hear the silence and incredulity as the fielders looked expecting to see the ball fly over the boundary. But there was no sign of the ball. All eyes passed back over the projected trajectory of the ball, until they saw me standing there with the ball stuck in my outstretched hand. As if in slow motion their faces changed from disappointment to elation as they realised I had caught the ball. The silence was broken by my “how’s that?“.

You would think that that would have been the start of a great cricketing career. But it wasn’t. Everybody knew it was a fluke, and I was never picked again. So I retired at the peak of my, albeit short, cricketing career.