This article first appeared on CricketEurope exactly five years ago today. It's a superb piece of writing by Peter Prendergast who died earlier this month. 

Stories I tell my kids

In one of my first ever cricket matches I blocked out resolutely for a draw. It was an Under 11 T20 fixture, best score wins of course, but I had recently been informed of the existence of the draw and had become temporarily fascinated by it. So I stoutly played out the last over. Two runs were required to win, maybe three, certainly no more than that. And if memory serves I may even have shouldered arms at the final two deliveries. Anyhow I shook hands with my grateful opponents and strode off wondering if it might seem a little precocious to raise my bat while Mario, showing the motivational nous that would see him one day manage the Clontarf First XI, climbed onto a bench and hit me on the top of the head with a stump. That’s one of the cricket stories I tell my kids.

I was back in Clontarf recently watching Bill Coghlan, whom I captained as he made his way through the teams, compile yet another fifty and I wondered briefly exactly how many coaches he has had in his time. Interprovincial and international coaches through all the age groups, no doubt, not to mention all the Clontarf coaches through the years. Presumably someone is employed to assist the Leinster Lightning.

(Peter Prendergast batting)

For me, there was only one man who taught me to bat. It must be over 40 years now since JB Bunworth brought a group of boys into a net and showed us how to hold the bat and where to lift it and how to bring it down in a straight line. He then showed us how to play a cover drive and shouted ‘Whacker shot’ at us when we managed to hit one. That was JB’s phrase, Whacker shot! and years later Deryck Vincent and I would open the batting together on the First XI and one or other of us would hit a drive, or maybe get hold of a pull shot and you would hear that unmistakable crack off the bat followed by the shout of Whacker shot! coming from the boundary edge.

It’s hard to know what my mother expected when she suggested that my brother and I try the local cricket club. My father had died some months previous and a long sad summer stretched out in front of us so she probably hoped that we would find somewhere to spend our time and maybe make some friends. What she couldn’t have known is that she sent us just in time. Relentlessly technical and utterly unforgiving, cricket is a game of early opportunity, a game which rewards those who get in ahead of the others. The more skill a kid acquires, the more opportunity he is offered; the more opportunity he is offered, the more skill he acquires. It’s the ultimate virtuous circle. For the rest, well cricket just spits them out. Hit the ball in the air? Go sit in the pavilion. Bowl a few wides? Head off into the outfield with yourself. Hard luck, thanks for coming, who’s next?

Next time you see an under 13 or under 15 match don’t for a moment be fooled into thinking that you are actually watching a contest between Clontarf and Merrion or whoever. The result could not be of less consequence. The real competition is occurring between team mates, although neither they nor their parents understand this, as they vie for places in the batting order and for overs to bowl. It is the only way they can acquire experience and improve enough to stay in the game. Learn or leave, it’s the law of the jungle. There is a finite number of opportunities, deliveries to be bowled and faced, in any cricket game.

Week after week JB took me into the nets. He taught me to cut and to pull and to drive the ball. He showed me how to defend my wicket and myself. Here’s another story I tell my kids: It’s my last ever competitive game in Castle Avenue and somehow I find myself on 99 with 5 overs left in the innings, loads of time to push a single as Frankie Furlong assures me, loads of time. Hit it and call and he’ll be there. Nothing to worry about, no problem. Five overs, after all, Only the chap then goes and has some sort of brainstorm and all of a sudden I’m looking down the wicket thinking, Why is Frankie running in with the bowler? Bowler hits his delivery stride, Frankie roars “Yessss!!!” and starts barrelling down the wicket. The only person more startled than me is the bowler. Either by design or maybe the ball just slips out of his hand but he bowls the loopiest delivery in history and I’m holding my bat there thinking, Frankie’s going to get here before the ball. What then? Then it occurs to me that if Frankie changes line here the ball’s going to hit him on the back of the head. Or maybe I could get bowled off the top of his helmet. Is there even a ruling on that? Anyhow the ball somehow passes Frankie out but not by much let me tell you, not by much and I push it into the on side and a fraction of a second later Frankie shoots past me shouting Run, for God’s sake, run. So I do. I scamper up the far end and somehow make it home and I turn around and Frankie is beaming at me. He punches the air a couple of times, marches back down the wicket and grabs me in the furriest hug I’ve ever been involved in. Then we look at each other and he beams again and goes to face the next ball.

I sometimes think about my father and what the final year of his life must have been like; a young man, forty-two, who must have understood that his heart was giving out on him and that he would soon be leaving his young family behind. Each Saturday he would bring me to the cinema; every Sunday afternoon we watched a soccer match. Then he went into hospital. I would visit twice or three times a week, sit at his bedside and tell him about things at school until one morning my uncle woke me and my brother and said, You’re dad’s in heaven now. I looked across the room at my brother. Then we went downstairs to be with the adults. Losing a parent so young changes you in many ways but most of all it consigns you to a fearful childhood. Put simply: if your father can go into hospital with a sore leg (I never was the most clued in kid) and never return then what can’t happen? All bets are off. The structures and comforts and reminders that console other children don’t fool you. You’re not smarter, not by a long shot, you just know better. You’ve been around the block. It’s only once you stumble into adulthood and begin to make a little sense of the world around you that this feeling begins to ease. But until then you carry a dull fearfulness with you. You never quite know what you’re scared of. You’re just scared.

There was plenty to be frightened of in the cricket club, mind you. It was wild back in those days with kids like Kenneth Walsh and Johnny Cassidy and even the now loveable Johnny Barry, but my brother and I would return day after day to play stumpy and rounders and impromptu cricket matches. Others would come and go, unable to withstand the hostile environment. And of course the game got rid of plenty. Learn or leave, the same as ever; improve or watch others battle it out from the boundary line.

Twice or three times a week I attended practice with JB. He taught me how to play a backward defensive shot and how to glance the ball off my hip. One day he brought tennis balls and taught us how to sway inside the line of the ball. Before cricket spits a kid out for good it offers him an opportunity. Only it’s not really an opportunity, it merely has the appearance of one. Because he hasn’t acquired the necessary technique or skill or experience and others have, often bigger, stronger kids who got that head start and never looked back. They have bowled more balls than he has, faced twice as many deliveries. The same age maybe but they are veterans in comparison and so his middle stump is uprooted or maybe his bowling is smacked to all corners and the humiliation is public and complete because all the other kids are there along with their parents and grandparents and siblings all whooping and hollering.

That’s the thing about cricket - it is public and brutal and unforgiving. There is simply no place to hide. All this poor kid can do is fight back the tears and make his way to the exit. I had turned 11 when the U13 captain, showing a tactical versatility beyond his years, shifted me from my customary Number 10 position. Malahide possessed in their ranks a fast bowler, six foot tall and seriously quick, and since I was the smallest on the team (where the hell was Deryck!) I would present the smallest target and therefore was least likely to be killed. My team mates deemed it a sound tactical option. Most of the balls would bounce over my head, I was assured. The vice captain, usually an opening bat, nearly banged his head off the table he was nodding so hard. So I went and padded up. No helmets in those days and the pads and gloves were nothing to write home about. I wanted to run. I would have given anything to be anywhere else, anywhere, but most of all I wanted to be at home where I felt safe with my mum and my brother and my sisters. I was physically terrified, sure, but it was worse than that. I knew that I would back away. I knew that I was a coward and hopelessly out of my depth and that all that fear I tried to hide each and every day would suddenly be there for everyone to witness. That was the worst of it; I would be utterly exposed.

I was so incredibly frightened of everything; of team mates, of opponents, of the older more streetwise kids who hung around the cricket club. And now everyone would know it. Sportingly, my opening partner allowed me to take strike. So I stood, utterly frozen. I was paralysed by my own fear and waited and watched and knew that I was going to back away, just knew it, until the ball arrived..... and somehow I found a shot to play. I’m not sure how but I managed. And again. And again. I remember very little of that innings other than a feeling of absolute wonder at what was happening. I couldn’t understand how the ball kept sliding off my bat to the boundary. I scored 64 that day, my first journey into double figures. I remember walking off and raising my bat (keeping an eye out for Mario of course) and though I didn’t know it at the time I was a very different boy from the one who had walked to the wicket an hour or so previous.

So that’s how it happened. JB taught me to bat and I survived that natural selection process. Shame his brother didn’t get off his backside and teach me to bowl; I would have had an even better time playing cricket. But that’s neither here nor there. I became competent. I continued playing. For the rewards are huge. A cricket club more than anything offers you somewhere to be. It is the most incredible gift a person can be offered, to have somewhere to be, for the alternative is awful, to have nowhere to be, nowhere to go, nothing to do. A cricket club is a small oasis, a little world independent of the surrounding suburb, with its own rites and norms, always open, mostly populated. When friends move away, when the phone doesn’t ring, when that boy or girl you think just might be the one turns out to have a very different view on the matter - you find your way back to the club. It is what a cricket club offers more than any other sporting entity. It is simply somewhere to be.

Ten til ten, that was my routine. Half an hour to get home and back for lunch, half an hour for dinner. I wasn’t the only one; Peter Duggan, John Forrest and Padraic McTiernan were on a similar schedule. Stumpy, rounders, go rob an orchard, back for more stumpy. On weekday evenings I would position myself in the outfield and return balls to the adults bowling in the nets. At weekends I would pack my gear and count the adult players through the gate in the hope that one might not show and I could be asked to play. I had nowhere else to be, true, but after a while there is nowhere else you wish to be. Any interruption to the routine becomes an outrageous intrusion.

And of course I tell my kids stories from that time. Like the day Pete Duggan came on to bowl out in Terenure and he fired his first ball one bounce off the sightscreen. Pete often did need a loosener before hitting his length. Or the time Flemmo ran three of the first four out and we were so angry we stormed out the gate, all three of us, left him to battle it out with the tail, then looked out the window of the 16A and saw him run someone else out. Small stories, nothing stories really, but my kids like them.

But what about my old pal Bill Coghlan? First time I ever spoke to Bill I asked him what number he batted and he proudly informed me that he opened the batting while representing his province but while representing his country he didn’t mind dropping to number three. He was still Under 13 at the time, a tall blonde kid hanging around First XI nets just as I had done some years previous so I smiled at him kindly and thought, What a pompous little prick! But he wasn’t the most obnoxious schoolboy in the history of Clontarf Cricket club. Not by a long shot. He wasn’t even a close runner up. That award is proudly held by none other than Rossa Bunworth, brother of the great JB, who, legend has it, upon returning from under 15 international duty insisted that both his Clontarf team mates and their opponents that day line up to applaud him out onto the pitch. What a splendid effort from the young man! Absolutely fantastic! I love that story only I wasn’t around to see it; I was way too young. That story was passed on by a chap called Kieran Gleeson who played in that game (and who was no doubt clapping just as enthusiastically as the next man), Kieran like JB and Rossa and Hoppy Ellis and Brenny Bergin, one of those men who as I grew older would welcome me into their conversations and buy me a Coke or a beer.

Because that’s what happens in a cricket club, you grow up and move along the teams. Your relationship changes with all those people who have known you since you were a child. You become a little less scared and a little more awkward and all of a sudden you find yourself playing on the firsts or the seconds without having any real idea of how you got there.

JB and I became the best of pals. For a short period we opened the batting together on the Second XI. One day we’re playing North County and I nick off first ball of the day. Yes, first ball. 100 over game, that’s 600 deliveries and I get to face one of them. So I’m in a foul mood, absolutely rotten. I want to take the ball and go home - to hell with the game, to hell with the team, with everything. I’m absolutely steaming. Then I hear a cry from outside and JB is down with a hamstring injury, rolling around the pitch, ow, ow, ow! Good enough for him! I haven’t a jot of sympathy. Anyhow, you’d think JB would get off the pitch and stop being a nuisance to everybody but no, he wants to bat on which means that I have to go out and run for him. That’s the law in cricket: it is a batsman who has already been out that has to do the running. And I was the only one who had batted. So I have to collect my pads and gloves and thigh pad and box from where I’ve chucked them all over the dressing room and troop on out there. Of course I’m hoping that he’s out next ball. Or if he collapses in a heap, well that’s fine too. Someone else can lug him back in, let me tell you, or if they want to roll him onto a side wicket and play around him for the afternoon, no problem. As long as it doesn’t involve me.

Only he’s not out next ball and he doesn’t collapse in a heap. In fact, he doesn’t get out at all. He bats through the whole innings, 50 solid overs, 117 not out and I have to run every run for him. At one point he clouts one into McTiernan’s garden and shouts Whacker shot at himself. Oh yes, JB’s having a whale of a time driving and cutting and clipping the ball all over the place and I’m running up and down like a lunatic on his behalf. He spent the North County innings slugging pints in the sunshine in front of the bar, a bag of ice on the hammy. Every now and then he’d grin and give me thumbs up.

That’s one of the JB stories I tell my kids. There are others. Like the time he whacked Ray Moulton into the gardens and shouted “There’s plenty more where that came from,” and was promptly bowled next ball. Or, and this is their favourite, the time he came out of retirement for a gentle knockabout friendly and found himself facing a young quickie pinging the ball down at 80 mph plus. JB played and missed at a couple, tucked the bat under his arm and strode off in the direction of the pavilion as though he had nicked one. Wife and kids, he said when I suggested he get back out there and face the music, wife and kids.

My father died in June 1972. Ireland’s first coronary bypass, an operation which would have allowed him to see me and my brother and sisters into adulthood, was performed in 1975 so he was unlucky. I know very little about him other than the fact that he was a very skilled sportsman. My mother could recall cycling to Dalymount Park to watch him play in an amateur international soccer match and he was a Leinster handball champion. But I don’t remember any of that. All I remember about him is that he used to bring me to the cinema on a Saturday and to watch football on a Sunday. For a while after he died I would scour the house for things belonging to him and hoard them away for myself. Pens, cufflinks, that sort of thing, they all found a way under my bed.

One of these items was a cricket book, a ghosted autobiography of Australian all rounder Alan Davidson. I loved that book. For years I would read it before going to sleep. When I finally asked my mother about it she explained that my father had been a cricket fan, that each summer she would be instructed to listen to the news and to write down the Test match score and at ten past the hour all through the day my father would ring home from his office for an update. At night during the winter he would fall asleep with the Test match playing in his ear.

JB now lives in New Zealand. He and Susan and their kids moved there some years ago and we have not spoken in quite a while. But that’s okay. You don’t have to stay in touch to be somebody’s friend. On the odd Friday night through the winter I run into Richie Currie in the ice cold North County barn. Richie lets me know how his kids are getting on in Clontarf and sometimes we talk about cricket in his native New Zealand. Because that’s they way it works: people move and your kids’ club becomes your club. JB’s kids are playing rugby or cricket or whatever activities they are involved in over in New Zealand; Richie’s kids are representing Clontarf with distinction while my three are hoovering up all the cricket they can get their hands on across the east link in Pembroke. It is the way of it.

And I have found a new club. Incredible to imagine, given the endless hours I spent as a child in Clontarf, playing, fighting, learning. And then, once I had grown, the role the club played in my life; winning and losing, ducks and runs, joy and more frustration than I would have liked. Late night jaunts to Leeson Street and parties in Hampton Court. It’s all mingled together in my mind but these days I sit on the wall in Pembroke, watching the cricket and cracking jokes and it’s only now that I understand that when JB taught me to bat he was neither putting something back into the game nor putting something back into the club. It was much more personal than that. He had something in his life that he loved so much that he wanted to share it. Not just with me, with anyone who wanted it. But others were not so fortunate. When our kids first joined Pembroke, I would tell Trish that I was just going to drop them off in the car park. Now, if she needs me during the summer months, she knows where to find me.

But what about Clontarf? Still a strong club, still successful, different fittings in the bar and an astro out the back. And Surf’s at the helm – what’s all that about? Last I remember Surf was batting Number 10 for Belvo thirds - and making it look like damned hard work. My kids come and play in Clontarf but they don’t hang around afterwards; like me, for so many years, they can’t wait to get back to their own club. Already the same pattern is emerging with my boys as they play their cricket and stay behind with their adult team mates to drink beer or Coke, depending on their age, to discuss cricket and sport and other matters. There are worse ways to be ushered into adulthood. They are building up their own stock of Pembroke stories. But until then they’ll have to make do with mine.

(JB Bunworth with Andrew Vincent)

We’re in Trinity one day and Enda isn’t happy, bowling rubbish, chunter, chunter, fielding rubbish, chunter, chunter and no one is exempt, not even poor Brenny Bergin who has pulled something in his back and now he has to chase to the boundary which is pretty damn funny if you’re the one who has to follow him out. All he can hear is me laughing at him as he hobbles along which makes him laugh which hurts him even more which is funnier again. Then all of a sudden he’s down. His back goes into spasm. About five yards from the ball, nearly made it, plucky devil, only he doesn’t go down properly, he just buckles onto his knees like he’s in one of those Vietnam movies, getting shot about thirty times. And Enda starts roaring at him to get up and get the ball in. Which is funnier again and makes me laugh harder which makes Brenny laugh harder and over he goes onto his side, ha ha, ow,ow, ha, ha, ow, ow. He’s like a fish on a deck now, flopping about.

So I have to get the ball which is fine only I can’t throw it, can’t get my body into the right position. Every time I try Brenny groans and that’s the end of that. So I give up and drop the ball on the ground and fall over beside Brenny and the ball. Now Enda’s going nuts. He’s absolutely screaming at me. He has thrown his cap and kicked it halfway across the square. But I’m no good to him, I’m done for. The batsmen are still running up and down and Brenny’s still flopping about next to me, clutching his back. I can hear him groaning and laughing, groaning and laughing. Next on the scene is McClean who makes his way out from the infield only he’s laughing harder than either of us, absolutely howling, but even so he makes a solid contribution. He picks up the ball and throws it straight to the vacant long off boundary. Then he crumples to the ground as well. The batsmen pause, can’t believe their luck and head off for more runs and by now Enda has lost his reason; he’s gone berserk, stamping the cap into the ground and swearing up a storm at McClean and it’s too funny, all too funny, because McClean’s howling and Brenny’s still laughing and groaning and the last thing I remember is lying on the ground, hearing Enda in the distance berate someone else for not chasing McClean’s wayward throw quickly enough. The Trinity batsmen only ran six which, as I tried to later explain to Enda, wasn’t a bad result under the circumstances.

Even when my kids get sick of my other stories, they still like the cricket ones. When I want them to understand team spirit I can tell them about the time Frankie Furlong was so excited about a team mate’s success that he arrived before the ball.

Or sometimes I tell them about a 60 over cup match when Mick Ryan, sick with the flu, bowled fifteen overs on the bounce into a howling gale simply so that none of his team mates would have to.

But mostly it’s just stories. Like the time Paul McCreadie followed a ball head first into a hedge out in The Hills and play was suspended while we all stood around and figured out a way to get him back out again. Or the time Gerry Ring misjudged a catch out on the boundary, then booted the ball off Edie Craig’s windscreen and had to follow it out the gate and down the lane. I tell them about Ringo, what a great guy he was. I tell them about McClean, that booming laugh, about Gerry Kirwan’s late inswinger and the odd way Enda used to carry the bat when he was batting well. I tell them about the time one of the ladies whacked a six onto the pavilion near where Lennie Dexter was painting and he painted the ball blue and threw it back onto the field of play.

I sometimes think of JB, especially when I look into our playroom and see the three cricket bags lying haphazardly there. I wonder if we ever cross his mind, that group of boys that he taught to bat back in the late seventies. Does he know that the Vincent name is once again appearing on Clontarf scorecards?

He couldn’t possibly know that earlier today in a cul de sac in Churchtown a teenage brother and sister were involved in a ferocious contest using a tennis ball and a stump, a barrage of bouncers followed by the inevitable yorker which missed by a couple of inches and was dispatched clean as a whistle over the house across the road. Only that was the last tennis ball. The house has been ransacked; nothing. The blame for this outrage has, unsurprisingly, been laid at my door; how could I not have seen that stocks were dwindling? Don’t cheap out, I’ve been urged. Quantity and quality, that’s what they’re after; they want good standard balls, ones that will really zing off the concrete - and loads of them. A whole summer’s worth for road cricket not to mention all the balls they’ll need when they go to meet their friends in Pembroke.

Stumpy, fumbles and those warm summer evenings where they line up along the boundary edge and smash catches at each other. But all that’s for later. Now it’s time to get a move on. The boys are training tonight; my daughter has a game in Merrion.

Come on, Dad, they say, shift, shake a leg. It’s time to go. After all, they tell me, it’s not as if we don’t all have somewhere to be.