The men behind the men

The cream of the cricketing crop was put to the polish at Florida a few weekends ago and as the husk settled, a rather unexpected hybrid strain has emerged as the most resilient one. Now that crop must be honed and separated in the lab that will be the selection camp later this month, a necessary step before the forthcoming export to Eastern pastures. There seems to have been a conscious effort, this time, to keep middle-aged men from the middle. “Forty-plus” might be a good batting average, but makes for a rather uninspiring team aver-age.

Some would say that better sense has prevailed. Others would say “better sense better prevail”. Better sense prevails more often than not at ground levels of US cricket.

In the land of the Prairies, everything short of the nationals is grassroots cricket; some of that grass grows into bamboo or sugar cane. Such grass also lends umpires like me the occasional high of officiating in a match that involves Cameron Cuffy, Jermaine Lawson and Adam Stanford. But understandably, a lot of the organisational responsibilities in such a set-up fall upon the clubs themselves. Who is to organise the grounds? Who buys the balls? Who goes to the league meetings? Who buys lunch during match days? “Don’t look at me!”

In most cases, it is the person who even thought of these questions that gets laden with the chores contained within. The allure of being selected in the playing XI moves others into “gettin’ it done”. And then there are the guys who at first seem like masochists, but when you look beyond the sweat and blood, you find they are just irrational lovers of the sport. They just want to have some cricket played on their watch. These are the men that run US cricket.

One such man, I recently learned, had been paying the permit fee for a couple of grounds in New Jersey without expecting to be reimbursed for it. It could be infuriating to many that several teams – only one of which is his own – that play there didn’t even wonder how the grounds became available for them to play on, let alone offering to repay him. The amount adds up to around US$1000 every year. This side or that, a lot of grass is green, after all. Another has no child of cricket-playing age and yet spends hours on end working on setting up a youth league in the same state. These efforts may or may not lead to anything that can be traced back to them a while from now. In a world where faculties are firmly set on an outcome and growth begets growth for the sake of growth, such unconditional devotion to the path and the journey is as rare as comforting.

Every club here has at least one individual in this vein; the men behind the men. Conflicts are resolved by them, solutions found, mats laid, umpires and opponents coaxed to overlook the gross indiscretions and unreasonableness of their team-mates. Their laser focus on just getting a cricket match started and played to fruition is the invisible force of a soft yet steadily flowing Colorado that cuts a canyon of cricketing activity in the US landscape. They might or might not get to play in those very matches that they help get going. To say they are unsung heroes would be an insult to the art of singing because they are seldom even spoken of. Cricket is not alien to thankless jobs. Tell me about it – I was a wicketkeeper when I played and now, well, now I am an umpire. Our sport has its way of introducing the nascent self-destroyer in many of us to the pleasure-seeker. Some of us are suckers for that.