ALSO SPRACH OUR MAN

The Presbyterian man never played on a Sunday. Despite loving the game being a top all-rounder - and there are less and less genuine pace bowling all-rounders these days - he felt that God deserved his time on the Sabbath, and as such he would not come near the Sunday cricket matches. His faith was absolute, and whilst other people thought it strange that he did not play on Sunday’s, he felt it more than strange that they should risk their eternal souls for the sake of a game that could be played on any day of the week.

Rules though are made to be broken though, and when our much delayed league-decider was moved to a Sunday, the Presbyterian Man had a choice to make. Did he dare let God down by playing in this crucial Sabbath match? Everyone expected that the team would lose out on his services, and possibly the league title as well. Years of evidence suggested that no matter how important the match was, our man would have to miss it. He would not even watch the Test Matches on television on a Sunday, and he yearned for the good old days when the Sabbath was a rest day in Test Cricket.

But something was different this time . . . the late start meant that he could go to church in the morning, and indeed the evening too if needed. His young daughter liked to watch the match and eat the left-over sandwiches, and he knew she was disappointed to miss out on an afternoon in the sun. Besides, was cricket really ever a sin? He knew other people in his church, elders even, who would play golf or watch sport on the television between church visits. Times had changed, and the team needed him. The Presbyterian Man was going to play.

*****

Cricket lends itself to abstract thinking, perhaps because of the amount of time the players spend doing nothing whilst waiting for something to happen. It also lends itself to great talkers, so when the opposition turned up for the match with a loud-mouth intent on giving everybody within earshot a piece of his personal philosophy of life, we should not perhaps have been too surprised.

“Let us get this show on the road; daylight’s wasting away while we wait! Life is too short to . . . ” His voice tailed off as he entered the visitors changing room, and the whole of the home side marked this loudmouth down as trouble. Things went badly for us as we lost the toss and struggled to 135 all out. It was between innings that the Presbyterian Man met the visiting loudmouth over a nice cup of tea. Who knows what the loudmouth had heard from our players during the match, but he set about winding our man up with a one-way tirade about cricket and Sundays . . .

“As I was telling that guy over there, it is hard to believe that we used to be forbidden to play on a Sunday. What is wrong with him anyway? Does he keep ducks or something, because that is all he seems to talk about. Anyway, how absurd is it that people used to think that there was a god up in the skies that looked down and cared about whether people played cricket on a Sunday or not. They locked up the swings and the stumps! It would be laughable if it were not so sad. The world keeps turning away even with Sunday cricket.” This was clearly a man who not only liked the sound of his own voice, but liked to know that other people were listening too. And we were.

“I mean, Nietzsche twigged that there was no god in the nineteenth century. Have you read any of his stuff? He said that God had died!” He paused, but got no response from our man. “He said we had made up God in our own image, and then killed him off when we no longer needed him. If you look at churches, they are nothing more than giant tombs in honour of our dead god . . . the message from Nietzsche was clear - God is DEAD.”

Still no response from the Presbyterian Man. He was being wound up inside, but his face betrayed no emotion. This was a personal affront, but he was just soaking it all up. We were all listening in and hoping the incident would spark a response, but all we saw was the same stony stare the visiting buffoon was getting. Something was about to happen though. I threw the Presbyterian Man the new ball, and watched as he hurled it down with more pace and fire than any of us had ever seen.

Wickets tumbled regularly, and suddenly we were back in the game. Next came the confrontation we had been waiting for as the Presbyterian Man came in to bowl to the visiting atheist who had taunted him between innings with his shocking religious irreverence. It was not much of a battle; our man smashed out his middle stump first ball with a big inswinging yorker, helping us reduce the opposition to an impossible 36-6. Victory would soon be ours, but there was still time for the best piece of sledging you could ever imagine. The Presbyterian Man ran right over to the departing batsman, looked him in the eye and pronounced with great calmness and certainty-

“I have a message from God for you - Nietzsche is dead but I still live.”