Ultimate Backyard Cricket

I was at home on Saturday afternoon, happily roasting a couple of bits of pork on the spit, waiting for the time when we’d be leaving to take Sam to the movies with friends to celebrate his birthday when the phone rang. It was a friend of Sam’s Mum.

“Toby would like to know if Sam would like to come over to our place tomorrow night and play some backyard cricket with Ricky Ponting.”

For the foreigners (particularly those from that North American continent) that read this, that’s probably the equivalent of the national hockey team captain.

Sam had a bit of a funny grin on his face when he was asked. It was nothing compared to the silly grin that I had on my face as I was doing the asking. For a moment I actually thought that he was going to say that he wasn’t really that interested, but I think he could tell that it was unlikely that I was going to let him get away with no as an answer.

There’s probably a bit of an explanation required at this point, because when the call came through, I knew that it was genuine. So the more likely and response that would have come out at another time, Like, “Ha Ha very funny,” or something less polite didn’t even cross my mind.

Sam’s friend Toby is in remission and has been a recipient of help through the Ricky Ponting Foundation, run by Ricky and Rianna. A couple of years ago, when we’d just returned from Canada and after Sam had made friends with Toby, he’d had his picture in the Advertise with Ricky at the Adelaide oval ahead of the test match. So when Ricky is in town, he catches up with Toby.

On Australia Day the Ponting Foundation is organising The Biggest Game of Cricket to raise money for young Australians with cancer and their families so the opportunity was taken as part of the launch to have a game in the backyard with Tony and some of his friends – one of whom was Sam.

Needless to say, Mum and Dad both dropped him off and took the chance to have a bit of a gawk and meet the former Australian Cricket Captain. It was a great opportunity and I think that we’ll have to look at hosting our own game of cricket on Australia Day, especially since oval renovations have seen Adelaide robbed of cricket on possibly our most traditional day of cricket.

We managed to get Thomas’ bat signed as well as his cousin’s (on his birthday even, which was lucky since we skipped out of his celebration for a couple of hours to do so) and had a great time watching the kids get the chance to play cricket with one of their idols. It was very generous and an exposure to another side of Ricky to that which we usually get to see via the media.

And as we all pointed cameras at him whilst he played with the kids and sat and ate and posed for photos, it was also an eye opener into what it must be like to live a celebrity life-style! Far from private.

City to Bay 2012

Last year I set out to run the City to Bay with little expectation. This year two things were different. Firstly, I had a goal to run the 12km race in under 1 hour. It didn’t have to be a lot. I would have been happy with a time of 59:59. It wasn’t going to be an easy achievement. Secondly, I’d convinced Michael to enter the run with me.

I trained as well as I could have managed this year, fitting it in around soccer, life and other general commitments.

I had a training program. I even had a GPS unit that helped me train to that program. What I didn’t have was single-minded devotion. In order to have done that I would have had to have stopped playing soccer and avoided all those other commitments that I mentioned before. I haven’t reached a point where I am prepared to do that to meet that goal of running the race in under an hour.

What I didn’t set myself as a goal was beating Michael. It never even occurred to me that it might be something worth aiming at.

Michael didn’t train. He played soccer for the school and did PE and that was about it. A couple of weeks before the race I suggested that he might like to come for a run with me. We jogged around to the local park, running together along the way. That was the warm up. When we started running, off he went. Not sprinting away, but starting quicker right from the get-go. It was only a small park, about 200m per lap. I watched him gradually stretch his lead and then gradually mow me down. He went past me and just kept going.

I didn’t delude myself into thinking that I should try and keep up, or improve enough to beat him, it simply wasn’t going t happen.

I think he may have run with me on 2 more occasions after that.

The first of those, his second run with me was an exercise in speed which meant spaced runs at higher velocities. When you’re busting your gut to finish the session off, what you need is your 15 year old sun running along beside you, maintaining the pace, but darting off to the side to jump up and rip leaves off trees, bounce of trunks and generally letting you know that not only is he not knackered and in danger of a heart attack, but that he’s a little bored and looking for some fun too!

His third run with me was the nice ‘taper’ run that I did 3 days before the event. A relatively easy exercise, not meant to wear you out too much. Michael was running with me, but it was clear once again that he was holding back. The fact that he was running along the top of 3 inch wide brick walls was probably the biggest clue!

On the day, I had one secret hope, not that I was focused on beating him. The only thing that would give me a sniff was if he ran out of puff because he’d never run 12kms before.

My aim was to chew through the race at 4:57 mins/km which in theory would have had me over the line in 59:24. I would have been quite ecstatic. I asked Michael at the start if he was going to run with me for a bit and then take off when I was slowing him down too much. His answer was very noncommittal.

He did run with me for just a bit. Basically right up to the start line, then as we crossed North Terrace, he bolted like a rabbit out the gate, up onto the footpath, round a couple of slow-pokes and off into the crowd.

I was on pace until the 7km mark but it was around then the GPS started telling me to hurry up. It continued to do this until the end of the event when I crossed the line in 60mins and 43 seconds.

43 damn seconds. It’s amazing just how close that seems and yet I know that I simply didn’t have it in me to drag that time back. I was stuffed. And waiting for me just past the finish line was Michael. He’d finished in 57:57.

My only consolation was that he was in about as much pain as I was and complained that he’d had to walk a bit because he’d cramped up. Some consolation. He walked a bit and still beat me over the line.

The other thing I worked out when I downloaded the data from my device was that I’d actually run a distance of 12.2kms. The time I’d run the race in was actually pretty much bang on (actually a fraction under) 5 min kms. So if I’d been able to run the damn thing straight instead of around all the people that were slower than me and if it had actually been just 12kms I would have hit my target!

But I still didn’t run the race in under an hour.

Looks like I’ll have to do it again next year.