ClydesDalí CC: On Tier Two T20 and the Surreal

Look, I could do this the easy way. I could churn out another milquetoast ramble about a routine afternoon at the cricket, about the appeal of the game in its hinterlands or whether second tier competition has the quality or the following to exist much further into the 21^st century. I could tell you that, founded in 1848, Clydesdale Cricket Club is the oldest surviving sporting institution in Scotland. But what would be the point of that, besides furnishing you with a piece of trivia that’s never going to help either of us even in the most niche of pub quizzes? Would any of that pique your interest? Make you more likely to spend three hours sat out in the cold and the drizzle in a flimsy plastic lawn chair with no hope of shelter if the rain picks up? Almost certainly not.

But you should. Really. Not just because these matches are staffed by charming volunteers who are far more committed to the game than you or I are ever likely to be. Not solely because second-tier nations’ administrators need every penny they can lay their hands on just to keep the lights on, or for what it would mean for the game at large if those lights went off one day. No. You should go because, frankly, the whole experience of tier two cricket is utterly bizarre in the best possible way.

Take Scotland’s recent T20 against the Netherlands at Clydesdale CC as an example. The strangeness is innocuous enough at first. Just the fact that international cricket is being played in a club setting and all the bucolic events that entails. The diminutive dimensions of the ground are such that, by the end of the Netherlands’ batting power play, balls hit for boundaries have been knocked of shape by sight screens, trees, and a school gymnasium. Later on, one Scotland player very nearly takes a chunk out of a brand-new car parked outside the ground with one monstrous six. The owner of said car very swiftly scuttles outside to move it out of the line of fire.

There’s something vaguely surreal about how, just after 3pm on a Wednesday, the speakers dotted around the boundary blast EDM at full volume between overs to a crowd of a couple of hundred greying cricket enthusiasts and schoolkids still in their uniforms. This, coupled with the unsettling, distorted echo that kicks in when the speakers fall out of sync with each other, makes this game come off like the aberrant offspring of a well-attended club cricket match and the world’s worst wedding disco.

When Bob Marley starts playing under the leaden Scottish skies as I feel the first drop of what I hope won’t become a typical June deluge in these parts, it serves less as a jolly tune to amp up the crowd and more as a potent reminder that we’re in Clydesdale and not Kingston.

The cricket itself is pretty peculiar. There are moments where Scotland look razor sharp in the field (in fact, there is one catch taken right on the rope that requires such a supreme combination of timing, skill, and spatial awareness that, unlike the ball, it does cross a boundary: that between the athletic and the sublime). More often, however, as they flop around the field with all the grace of Dalí’s spindly-legged elephants, Scotland make gathering the ball look like a Marx Brothers routine.

Events take on a kind of quantum strangeness when a catch taken close to the ground by a Netherlands fielder creates a Schrödinger’s wicket scenario in which the batter, chatting away to his partner like it’s just another gap between deliveries, is simultaneously not out and, according to the Dutch players who huddle and high-five in celebration of his dismissal, very much out. This superposition persists for what feels like an eternity, until the umpire eventually brings an end to this purgatorial uncertainty by raising a finger and condemning the batsman to the pavilion.

Even the catering is odd. They’re serving paella. What Scottish, or really any non-Iberian, sporting event serves paella? And it actually looks quite nice.

Nothing too unusual there, though, right? Well, let’s turn our gaze to the eclectic hodgepodge of humanity gathered to witness this spectacle. Many clearly have one foot in the grave, and are as quiet as if they’re practicing for when the rest of their bodies join those currently solitary feet in the tomb. Even the most powerfully hit six elicits only a suggestion of limp applause. Scanning around, it’s hard to put a finger on it, but something is just sort of off. Like how in folk horror the pleasant idiosyncrasies of an English village fête take on a sinister hue when you realise the Morris team is dancing around a maypole made from human skulls. I wait for evidence to support this hunch until my attention is drawn to a man sitting in front of me who I appear to have caught, out of the corner of my eye, finishing the job of pulling up his trousers having just had them fully down. My bafflement is compounded as he slathers his hands with a prodigious amount of hand sanitiser and proceeds to wipe them down furiously with a handkerchief. Have I just witnessed the tail end of some public prostate self-exam? Has he, too, had trouble putting his finger on it?

I recall the terrifyingly silent security guard at the gate who looked distinctly like he’d rather be ripping the throat out of a Celtic fan with his bare hands than dealing with me. The unrestrained aggression with which he searched my bag suggested that he’d either be very good, or is already extremely experienced, at doing just that. I spot him stood by the sight screen and staring intently, with barely suppressed violence, at the players like he’s daydreaming of sprinting to the middle, snatching a bat, and beating the life out of some of these posh pricks.

There’s also a man brazenly smoking a huge pipe that washes much of my section of the crowd in a sweet-smelling smoke that is either horribly flavoured tobacco or some kind of herbal hallucinogen I’ve never heard of. The latter might give a narcotic, rather than a supernatural, meaning to this high strangeness.

The instinct that something isn’t quite right turns to anxiety, intrusive thoughts come to mind like uninvited guests:

-        Is that security guard going to reveal he’s wearing a lot of bondage gear under his uniform and chop me into tiny pieces in a manner so spectacularly visceral that David Cronenberg himself would baulk and leave it on the cutting room floor?

-        Are those uniformed youths going to turn out to be contemporary Weegee versions of the kids from Village of the Damned, eyes ablaze as they livestream my grisly demise on TikTok?

-        Is any of this real? Am I real? Am I risking hypothermia to watch 22 adults in ludicrous costumes hit a spherical object around a field with bats for no discernible purpose?

This experience cost me approximately £30 after ticket and train fare, as well as three hours of very real fear that I was going to be sacrificed to some Pagan sun – or, more likely, cloud – god and have my severed head displayed on middle stump.

Was it worth it?

It’s hard to provide an objective answer. It’s entirely possible that much of what I’ve just written is an account of a self-induced fever dream that my subconscious conjured up to distract me from the fact that, because this is Scotland (a land which, despite its meteorological shortcomings, I love to my bones – which is also where the cold reaches), it was 15°c, spitting with rain, and so windy that I was frozen half to death by the time the Netherlands achieved an 18-run victory by running through Scotland’s lower order like they were having a net against the fourth XI of Bognor Regis under-15s. Or maybe whatever that old chap was smoking really did a number on me.

What I can say with certainty is that, while the cricket might be wildly inconsistent, the whole experience of tier two T20 is brilliantly weird. Sure, you could spend £30 to go to a Blast game at The Oval and watch what is, arguably, a better product… but you’ll have to endure being surrounded by boorish bankers on a corporate night out shouting at each other and paying no attention to the cricket. Why do that when tier two T20 offers you the chance to see a grown man in a ridiculous purple outfit getting abuse hurled at him by a group of Glaswegian schoolgirls who have presumably missed the bus home just to sledge a beleaguered fielder from behind the school fence? Where else are you going to see that?[1]

I’ll be going again at the earliest possible opportunity (which, happily, is less than 48 hours away as I write). You should do the same.

[1] On reflection, this is probably a regular enough occurrence in the Love-Island-meets-Hieronymus-Bosch sideshow that is any Glasgow weekend that I’d wager this exact scenario is playing out as I type.