Nick Ahad: Post-season blues not helped by ‘forecasters’ getting it so wrong

Me: “The one about me playing cricket on a weekend? Errm.. okay.”

Pause.

Me: “You do know I don’t play cricket during the winter, don’t you?”

Sports Ed: “Aye. Some people seem to like your column.”

Me (approaching the desk with a hint of a swagger): “Oh, really?!”

Beat.

Sports Ed: “Don’t get cocky, Ahad. We’ve had one letter. And I reckon it’s from your mum.”

(Walks away from sports desk with less of a swagger).

So, here we are. A cricket column penned as the leaves are falling and that unmistakeable smell of Autumn lingers in the air.

The only stipulation is that it ‘needs to be summat to do with a bat and ball’. Well, I’m a maverick, a rebel, and so there will only be fleeting mention of a bat and ball here today and much talk of ... the weather.

But, before we get to that, let me share something with the non-weekend cricketers among you.

Some of you may have colleagues who, unbeknown to you, play cricket during the summer.

If you have noted that some of your work-mates seem a little quieter, a little more subdued, dare I say it, even a little depressed, at the minute, it may well be because they play cricket in the summer and right now their weekends seem very, very, empty.

It really is the strangest thing when the cricket season finishes.

With something like, say, Sunday League football, you play on a morning, it takes a couple of hours and you’re done, free to ... well, I don’t know what footballers do – smash up shops and spray graffiti on walls? (I’m joking, I’m joking. Football fans don’t know how to operate something as complex as a spray can). I hope cheeky sarcasm comes across in print.

Point is, with normal sports, as opposed to local league cricket, you play the game, you finish, have a pint, get on with your weekend and your life.

With cricket, you leave for the ground Saturday mid-morning and only drag your carcass home eight or nine hours later. And that’s if it’s been a short game.

So, come the end of the season, the weekend suddenly opens up and you have acres and acres of time ahead of you. It’s enough to bring on a bout of agoraphobia.

The first weekend is okay. You do bits of DIY that have been ignored all summer – the door that’s been hanging off its hinges since May gets fixed, the lightbulb in the bathroom, dead since July, finally gets replaced, you slowly start to recognise the woman who seems to live in your house and turns out to be The Missus.

Then the second weekend comes. You catch up with family, friends – those that are still speaking to you after a whole summer of absence.

And then.

The autumn arrives, the season just past moves further and further into distant memory, the nights close in, it gets cold and miserable. Standing in a field chasing a leather ball around is the last thing on your mind, your weekends fill up and you start to wonder how on earth you can spend a whole one of your two days off a week playing cricket.

Except, it hasn’t happened like that this year, has it?

I ended my cricket season 2011 in the way I have ended it for the past two years – driving to Devon for a cricket tour and playing precisely no games and instead, watching the rain fall outside from the inside of a pub.

It was a tradition that started about five years ago when my best mate Ben, a reporter for the BBC’s Look North, moved south (traitor) and joined the Beeb’s cricket team down there. He had a mate who played league cricket – in Yorkshire, he told his team, hoping to ingratiate himself.

They got excited – they play friendly games at a pretty inoffensive standard – and they were about to get a Yorkshire league cricketer as a ringer, courtesy of Ben.

Not sure how they felt about him when I turned up to join them on tour. They can’t get rid of me now, and myself, Del (another of my oldest friends who is also a cricket nut and joins us on tour) and Ben have trudged down to Devon annually to play against a variety of teams around Bideford. Well that’s what we used to do. The past two years I have driven to Devon to watch the rain.

When the season ends with a tour, playing three games in four days, it is a wonderful bookend to the summer and helps get you through those miserable dark autumn days. But not only did we not get to enjoy the tour because of the rain, we now spend the end of September and the beginning of October in blazing sunshine. The sort of weather that is perfect for cricket.

Earlier this week I was talking to someone who works in another department of the YP building. She told me that the weather forecasters had predicted snow for Friday. I think she was taken aback by the language I used to suggest that weather forecasters were about as reliable as my cover drive. Sometimes it’s absolutely spot on, everything is right about it. Other times I might as well be picking lottery numbers blindfolded.

As cricketers we don’t blame weather forecasters for the weather, we blame them for their predictions that might as well be shouted from the top of a milk crate on a street corner (I’m not being ironic – I honestly don’t know why we allow them on telly). But, in the absence of anyone else to blame, they bear the brunt of our ire.

I hope the lass I laughed at, who told me it would snow on Friday – it’s Friday as I write this and can just about see the sunshine through the tiny windows of YP towers – sees this and realises her folly at listening to weather ‘forecasters’.

Any road up. Seems the Sports Ed may have been on to something. Even though there’s no actual cricket to report on, I was going to tell you about what I’ve got up my sleeve for our annual cricket club dinner. It appears there might be a next time, so it’ll have to wait until then...

And another thing...

There is a long running argument in YP Towers between me and a couple of football-loving colleagues.

They seem to think there is skill and finesse involved in football and have, laughably, even suggested that it can match cricket aesthetically.

I have wasted many hours trying to explain to them why they are wrong, frustratingly without seeming to dent their love of what looks to me a fairly barbaric game (I really am one of those people that just doesn’t ‘get’ football).

Without wanting to make light of a tragic loss, the sad death of Graham Dilley served as a reminder to why cricket is a sport unmatched for nobility.

I wasn’t at Headingley in 1981, unlike two million Yorkshiremen (if you believe tales in bars across The Broad Acres). The site of Dilley’s greatest moment, it was not his skill with the ball – for which he was picked – that crowned his career, but the work down the other end of the wicket to Botham with the bat he’s remembered.

That’s the beauty of cricket: Botham could not have performed his heroics had it not been for a man straining every sinew alongside him.

Reminded me of when I scored my first century and had No 7 Scottie at the other end. Have I not mentioned my (as yet only) ton? Well...