Disclaimer

This blog reflects personal views only and is written for general interest, mild amusement, and the documentation of one family’s increasingly unmanageable sporting logistics. It does not constitute coaching advice, selection policy, or an official statement from any tennis parent committee, cricket club, school WhatsApp group, or small governing body hiding behind an app.

For regular readers of pseudocystblog.com, it may come as a mild shock to discover that our son does, in fact, have hobbies outside tennis.

I know.
I was surprised too.

Given the overwhelming body of evidence on this blog, one could reasonably assume that his entire existence consists of hitting yellow balls, attending tournaments, and causing his parents to become amateur meteorologists every weekend. But no. Apparently the child has range.

Current portfolio of interests includes Martial Arts, tennis, piano, swimming, parkrun, tennis tournaments, board games and, just to keep our calendar from ever becoming readable again, cricket.

Now, for those living in the UK, cricket is not merely a sport in certain areas. It is somewhere between culture, local identity and a quiet summer obsession carried out in whites. The broad stereotype still holds that football dominates nationally, rugby has a particularly strong hold in parts of the north, Midlands, south-west and Wales, while cricket remains especially woven into counties like Somerset.

That said, football is still the most widely played and followed sport across England overall, so one must be careful not to start a regional civil war over one sentence. Somerset, meanwhile, very much does have a long cricket tradition, and Somerset County Cricket Club has one of the richest histories in the country.

Which brings us neatly to our latest revelation.

Last year our son did the whole Cricket All Stars thing, which seemed harmless enough at the time. A seasonal dalliance, we thought. A bit of bat, a bit of ball, a bit of standing around in a field wondering why everyone is clapping politely. But no. From there he joined Taunton Vale Cricket Club, because apparently one gateway activity into organised sport is never enough.

Over the winter they have been running sessions for the keen children. Naturally, our son is keen. In fact, “keen” may now be his resting state. This is made even worse—or better, depending on your appetite for more driving—by the fact that three of his classmates are also involved. Nothing fuels commitment quite like your friends being there too.

At the moment he is training every other Sunday in a developmental group that includes the U11 girls’ team and a mixed collection of 10 to 15 boys and girls from what can only be described as the seriously keen brigade. The younger lot train with the soft ball, while the U11 girls are already using the hard ball, which is no small matter whatsoever. Frankly, some of those girls bowl with the sort of intent that makes grown adults reconsider their life choices.

This is where cricket starts to become interesting.

Or confusing.

Possibly both.

One thing that struck us is that there does not appear to be a local U10 league around Taunton, while nearby structures do offer junior cricket at that age. The Taunton and District Youth Cricket League currently highlights age groups beginning at Under 11, whereas Ilton fields an Under 10 team in the Mid Wessex Cricket League. So this was not parental imagination or a post-training hallucination brought on by too much squash and weak coffee.

That does create an interesting little quirk. If you are a keen U10 around Ilton, there may be more obvious access to age-group competitive cricket than there is in the Taunton setup. Whether that translates into a massive long-term developmental advantage I shall leave to wiser cricketing minds, but in practical parent terms it means one thing: more chances to play actual matches, which is usually quite useful if your child enjoys, well, playing.

As it happens, our son had already played a cup match for Ilton on one occasion last year. So the idea was not entirely outlandish. With summer approaching and various clubs inevitably looking for children who can hold a bat the right way round and remain enthusiastic for more than eight minutes, the question quietly emerged:

SHould he play for Ilton this year?

At this point I naturally consulted one of the great informal strategic minds of our time: James Deem.

Avid readers of this blog will know James already. He and I discuss many things—tennis, sport, current affairs, the general decline of common sense—and between us we have solved quite a lot of problems that nobody official has yet had the courtesy to ask us about. It is frankly astonishing how many governing bodies continue to operate without our input.

Still, on the cricket matter we were, as usual, entirely sensible.

Could our son play for Ilton this year?
Would he enjoy it?
Would this lead to yet another sports app being forced onto my phone?

After speaking to our son—who, predictably, was immediately keen—we decided the answer was yes.

So he will join Ilton this year.

This, of course, led to the next great modern parenting milestone: I downloaded Spond.

There are few moments in life more sobering than realising that your child’s sporting development is now partly controlled by another app sending cheerful notifications at inconvenient moments. Still, I now have all the dates in the palm of my hand, which is either progress or the final administrative stage before complete surrender.

And so here we are.

A child who was already doing Martial Arts, tennis, piano, swimming, parkrun, board games and the occasional act of academic resistance at home has now added club cricket with proper intent. One begins to suspect he sees the family calendar not as a scheduling tool but as a challenge.

Will cricket become the new tennis?

Probably not. Let us not get carried away. Tennis still has a very firm grip on proceedings, not least because it appears in this household with the regularity of bills and weather complaints. But cricket is clearly no passing whim either. It has moved beyond “nice summer activity” and into the more serious category of “we may need new kit and a revised transport strategy.”

So yes, dear readers: cricket blog entries are likely coming.

Many of them.

I had better start learning the lingo before I embarrass myself entirely. At present my cricket vocabulary is somewhere between “nice shot” and “that looked out to me,” which I appreciate may not satisfy seasoned observers of the game.

Still, optimism remains high.

The child is keen.
The clubs are welcoming.
The summer looks suspiciously busy.
And I, once again, appear to have signed up for a whole new sporting subplot without fully understanding the rules.

Standard parenting, really.