The Mighthy ICC - The Final Chapter

Tom Bentall is the last player in our line up: AKA Tom, Tommy. Nothing creative here.

Tom wasn't born in the conventional sense. He was found. One summer morn' back in the 80's when summers actually had sun in them, the then skipper found a little baby nestling in a pile of old pads in the Home changing room. It was Tom.
Not really.
But he may as well have been. His Dad has been playing for ICC for 170 years and all his children, upon birth, were brought along to the club and more or less raised there by cricketers, the spiders in the shower and feral rabbits. All Tom's formative years have been spent in the company of immense idiots. Which tells you all you need to know.
It also explains why his body cannot tolerate vitamins, minerals, fibre and the like as he has been weaned on a diet of cricket teas and whatever he could scavenge from the pav. His body now produces all the nutrients it needs from Cheese and Onion sanditches, Lemon Drizzle Cake, Cherry Bakewells, warm milky tea, spider's webs and 4 year old cans of lager.
Tom plys most of his trade (the trade being medium pace, batting, fielding, talking shite, untidy scoring and possessing a good arm) for our arch rivals. Shipbourne Cricket Club. That's right. Those bastards. However before you go taking against him, he plays mostly for their 2nd IX and as such is not tarred by the same arse-brush as their 1's indubitably are.
Come Sunday though and he will, like a salmon, return to his spawning ground and ply his trade for his alma mater. Right again. The Mighthy Ightham Sunday All-Stars. Which explains his presence in the team photo all those many posts ago.
Let's now examine Tom's cricketing skill set.
Bowling. Tall, gangly, uniquely (at ICC) aerodynamic, Tom is a decent bowler. To fit more closely into the team, he's only missing about 4 and a half stone and a big pair of wobbly man boobs (which are surprisingly off putting to batsmen when they're jangling up to the wicket).
Batting: Again. A decent bat. But continuous absence from the influence of such Ightham luminaries as Moodie, Alexander, Smart, Bridge, Smith, Austin and Mungo has resulted in a strange technique whereupon the ball is sometimes tapped gently back to the bowler instead of pretending one's bat is a sort of willow Large Hadron Collider with which to smash the ball into sub-atomic God particles or the ball is played along the ground instead of smote into the ionosphere and worst of all he keeps his eyes open at the moment of impact!
Some people.
Never mind. We'll have all that drummed out of him by August.
Fielding: In Tom's case it isn't really fielding. It is more a cloak and dagger secret op behind enemy lines. Like the Special Operations Executive during WW2 Tom 's mission should he choose to accept it (which he does) is to set Kent's village cricket pitches ablaze. Not in the style of Joe Austin, by appearing and disappearing and wandering off at will. No. Tom hides in plain site. He likes to give the oppo the impression that in fielding he is a cretinous moron. While most of us can give this impression with some ease, Tom has to do things like throw it in left handed or drop it when the ball is being returned to the bowler or the ever popular, simply fall over when nothing's happening. Then when the chips are down and the batsmen take a risky run, he whips it into his right hand and unleashes a very fast, very accurate throw to the stumps. In first class cricket this would be worth at least one run out every game. At ICC it pretty much always results in four overthrows.
If you've been following this blog as assiduously as I hope, you'll already have spotted why. The give away is the phrase 'very fast, very accurate throw to the stumps.'
There are several things wrong with this.
1) No one ever throws fast accurate throws to the stumps. As the team's wicket keeper I have grown used to throws hurtling over my head, bouncing just in front of my ankles, not actually reaching me, heading off on a compass bearing at least 27 degrees North West of the one it should be on.  In other words, as I'm not expecting it to arrive at the stumps, I'm probably standing somewhere else. Possibly chatting to someone about the drizzle. The ball will sail off to the boundary unhindered by human glove.
2) Even if I happened to have wandered near the stumps, the ball's sudden arrival in a place it's never been before would have rendered it completely out-of-context. In short, it would have confused the fuck out of me and I probably would have simply watched it sail past as I tried to work out what this mysterious sphere above the stumps actually was.
3) In the completely unlikely event that I actually tried to catch it and run the batsman out, it undoubtedly would have been going too damn fast for me to hang on to.
The result? Order is restored. The situation is normal. Mirth is provoked.
Tom: Shipbourne. Ightham. Shightham.