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Photos by Ben Liney http://www.benliney.com (all rights reserved) For my last birthday, family and friends chipped in for an experience of learning how to make my own cricket bat with Lachlan Fisher at his Williamstown Road workshop in Footscray. Not only … Continue reading
Credo Cricket’s Phil Yew talked with Urban Seed Director, Marcus Curnow about his recent cricket adventures:
So Marcus the last we heard you were playing cricket with ‘gangsters’ and Hollywood Execs in LA. What were the cricketing highlights from your UK travels?
Well the lowlight, without doubt, was having the Aussies lose the Ashes at the same moment I was arriving at Heathrow. Not great timing lads! The highlight was getting to play at the Honorable Artillery Ground.
Why?
It’s an amazing paddock near Finsbury Circus, smack bang in the middle of London and so surrounded by buildings that I couldn’t even get a mobile phone signal. It’s perhaps the oldest known venue for cricket, which apparently ceased for a time there in 1780 after a bout of match fixing…. Perhaps they sent the culprits over to Australia with the First Fleet because the MCC and the Lords ground took over from about then.
So how did someone of your cricketing ability get to play at such a distinguished venue?
Now, go easy…I was a guest of Cricket for Change, (C4C) and that was my real reason for being there and the real highlight. They are a fantastic, charity that has been running community cricket programs in the UK since they began as a response to the Brixton riots in 1981. They are a great mix of cricketing characters who have basically made it their mission to be at the forefront of each innovation in community cricket. They’ve run coaching apprenticeships, leagues, and participation programs with at risk youth, in schools and prisons and with multi-ethnic groups from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. They have in many ways pioneered much of women’s and disability cricket at grassroots and higher levels in the UK and now increasingly overseas.
It is possible that cricket, a game venerated all over the Commonwealth, is older than currently thought. In fact, Jesus may very well have played the game (or a similar bat and ball contraption) as a child himself, according to an ancient Armenian manuscript.
Long before the English launched cricket some 300 years ago, similar games were being played as early as the 8th century in the Punjab region, Derek Birley writes in his Social History of English Cricket.
But an Armenian scholar says there is good reason to believe that similar games were played in the Middle East long before that time.
Dr Abraham Terian, recently a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities, points to a rare manuscript as his source.
He notes that in the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, translated into Armenian in the 6th century from a much older lost Syriac original, a passage tells of Jesus playing what may well be the precursor of cricket, with a club and ball.
Terian discovered the manuscript more than a decade ago at the Saint James Armenian Monastery in the Old City of Jerusalem.
His English translation of the book has been published by Oxford University Press.
He says he has now identified the same passage in a couple of other manuscripts of the same gospel of which some 40 copies exist in various archival collections in Europe and the Middle East, including the oldest copy now in Yerevan, the capital of the Armenian Republic.
The latter manuscript is dated 1239, whereas the undated Jerusalem manuscript is considerably later.
Quoting from his Armenian source, Terian says the gospel relates how Jesus, at the age of nine, had been apprenticed to a master dyer named Israel in Tiberias, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
‘Jesus is instructed to watch Israel’s house and not leave the place while the master goes away on a tour to collect clothes to be dyed. But no sooner has Israel left the house, than Jesus runs out with the boys,” Terian says.
‘The most amazing part of the story of the nine-year-old Jesus playing a form of cricket with the boys at the sea shore, is that he would go on playing the game on water, over the sea waves.”.
He gives the following translation: ‘He (Jesus) would take the boys to the seashore and, carrying the playing ball and the club, he would go over the waves of the sea as though he was playing on a frozen surface, hitting the playing ball. And watching him, the boys would scream and say: ‘Watch the child Jesus, what he does over the waves of the sea!’ Many would gather there and, watching him, would be amazed.”
Terian says the story echoes allusions to Jesus’ walking on the Sea of Galilee, as told in the gospels.
‘But the apocryphal story shows that for a ball game even Jesus would forget work and would go to have fun with the boys!” he says.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/messiah-caught-on-a-wet-wicket/2008/08/08/1218139080359.html
– AAP, August 8th, 2008….
