Not cricket

In Competition No. 2500 you were invited to describe a modern-day Test match in the style of Sir Henry Newbolt’s ‘breathless hush’ poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’.
Summoned by the holidaying Dr Lucy to provide columnar cover, your locum tenens was initially worried that his prescription would not tick the right boxes, float enough boats. It was a big ask, but you played a blinder, whacking Sleazey, Sledgey, Streaky and that prat Silly Fancy-Dressy all round the park. Best entries were the 24-liners, which adapted the poet’s conceit of cricket as metaphor for the Great Game of war and indeed life itself (one can’t imagine such stuff being written after 1914). The winners below get £30 each, while Man of the Match and trouserer of the extra fiver — by a stump’s width from Bill Greenwell — was Basil Ransome-Davies with a dark dactylic diatribe.

There’s a drunken mob in the ground tonight —
The air is opaque with ganja smoke
And the sledging taunts of the men in white
And the umpiring beyond a joke.
Bunce