Dan Forman won the Wisden Writing Competition in 2024. Alan Bennett’s Baton, Forman’s award-winning piece, was published in the 2025 edition of the Wisden Almanack.
The day after our game, Mike Atherton in The Times quoted Alan Bennett’s The History Boys: “Pass the parcel. That’s sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That’s the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.” It was ten to six, a Sunday, mid-July. The final over: nine to win, eight to tie, eight wickets down, all results possible. Then the captain brings himself on to bowl. This doesn’t happen often. It hasn’t happened for at least 30 years. But today is different. Today is a little bit special. It is our 60th anniversary as a club – not quite to the day, but close enough. And we aren’t playing against one of our usual opponents. We are playing against each other: an Original Generation XI (maximum age seventy-something) against a Young Guns XI (minimum age nine).
Yet in many other ways it is a typical summer Sunday. We are playing at a pretty ground. A good tea has been taken, and a beer or two will be later – among those of drinking age, at least. Most importantly, the match has been played in true Sunday spirit: competitively, not least where father was playing against son, but with a keen eye on inclusion too. The art of captaincy here is to get everyone involved without losing control of the game. It’s a finely balanced thing, impossible to fathom for some, yet intuitively understood by every good Sunday skipper everywhere.
What makes this formula still work? From July 1964, somewhere between the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ third LP, to a time of the IPL and ChatGPT. If there is a secret, it might be something to do with the grounds or the teas. It’s definitely something to do with the camaraderie and the captaincy. But ultimately it’s intangible. As the captain once said of our club, no one quite knows why it works, but somehow it does. And somehow it is passed on from one generation to the next. Today’s two teams, representing different millennia, are still both recognisably playing the same sport, with the same love and the same spirit, however you want to define it.
If there is a secret, it is perhaps revealed in that final over. The captain brings himself on to bowl. No one minds. It is, as everyone instinctively recognises, at the same time surprising, fun, risky and also just the right thing to do. The donkey drops are duly despatched until, with two balls left, he produces a dot, then there’s a swing, a miss and a wicket. A draw from the jaws of defeat – but somehow also something more than that. A passing-on of Alan Bennett’s baton. Atherton was writing about Jimmy Anderson, as it happens. But it could just have easily been about us.
Dan Forman, a strategy and communications consultant, is secretary of the Mandarins Cricket Club, and a trustee of the Googly Fund.
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