Remembering the days of the backyard battles

In my days growing up, we had no iPads, X-Box 360s, Playstation 3s, mobile phones or the Internet to entertain us. Just as long as a couple of mates and I had a cricket bat, ball, and two sets of stumps – be it a bin, chair, whatever – we could be entertained for not only hours, but days on end in the backyard.

Plenty of Stanhope lads graced my backyard over the years for a game of cricket – my 10th, 13th and even 21st birthday on a Sunday afternoon involved a stoush in the backyard – but my two great rivals growing up were Azza and Willy. They are my two best mates, but when the annual Stanhope Backyard Cricket Association season got under way in mid-December once school finished, friendships were put aside, and on a few occasions almost ended, as we went into battle. 

Our preferred format of backyard cricket was to play one-on-one 50-over-a-side matches as we replicated the popular one-day internationals of the ’90s. We would set the date for a game and for a week leading up to a match I would put my curating skills to the test by preparing a top-notch backyard wicket. When I say curating, well, it was simply a case of setting the lawn mower blades as low as possible and mowing a strip about two metres wide, while also giving the pitch a nightly water to ensure the deck had a bit in it for the quicks. The fences formed the side boundaries, but because of our backyard set-up, I needed to create a straight boundary, so for that I used seats and benches to help build a stadium-feel at the WCG – West Cricket Ground. Unfortunately, the seats were rarely occupied – my two younger sisters, Melissa and Rebecca, were never quite prepared to shell out the 20c admission price to watch these titanic backyard struggles. 

I would adorn the fences with A4 paper sponsor signs that I had created, and for one particular match devised a scoreboard, but we soon grew tired of updating it after each over and resorted back to the batsmen keeping his own score, which often resulted in many of the confrontations as the batter always had a tendency to add a few extra runs on to his tally. 

Before a game – which would always begin at the traditional day-night start time of 2.20pm and with the time-honoured backyard flip of the bat, rather than a coin toss – we would select a country to play as and choose 11 players. Back in the early ’90s the West Indies were the powerhouse of international cricket and always the preferred choice of team to play as in the backyard. The catch with selecting your 11 players was you had to replicate that player. For instance, if you were the West Indies and selected the feared duo of Curtly Ambrose or Courtney Walsh among your 11, you had to bowl off the long run-up, or if you chose to bring on Carl Hooper, you had to bowl off-spin, although, I never could get the ball to turn. Nothing has changed there. 

Before each match we would create scorebooks, whereby we could keep track of each bowler’s figures and the scores for each batsman. Just like in international 50-over games, each bowler was restricted to 10 overs, and as you can imagine with only one player bowling all 50 overs without a break, the likes of Ambrose and Walsh’s run-ups were considerably shorter when they came back into the attack for their later spells, particularly on those stifling 40 degree days. As for the batting, we were more flexible – if Allan Border or Mark Taylor were at the crease, you weren’t required to bat left-handed. But for batsmen No.9, 10 and 11 in the team, you were forced to bat left-handed in order to ensure they made tail-ender scores. Although, Azza – whose speciality was with the ball – didn’t need to be batting left-handed to make tail-ender scores. He did a good job of that batting right-handed.

For the scoring, we took an indoor cricket approach, whereby the batting team was penalised five runs for each wicket lost. Over the course of your 50-over innings, you could make 500 runs, but lose 40 wickets, therefore finishing with a total of 300 – a more than competitive score on the unpredictable nature of the WCG wicket, which was renowned for its bumps and divots. With each wicket that fell, we would record the score and move on to the next batsmen. If, for instance, David Boon batted four times in an innings for scores of 17, 6, -5 and 12, he would go in our backyard record books as having made 30 for that match, while it wasn’t uncommon for a bowler to finish a game with 13 or 14 wickets from his 10 overs. Carl Rackerman once took 17.

My favourite player was Dean Jones, so I always placed extra emphasis on his wicket when it was his turn to bat. Our record books documented all our backyard games. They are complete with scorecards, man of the match awards, session highlights, and in some cases mock newspaper reports as my introduction to sports reporting. We tried to make it as real as possible. None of this one-hand, one-bounce, tipity, or can’t go out first ball rubbish, it was fair dinkum, aside from the standard backyard cricket rule of no lbw as I could never get dad to stand out in the heat and umpire us for 100 overs. Don’t know why.

The most memorable backyard game was an Australia v India clash between Azza and I. We all know of the 1960 tied Test between Australia and the West Indies at the Gabba, and the 1986 tied Test between Australia and India at Chennai.Well, this game was the 1995 tied backyard match at Stanhope.Batting first, Australia, aka Azza, finished with a total of 314 off its 50 overs. And after India’s 50 overs, I too had made 314, thanks to Kapil Dev hitting Craig McDermott for a four through mid-wicket off the last ball of the match to tie the scores in what was an epic struggle. It was close games like that which tested the friendships. We never quite came to blows in the backyard. Rather, our preference was to resolve any issues with a well-directed short ball aimed at the throat, sometimes resulting in me donning one of those old bicycle stack hats for protection from the balls that reared off a good length, which they tended to do more often than not at the WCG.

While matches were mostly one-on-one, the bowler did have some assistance in the field. As with most backyard cricket games, hitting any tree on the full was out, we had “auto-wickey” for any nicks to the keeper and slips, and, of course, over the fence was out. But in my backyard it wasn’t six and out, it was just simply out, as I needed to do all I could to discourage the ball going over one particular fence. As anyone who has played at the WCG will know, I had the unfortunate situation of having a neighbour who despised balls flying into his backyard and the subsequent attempts of those who hit it over the fence to retrieve it. You can bet that as soon as a ball went over the fence, my neighbour, who I will refer to as simply PB, would pounce on the ball and add it to the ever-growing collection in his shed. I can still recall the day Azza hit the ball into PB’s yard, and as we were down to our last pill, he cunningly snuck next door to try to salvage it. He managed to get the ball, but was chased by PB – a man in his late 60s – only reaching safety when he dived through a wire fence towards the back of our yard. The following morning when we returned to finish the game – we never could fit the full 100 overs in the one day before it got too dark – the wire fence had been tightened and barbed wire added to it.

Remember The Sandlot Kids, the 1993 movie about the young baseballers who devised elaborate plans to get their ball back after it’s hit into a neighbouring backyard guarded by a 300-pound English mastiff dog called “The Beast”? The plot of The Sandlot Kids mirrored the troubles my mates and I encountered with lost balls over PB’s fence. Only we weren’t in a movie, this was real life. What made losing the balls so frustrating was the time we spent developing them.Without doubt, the ball was the greatest evolution of the backyard at the WCG. Initially, we played with simply a tennis ball. But that was to tame.Then we discovered tape, so we taped half a ball for swing. Then we taped the entire ball, and added a taped seam. Then we hit the jackpot – injecting the balls with water using a cow medicine syringe, and then adding the full coat of tape, plus the seam, which meant we generated not only the swing the seam provided, but the extra bounce created by the water. The balls stung when they crashed into flesh, but we would wear the bruises left by those taped up, water-filled weapons as a badge of honour, for we thought of ourselves as backyard warriors. Yes, they were great days in the backyard. It’s amazing how much fun a bat, ball, stumps and a backyard can p