How many sports do you know during which you can eat a meal? Tennis players sometimes have a drink between games, and I remember once seeing Boris Becker eat a banana, but you never see them leaving the court before the match is over to go for lunch. In most sports it is unthinkable to leave the pitch in the middle of a game to go and have a proper meal. Cricket however is different.
Cricket is a slow game. Even the shortest matches last for a whole day. International games (called test matches) go on for five days, so it is not surprising that the players stop for lunch and tea. Play begins in the morning at eleven o'clock, stops at 12.30 for lunch then resumes in the afternoon at 1.30. Tea is taken at 4.15, and lasts till 5pm. The final session of the day is from 5 till 6.30 or 7pm, depending on the light conditions. If the sky is too dark, the players cannot see the ball easily which can be dangerous.
When I was twelve, I played cricket for my school team. Each week we played a match against another school. One week we would play at home, the next week away. For me the away games were always more interesting. We got to go somewhere we had never visited before. It was strange to step inside another school and see how life there differed from life in our own school. We also got to eat different kinds of food. Sometimes we were treated like kings, but at one school we played at, we had potatoes thrown at us in the canteen.
Out of all the schools I ever visited, the one I remember best is Stouts Hill. It was a very small school on the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. It was surrounded by greenery and seemed to be totally cut off from the rest of civilisation. We arrived in our school bus after a long journey up and down narrow lanes with tall hedges on both sides.
Cricket is a summer sport and wherever we played, we were usually given cold food such as sandwiches, potato crisps, cake, ice cream and jelly. Some schools were more generous than others, but Stouts Hill was the best by far: we got mountains of sandwiches, full of ham, cheese, and egg; as many packets of crisps as we wanted; more cake than we could eat; and enough ice cream and jelly to feed a whole school. Being only twelve, I ate as much as I possibly could. When it was time to start playing cricket again, I was still busy cramming food into my mouth. For a greedy boy like me, it was too good a chance to miss.
There was a reason for Stouts Hill's generosity: their only hope of beating us was to fill us up with food. They were terrible at cricket and wanted to make us too sick to play. I am embarrassed to say it, but their tactics worked. We gained weight but lost the game.