When Owzthat and Subbuteo meant cricket lived from dawn until dusk

MIKE NEVIN: The delights of the sport were not merely a seasonal obsession in the days of yore, with several attempts to fill the void during evenings and winter months

• The Stars of 2019
• County Hub

After a rollicking summer featuring a maiden England World Cup win and a drawn Ashes series to rival 2005 for drama if not quite the quality, we ask ourselves once more how do we capitalise and get more kids into cricket?

Cricket in this country, once deemed a national sport to rival the winter game of football, still needs greater exposure if it is to recapture its former place in the country’s hearts and consciousness.

Back in the day, as soon as the goalposts came down in May, wickets were pitched in parks and on beaches and stumps chalked onto garage walls and gable ends. The game was in rude health in the provinces as well as in the public schools.

For those of us who played all day long, feeling the warmth of a summer breeze and the sun on our backs, the delights of cricket – our seasonal obsession - didn’t end there; even when powder puff street lamps succumbed to darkening skies and bad light finally stopped play.

There were other outlets for our mimicking of overs from Old Trafford’s Stretford End, sixes pulled into Lords’ Mound Stand and skiers snaffled in front of the enormous Gas Cylinders at The Oval.

We played indoors too and not just in galley kitchens that robbed the pitch of 75% of its 22 yards but exposed us to a ball reaching the “crease” - normally in front of the tumble dryer - at a speed, Lillee and Thompson wouldn’t have sniffed at. We didn’t always need a real bat and ball to re-enact the 1977 Centenary Test at the MCG or Botham’s Ashes.

No, in our bedrooms lived miniature cricket and cricketers; statuesque Gowers, Randalls and Boycotts and imaginary Marshalls, Garners and Crofts. We seldom had the cheek to knock at friends’ houses without a tabletop Gillette World Cup to be played out or, if the late evening was nigh and time short, a John Player League fixture in our pocket.

So gushingly did the blood of the greatest sport course through our veins, we feasted on a rich seam of cricket simulations which sufficed until we were again in the park or Peter West and Tom Graveney back on a windy old TV scaffold. Nothing to rival the virtual authenticity of PS4 lookalike Steve Smiths fidgeting his way through the Long Room but the reality of these games for us was in our imagination.

Of course, just like the many incarnations of England sides over the last 40 years, some were better than others. And two particularly standout.

^{Owzthat was absurdly simple}

Owzthat

This little bit of magic was the inspiration for this piece. What probably was our last family holiday earlier this month was illuminated by wine-filled balcony lunches culminating in games of Owzthat.

Admittedly sharing a sliver of my childhood met with a varied response from a wife who sledges me for fun over the washing up and an insanely competitive daughter who would metaphorically kick down the stumps a la Michael Holding when things don’t go her way. The tournament was soon rendered a three-hander to rival the World Series Cup when my cheating 21-year-old son staged a walk-off worthy of Inzamam Ul-Haq.

To the masterpiece of Owzthat itself.

A lid of a compact tin box of four-inches square (which doubles up nicely as a cigarette box) makes two claims. It has a fair entitlement to advertise as “The cricket game for all weathers” but goes further with the strapline “The pocket-sized game of the century.” That’s quite the bravado since Owzthat has been around since the days of Alan Knott, so competes with all games fashioned during a century when a stray shoelace could keep a child occupied for hours.

Officially the set “contains two plastic Owzthat rollers; imagine the last centimetre severed from the blunt end of a six-sided pencil, 10 plastic scoring counters (representing 10 wickets in an innings) and one rule sheet, not quite as extensive as the Laws of Cricket written over the 34 closing pages of Wisden.

Unlike with an IKEA flatpack you can dispense with the rule sheet. The game’s beauty is in its simplicity. Five of the six sides on the scoring dice register runs; quick singles, hurried twos, exhausting threes, fours creamed through the covers and gargantuan sixes. As the batsman, you accumulate just as you would at the popping crease – until the deadly rogue edge of the roller lands with “OWZTHAT” pointing to the sky.

Now, the bowler’s chance to turn his or her arm over. With “ball” in hand you have a 66.6666…..% chance of getting the decision (bowled, caught, LBW, or stumped) or the let down of the dice barking “not out”, or showing “no ball" - giving the batter a reprieve.

This moment of suspense rivals the very best of DRS and has scope for tipsy onlookers (cocky third umpires) to slur, “That’s a fair delivery. Can we please go to ball-tracking?” And then, “There’s no sign of bat on ball, can I have ultra-edge when you’re ready, please Kumar". All delivered in phony accents of the old Empire.

The format is as flexible as you like. One-wicket duels, one-innings games, or 20/20 through to the built-up ebb and flow of test matches for the interminably patient. If you’re a real nerd, each individual innings can feature the names of players past and present and be scored meticulously by a saddo in a floppy hat. Perhaps no-one will go as far as my teen self, wearing an arm guard and pads while “batting”.

Sadly, there’s a let-down in the latest edition which features light plastic dice which eliminates the skill involved in rolling the weighty old brass dice which, with a delicate touch, allowed one to build an innings. Instead of repetitively gathering runs apace in twos, fours and maximums almost all is left to chance; peril akin to facing Mitchell Johnson on a wearing pitch with uneven bounce. With a heavy element of luck now the main factor there are more appeals than you shake a stump at.

That said, the game retains much of its innocent charm.

“Owzthat?” Bloody brilliant, and when all the fun is exhausted, or the dice is eaten by the dog, that little tin caddie keeps your ciggies as dry as bone.

^{You could stage your own version of the Gillette World Cup with Subbuteo Cricket or Test Match}

Subbuteo Cricket

From the sublime Owzthat to the ridiculous attempt by Subbuteo to invade the world of cricket. Football Subbuteo works, despite a ball that dwarfs its tiny players and given the plethora of available team strips, unlikely bedroom finals where QPR meet Holland. Eddie Howe v Johann Cruyff was evenly matched until Howe fell from the kitchen table, was trodden on by my mum and kicked under the sideboard.

Subbuteo Cricket is crap; as unplayable as Shane Warne’s ball of the century that left Mike Gatting wondering who had stolen his biscuits. 

Visually the scene is set beautifully on a lush green baize any groundsman would be proud of. The anomaly is that the square and pitch are akin to the outfield, as Emerald green as the Irish fields of cricket’s newest test nation. Good help England if they’d batted this July against Tim Murtagh’s curveballs on a strip as lush as this. It is the definitive green seamer.

Nonetheless, for authenticity, nine fielders and a wicketkeeper grace the turf along with a bowler boasting a small wire triangle protruding from his backside. The bowler is the only figure built on the Subbuteo model of matchstick man on a wobble board - replete with his metal tail. That apart the game, until play starts, looks realistic.

An unnecessary irritant is that the “oval” – needlessly - isn’t circular, resembling one of Kerry Packer’s hastily assembled World Series grounds; a square with its rough edges shorn off.

Miniature stumps lie a scaled 22 yards from each other sitting on a small green base in the middle of the ground. Like the Subbuteo football pitch, a decent steam iron is required to iron out the rough edges before it’s smoothed lovingly onto a carpet - or an elevated table for sufferers of acute sciatica.

Two tiny rigid batsmen – possibly bigger than Lancashire’s diminutive 1970s icon Harry Pilling – occupy the crease.

But, neither of the minute batting figurines play a part. They stand motionless, merely symbolic leaving run-getting to the human hand, with an almost microscopic bat attached to a sundry horizontal handle which is held precariously between thumb and forefinger. Scientific it is not.

Any chances to score runs off the bat are at a premium, not merely down to the fiddliest swish of the blade imaginal. The main issue is the bowling, with the tiny red cherry delivered from a seat in the bowler’s metal appendage. Even the deftest flick of the paceman’s slender frame cartwheels the ball over his head in any direction making Steve Harmison’s errant first ball of the 2006-07 Ashes at the Gabba look as straight as a dye.

Resultantly, any score assembled by the batting side consists almost exclusively of monstrous wides and for the clumsier bowling hand full tosses over the boundary for six. It is a farce. The small plastic catching pouch in front of each fielder is completely redundant as the ball disappears to all parts, but the only rare bat on ball contact made near square leg or extra cover.

Given that Subbuteo is probably the most loved and universally played table football game, the cricket version is ludicrous and remembered by nobody bar the brand obsessives and those unfortunate enough to have endured its enormous, lingering frustration.

Any compensations? Well, as advertised on the box of the “Test Match Edition” the deluxe form includes miniature sightscreens, scoreboards, groundsmen with rollers, and spectators in deck chairs. Nice for the mantelpiece until the Mrs polishes them away and they drop to the floor and suffer the same tragic fate as QPR’s Eddie Howe.