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Part 2 – Cricket, Swedish style

Guttsta ChroniclesPosted by Joseph Tuesday, March 20 2007 00:03:43

THE GUTTSTA CHRONICLES

By Paul Eade

Part 2 – Cricket, Swedish style

If you’re coming from a cricketing country to play cricket in Sweden, rule one is: ditch all your previous assumptions about cricket. I’ve had prospective Guttsta members call me up and start asking questions like: “How does your pitch play? Does it take spin? Do you have a first and second XI?” Well, mate, cricket in Sweden just isn’t like that. For starters, there’s maybe around 200 cricket players in the whole country. Guttsta has the only fully-equipped cricket ground in Sweden. You can’t just go down the local nets and have a practice, roll up to the local ground at 1pm on Saturday and be in the pub by six o’clock. Players are hard to find, equipment all has to be imported, and much more besides.

But when it came to making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, Jason was your man. He had a knack of making Guttsta Cricket Club work, even if there were just two of us at training; an occurrence not unknown. Jason had somehow discovered a disused cement tennis court by a park in outer Stockholm, complete with fence surround but without nets and posts – perfect for an outdoor training venue (Guttsta is two hours away from the capital but we have a number of Stockholm-based players).

Remember what I said about forgetting any home-grown assumptions? Guttsta draws on its players from an area covering hundreds, thousands even, of square kilometres. Making a game happen at Guttsta is an achievement in itself, taking weeks of planning and preparation, plus, ideally, a commitment to stay over there for the weekend. Throw in the shortness of the Swedish summer, with the added obstacle that almost everybody goes away for four weeks of holiday in July, and you’re looking at getting maybe a maximum of five “real” games played over the course of a season.

Faced with this, Jason played a trump card. He made training into an event, and a match to boot. But he then dared to take this a leap further. Not only was a scoring record kept of these “matches” but they were then entered into an internet cricket database, www.resultsvault.com. In this database, players’ individual scores contributed to the annual competition to be Club Champion, their personal averages and career records were on the internet, plus the chance to gain points for our very own fantasy league, with a decent cash prize. So what would have otherwise been four people knocking about on an old tennis court was transformed into a competitive game broadcast to the world!

To give everyone a fair chance for a bat and a bowl, Jason used what he called “Tippety Run”, with five runs deducted from the batsman’s total for every dismissal, “six and out” if you hit the ball out of the court and players facing their team-mates’ bowling. The same basic format, with various modifications down the years (for example we had a few problems with some players repeatedly smashing the ball out of the court for six and out, gifting bowlers with bowling figures like 8-23 including a double hat-trick) is still being used today. The first outdoor training session of 2003 – my second Guttsta experience after the indoor training session – was the first Guttsta training match to be recorded on the internet, and the unusual scorecard looks like this:

http://cricket.resultsvault.com/cricket/reports/match.asp?locx=MATCH&matchID=50943

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Part 1 – 2003: Back to the Future

Guttsta ChroniclesPosted by Joseph Monday, March 19 2007 23:58:47

THE GUTTSTA CHRONICLES

By Paul Eade

Part 1 – 2003: Back to the Future

The Swedish winter can take its toll on all but the desensitized. Thoughts easily turn to summer, the past – well, you name it. During just another, yet another, winter night my mind turned to … cricket.

Cricket was the one sport at which I had, albeit briefly, been at least a little bit good at. Four wickets for 10 runs on my school debut at North Marine Road, Scarborough – the only first class ground I have played on. Summoned to the front and congratulated in school assembly the following day, I publicly vowed to play for England. Things did not quite go that far: I did play, though for the team of a local plastics firm, Duraweld, and my sixth form college 2nd XI. Oh yes, and one confidence-shattering appearance in an indoor cricket game for Oriel CC, where I was way out of my age and my depth. I scored 0, fielded badly and was never asked back. You bastards.

As various distractions multiplied, so my cricket career waned. A couple of outings as a makeweight for the Russian department at Sheffield University, where despite a one-handed boundary stop that helped us win a game and for I received much welcomed hearty congratulations, a second ball duck was my only contribution with either bat or ball. And in the early 1990s, a disastrous attempt at a comeback for some tin pot side from south-west London who were several players short, floundering around in the field and being shouted at. Cricket is not a game you can drop and just pick up again years later.

Yet I was about to do just that. Fast forward to January 2003 and I’d stumbled across the web site of Guttsta Wicked Cricket Club of Sweden. I was impressed, tempted and daunted. Thoughts of the captain’s expression as the ball went through my legs on that rutted London field came back to me. But as I read on, my fears diminished. Guttsta, it said, welcomed all abilities and ages, even Swedish newcomers to the game.

So it was that a few weeks later I found myself trudging through the snow to a sports hall somewhere in nowhere. My first Guttsta introductions were to Jason, an ultra-enthusiastic and encouraging Aussie; Hasse, a dignified-looking Swedish gent, who, it soon transpired, certainly knew how to hold a cricket bat, and Mangala, an ever-cheerful Sri Lankan, who could, as the saying goes, bowl a bit. The fourth Guttsta member that day was a bowling machine, something which I was comforted to learn we would be using, as when we warmed up, I did wonder about the consequences if one of Mangala’s deliveries came in the direction of my head.

I found that I could at least still bowl somewhere near the wickets (but more of that later) but the evening concentrated on taking turns to bat against the bowling machine. “Not too fast” was my request for its setting. My three soon-to-be team-mates verbally fed my confidence and, to my pleasant surprise, I found I could at least get bat on ball. Or in other words, I was hooked. Twenty-eight years after my avowal in school assembly, my cricket career had just kick-started in a suburb of Stockholm, with consequences I could never have imagined…

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World Cup 2007

World CupPosted by Joseph Thursday, March 15 2007 23:05:11

Hej allihoppa,

Det blir mycket World Cup cricket innan kick off på 5 maj 2007.

Joseph

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