The team assembled early this morning to prepare for our grand finale, a cricket tournament at the Rift Valley Sports Club featuring 10 schools, 20 teams (split equally between girls and boys) and over 200 students. Running a cricket festival can be a logistical nightmare, but we diligently prepared a fixture schedule starting at 9am and split into 30 minute matches. However we forgot to account for the phenomena that is ‘Kenya Time’, the first school arrived about 9.30am, the last rocked up around 10.40!
Drawing on support from local coaches, and some of the newly trained coaches from local schools we adapted as best we could. Dividing roles of umpire, scorer, team manager, tournament coordinator, and sometimes mere crowd controller we managed to fit all the games in.
The games were raucously entertaining. Bowlers charged in determined to bowl fast, batsmen swung from the hip and fielders charged round enthusiastically. The running between the wickets often verged on shambolic. The smiles on the children’s faces and natural exuberance of the kids will live with me a long time, as they tried to master a game that not long ago they had never seen.
The very first game I umpired summed up the unpredictability. In a 7 over, 8-a-side game the opening bowler cleaned 3 batsmen in his first four balls and ran out another in the very first over. By the last over the number eight batsman was launching 3 huge sixes over the bowlers head, his 36 not out leading the team to a score of 82/6 that saw them win on the last ball with 2 runs to spare.
At around 5pm we wrapped the tournament up with the 2 finals, erratic to the last the team that had been unbeaten all day were bowled out for 9, chasing what seemed an easy target of 44. We finished with a few presentations, handed out our remaining medals and prizes and launched into one final rendition of the ‘Lovely Lovely Cricket’ song. The day was a great success with 3 television crews from various Kenyan TV stations coming along to film sections.