Benji and the Cricket Match

The under-twelve neighbourhood cricket match happened every September, and it mattered.

Not to the cricket authorities or anyone who kept official records — this was Cliffside versus Waterford and it had been happening for eleven years and there was no trophy, just a scorebook that had been kept by the same retired schoolteacher since the beginning. But it mattered to the children who played and the families who came and the people who had been watching it since the first year and had opinions.

Clevie was Cliffside’s opening bowler, which he considered the highest honour of his life thus far.

Omar kept wicket and did not get enough credit for it.

Nadine did not play cricket but came to every match and had stronger opinions about the Cliffside fielding positions than most of the players.

Benji had circled the pitch four times on Saturday evening and sat at the wicket nearest the road for two hours, and when Clevie came by at seven in the morning on Sunday to do a final practice, Benji was still there.

“Morning,” Clevie said.

Benji did not move from the wicket.

“It’s match day,” Clevie said. “We need the pitch.”

Benji looked at the pitch.

Clevie looked at the pitch.

It looked like a pitch. Rolled and marked, the crease lines white, the outfield cut. It looked fine.

Benji looked at Clevie.

“What?” Clevie said.

Benji looked at the pitch again.

Clevie went and got the others.

“It looks like a pitch,” Clevie said again.

“Everything looks like what it is,” Nadine said, “until you know it isn’t.”

She walked the length of the pitch with her eyes down. Benji walked beside her, and at approximately the eight-yard mark he stopped and sat.

Nadine crouched.

The surface here was slightly different — not visibly, but to the touch. She pressed with one finger. The ground gave more than it should have for a rolled pitch.

She pressed again, in a line.

The soft section was about two feet wide and ran across the pitch at an angle.

“Water,” she said. “Something under here. A pipe or—” she stood “—or deliberate.”

“Someone watered the pitch?” Omar said.

“Soaked it. Underneath. The surface dried out again but the sub-layer is saturated.” She stood. “If a ball lands here and bounces, it’ll kick unpredictably. A fast delivery on a soft spot is genuinely dangerous.”

Clevie was looking at the spot with an expression that had moved past competitive concern into something more personal. He was eleven and he had been bowling for three years and he knew what happened when a ball landed badly.

“Who would do this?” he said.

“Someone who doesn’t want Cliffside to win,” Omar said. “Or—”

“Someone who wants Waterford to win specifically,” Nadine said.

“Is there a difference?”

“Yes. One is wanting us to lose. The other is having a stake in Waterford winning.”

The match was due to start at ten. It was currently seven-fifteen. The pitch supervisor — Mr. Duncan, who had kept the scorebook and managed the pitch for all eleven years — arrived at seven-thirty for his pre-match check.

He found three children and a dog at the eight-yard mark.

“Reid,” he said. “What are you doing on the pitch.”

“Mr. Duncan,” Omar said carefully. “We think there’s a problem with the surface.”

Mr. Duncan walked to the spot.

He pressed.

He pressed again.

He stood up slowly with the expression of a man who has just understood something he didn’t want to understand.

“When did you find this?” he said.

“Benji was here last night,” Nadine said. “He waited until we came.”

Mr. Duncan looked at the dog. Benji looked back.

“Who has access to the ground?” Omar asked.

“The club committee. The groundskeeper — that’s Old Percy, he’s been sick for two weeks. The neighbouring properties.” He paused. “And anyone who came over the fence.”

“There’s a gate at the far end,” Clevie said. “I saw it on Friday. It wasn’t there before.”

“What gate?”

“A new latch on the back fence. The kind you can open from outside if you know the angle.”

Mr. Duncan walked to the back fence.

There was a new latch.

He turned around. “Show me who fitted this,” he said, to Benji, which surprised him slightly as he said it, but he had found that this was how conversations with this particular dog seemed to go.

Benji walked to the far corner of the ground and sat beside a section of fence where the grass was disturbed — not recently, this week, but recently enough. Boot prints in the soft earth beside the fence post.

Two sets. Coming in and going out.

There was a Waterford man named Desmond who had been known to care more about the match than was strictly reasonable. This was general knowledge in the community. He had played in the first match eleven years ago, when the teams were under-sixteen, and he had never quite let go of the fact that Waterford had lost that year.

Sergeant Peart, when he heard the story, said he would have a conversation with Desmond, and he said it in the tone that meant this was not going to be a pleasant conversation for Desmond.

The pitch was addressed: Mr. Duncan had a supply of pitch-drying compound that he used for rain delays, and by nine o’clock the soft section had been treated and re-rolled and tested and was, if not perfect, playable and safe.

Cliffside won by fourteen runs.

Clevie took three wickets and was insufferably pleased about it for the remainder of the afternoon.

Omar stumped two batsmen, for which he received one third of the congratulations Clevie received, which he noted in his notebook with commentary.

Nadine had positioned herself exactly where she had calculated the ball would most often be hit, and she was right about this four times, and each time she retrieved the ball and returned it with the efficiency of someone who had studied the game without playing it.

“You should play,” Clevie told her.

“I know,” she said. “I prefer watching.”

“Why?”

“Because when I watch, I see everything. When I play, I see only my part.”

Clevie thought about this. “That’s a reasonable cricket philosophy,” he said.

“It’s a philosophy generally,” she said.

Benji watched the match from the boundary, seated, and did not move except at the end when Cliffside’s last run was scored and the score confirmed, at which point he stood up, stretched, and walked off the ground in the manner of a dog whose work was done and who was now going home.

The groundskeeper, Mr. Duncan, watched him go.

“Eleven years I’ve been running this match,” he said to nobody in particular. “Never had a dog catch a pitch problem before.”

“He’s very particular about things being right,” Nadine said.

“Is that what you call it?”

“That’s one word for it,” she said.