Summer vacation has started…rewinding back 15-16 years.. summer vacations meant cricket in the morning, cricket in the afternoon and cricket in the evening
The morning cricket used to be home and away matches with neighborhood suburban teams – made up of school going kids similar to us.
Cricket used to be played with rubber balls – white color Montex balls – (tennis balls were generally used in flood light “tournaments”).
Typical matches would be played like this:
Any player of team A would find out a team B who is willing to play on so-and-so date/time- and a schedule would be fixed.
Both teams buy the Montex balls (typically 2-3 would be needed) to be used in the match. Batting team will provide balls to the bowling team – so any balls that got busted by power hitting were to be replaced by the batting team itself. The match getting paused since the ball has busted, and someone from the batting team has gone out to the nearest shop to get a new ball was a common occurrence. Matches would be 12, 14 or 16 overs a side.
The match used for be not just for bragging rights, but for played for a 21 Rs or 51 Rs “prize” – each player would contribute 2-5 Rs to buy the balls and come up with the 21/51 figure.
Umpires were always from the batting side, and rules were like this
• Umpires used 6 pebbles to keep a count of no. of balls bowled – a pebble transferred from 1 fist to another means a ball bowled.
• Keeper/umpire didn’t switch sides, the keeper/batsman position is fixed. Hence the square leg and the main umpire don’t switch positions after each over
• No runs given for wide balls - too much judgmental decisions could skew the score since the batting team provided the umpires
• If playing on a smaller ground on “away” matches – our ‘home’ ground was a full size ground.. runs behind the keeper or runs on the off-side were called as 1-D or 2-D – meaning, if the ball goes in that side of the field 1 run or 2 runs were “declared” given the ground size constraints
• Paper score cards were used – stats of batsmen were maintained, and scoring was typically done either by the score leg umpire or one of the players who always sat besides the square leg umpire. A typical score card would have the main score, count of overs, and individual batsman scores. The main score would be tracked like this:
1 - - - 5 - - - -10 - - - - 15 and so on…each – or number would be marked with a backslash to mark it as a run scored
• Scores were shouted aloud at the end of each over so that the bowling/batting team could be on the same page – bumping up your score by 3-4 runs (under the noses of the opposition team) during the course of the match was an art
• Finding the right Montex ball (predicting its life, and good bounce) was an art, and such experts were typically sent to buy the balls
