Identifying ways to unravel cricket's mystery

At last Thursday's women's one-day international between Ireland and Pakistan, your correspondent was accosted at the tea-break by an Australian tourist, Greg McNally, from Sydney. Ireland's innings was over by the time he arrived, and he was not too pleased; "I read in The Irish Times this morning that the match was on today, but it didn't say where it was being played," he said.

I pointed out that the venue - Sydney Parade - had been given in the newspaper. "Yes, but how in hell are visitors like me supposed to know just where Sydney Parade is?," he replied

Game, set and match. We take it for granted that everybody knows automatically what we know. Later, on mature reflection (as somebody or other said) I began to think that this attitude cuts right across the board in cricket.

For instance, cricket must be one of the few, if not the only, team game in the world in which the players do not wear numbers or any other means of identification, which is fine and dandy for those who happen to know each individual, but a total mystery for those who don't.

When numbers - and names - are perfectly acceptable in the cricket World Cup, why are they also not de rigueur at all levels of the game? At any senior club match in Ireland on every weekend throughout the summer, vital matters like who is bowling to whom and who held a catch and who cut off a potential boundary and what is the wicketkeeper's name are complete mysteries to everybody except those in the know.

The Clontarf club, to its credit, produces programmes for its more important home matches, and also does more to publicise international games staged at Castle Avenue than the Irish Cricket Union does. But in these high-tech times, it would be simple and cheap for all clubs to run off a scorecard for their home games.

What club will become the first to make an enterprising move and (a) put numbers and/or names on the backs and fronts of its players' shirts and (b) produce a scorecards with and full Christian names and surnames (no double or treble initials, please), and then find (preferably) a local sponsor to back these simple promotional efforts?

More badly-needed sponsors would be drawn to the game and more and more people would become familiar with the cricketers.

Or do those of us involved in cricket want to keep the game to ourselves for the foreseeable future? Meantime, next Saturday, when North County contest their first-ever Leinster Senior Cup final - sponsored by Conqueror - at Milverton, happens to mark the anniversary of the death of one of the club's and Fingal's cricketing legends, "Ranger" Mooney. He was man of the match when North County won its first Senior Cup game, beating Railway Union in the first round in 1990.

His son Paul, now an established international player, will be a key man against Clontarf on Saturday. And no doubt "Ranger", along with all the rest of the cricket-loving faithful departed, will be watching it all, ball by ball, "as the run-stealers flicker to and fro, to and fro", in the lovely rural setting of Milverton.