Cricket teas survive man-made disaster, now for Planet Earth
While Cop30 gathered in Brazil trying to save the planet as the Doomsday Clock ticks towards midnight, so a similar summit was taking place in North Tyneside with the fate of another much-loved body at its core… the humble sausage roll.
Well, not just sausage rolls, but also limp cheese savoury sandwiches, a handful of Tunnock’s teacakes, two dozen mini pork pies, any number of Mr Kipling fondant fancies and maybe a gallon of freshly brewed Typhoo, otherwise known as the typical cricket tea.
Much like the earth, the cricket tea (served between innings at village cricket games) is facing an existential threat.
While our planet is put in peril by man-made catastrophes such as pollution, global warming and rampant overconsumption, so the traditional cricket tea is hanging by a thread due to that age-old man-made threat of, erm, rank laziness.
Item 10 on the agenda of the Northumberland and Tyneside Cricket League AGM this week was a call to arms to end the mandatory match-day serving of teas for all players by the host club. I was there for this era defining moment, along with knocking on a hundred others. A hush descended. This was the big one.
There was an impassioned plea from one member backing the motion to make cricket teas optional for all the clubs concerned.
He rose to his feet and took us on a journey from the days of yore when wives and girlfriends would slave over hot ovens to cook up veritable feasts for their partner’s cricket colleagues on match days to the fraught-with-danger modern times. We live in an age of food intolerances, potentially-fatal allergies, a cost of living crisis and over-officious council environment inspectors wielding enforcement notices on unsuspecting clubhouses daring to dish out grub that has not been vigorously tested to, one presumes, Michelin star standards of cleanliness.
It was stirring stuff. Lips were wobbling. I’m sure I saw a tear wiped from an eye. ‘Smoky in here isn’t it?’ mumbled one man, dabbing his face with a handkerchief.
I dunno. While the dangers of eating cricket teas may be underreported, I can’t help feeling it’s more a case of lazyitis than raging pancreatitis caused by a stale pasty at the centre of the argument.
Yeah, it would be nice to have wives and girlfriends serving up home-cooked cricket teas, but these days they’ve got better things to do… often playing the game and uprooting my off stump with a yorker in the process.
Anyway, to cut a long story short… the cricket tea survived the vote.
The Doomsday Clock for cricket teas has stopped at five to midnight. Here’s hoping planet earth fares even better at Cop30.