To play real cricket…
When I was at high school in the Eastern Cape during the early 1990s, cricket was an integral part of every Saturday in summer. It smelled like sweaty cricket pads, leather balls shiny with age, sunscreen and dry grass. That's if there was any grass at all because there was also an ongoing drought in those years… The outfield was often hard and littered with duwweltjies.
Usually the only spectators were a parent or two relaxing in the shade of a pine tree. The thwack of the ball against the bat and an overenthusiastic “Howzat!” every now and then were the only sounds you heard. It was a sport I could enjoy with my best friends Jaco, Asterix, Marius, the Du Toit brothers, Jules, Handré… My older brother Wimpie and I even played on the same team for a few years. To me, this will always be real cricket. Modern pyjama cricket, played under lights in two hours, will never beat my experience of school cricket.
I went to a small school called Gill College in Somerset East. Like most platteland schools, the main focus was rugby, and in summer only a small, dedicated group of children (and teachers and coaches) could be found on the cricket field.
Back then, the Karoo league often had us schoolboys play against the men's teams from surrounding towns like Jansenville, Middelburg and Graaff-Reinet. Our coach played on our team when we competed against the adults. For a few years, a young cricket coach from England would come over to train us for the summer. (I recently saw one of them, Mike Burns, on TV. He's now an umpire.)
This photo was taken in 1994, in the cricket field changing rooms at the police training college in Graaff-Reinet. It was just after a dramatic win against a strong team from Bethesda Road – mostly farmers from the district north of town.
I took five wickets that day, and late in the afternoon I hit the winning run. We were chasing well over 200 runs, if I remember correctly. The Du Toit
