XI plus extra man

In Competition No. 2398 you were invited to write an entertaining piece of prose incorporating a dozen given cricketing terms, but using them in a non-cricketing sense.

One competitor added a postscript: ‘I have not used the term “Chinaman” to refer to a native of that country as, according to Collins, that usage is now considered offensive.’ Accordingly, he appeared as a person in charge of the porcelain department in a shop. Can political correctness be more exquisitely expressed? The given words tended to elicit thoughts of crime and violence in you, but perhaps any dozen words would have the same effect, such is human nature. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and Peter Smalley has the extra fiver.

A nightwatchman found the body at 6 a.m., up by the dam at Encino. It was the Chinaman. He’d been there a while, maybe 48 hours. His left leg was a bloody stump, and something had chewed at his face, a vampire bat or one of those coyotes that slip in from the hills at night.