Refusing to walk

What would make the same two groups of people –okay, men, mainly – go away together for 40 years' running? It might have something to do with playing sport

Twice this year already, I have flown on budget airlines to places where I have eaten the kind of food I never eat, stayed in rundown or old-fashioned hotels, rested my head on thin pillows, sometimes in the same room as bloke snoring loudly, had unsatisfactory showers and chaotic travel arrangements and I’ve not been able to choose where I dine, drink or spend my leisure time.

It sounds like the definition of a holiday from hell. Any sensible person would be straight on TripAdvisor vowing retribution and demanding restitution. But no, as I say, I have put myself through this twice in 2026 alone. What’s more, I’ve been doing this for four decades and have not the slightest intention of stopping.

Why? Because they have been some of the best trips of my life in the company of groups of people I like immensely, even when they drive me mad and I do the same to them.

Welcome, as the Daily Mail headline might go, to the world of the sports tour.

I play for two teams: the Racing Club de Blackheath (football) and, a bit less regularly, the White City All Stars (cricket). WCAS just completed its 42nd tour; Blackheath will, I hope, get to its 40th in 2027. That’s a lot of air miles, grass stains, bus journeys, sore limbs, sore heads, singalongs, feats both glorious and not, milling about, shouts of ‘kitty!’ when the drinks have to be paid for and ‘where’s xxx???’ (fill in name of a regularly missing player as we wait on the bus).

Before I go on, let me pay a heartfelt tribute to the organisers of these tours. It’s a task I have managed to sidestep with the deftness of the great Charles ‘Charlie’ Charles. But these organisers, if only in this one and very specific respect, are saints. The WhatsApp group had made life a bit easier for them, but corralling a dozen or so shilly-shallying, late-paying, last-minute cancelling ageing muppets into some semblance of a competitive team is an accomplishment that needs to be acknowledged. There is a place in heaven for sports team organisers.

For the first time (I think) we brought in a tour operator for the last Racing Club expedition, the massively worthy and well qualified Mark Lawther of Experience Albania. But there was still a lot for Hough, the long standing general of the RCdeB op, to do.

The cricket tour is a bit easier, as it goes to the same country (Ireland) every year: we usually stay at the same places and play the same teams. But it is a rare pre-tour thread that does not ring to the plaintive cries of ‘anyone know a decent bowler?’ or ‘is there a bus from Kilkenny to the airport on a Sunday morning?’

What about the WAGS? That shorthand for ‘Wives and Girlfriends’, made famous by the exploits of the England team’s partners in the 2006 World Cup, is, I understand, considered a bit demeaning in some quarters. But the Blackheath WAGS, a constant and growing part of the touring team, are happy enough to own it. The White City WAGS largely choose to stay at home.

Full-time champagne in the early 90s and pre-match in Vlore, Albania this May. Can you spot the four Blackheath players ((including the author) who are in both pix?

Next year, The Racing Club de Blackheath, will, we hope, embark on our 40th annual tour. The destination is the subject of much debate. We are not betting types, which is just as well as the market is eminently riggable, but at present I’d say Armenia is a clear favourite, with Uganda and Senegal creating some interest among bolder punters.

I have just thrown in a late and exciting runner into the field: Palestine and the West Bank.

Do join in. Here, for context, is the full list of countries we have visited on tour: Netherlands, Italy, West Germany (RIP), East Germany (RIP), Poland, France, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (RIP), Estonia, Latvia, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Croatia, Cuba, Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Nepal, Myanmar (Burma), India and Albania.

We have revisited two countries – Poland and Austria – and for a few years we played in an annual tournament in France in a region expressly chosen not to suit our brand of south London parks football: Champagne.

Criteria for other tours emerged. We favoured countries that had just been through some political cataclysm and had emerged hopefully on the other side. Many of our countries justified that hope, although the likes of Estonia, Latvia and Poland look anxiously over their shoulders at a Blackheath destination that has fallen back into dark times (Russia). The same is true of Myanmar and Cuba and was, until recently, of Syria. But the tour history justifies the faith of believers in factfulness adherents like me. A 1970s version of Blackheath would have been pretty much confined to western Europe.

(For more on why we should take a sunny view of travel and the opening-up of the planet, go here).

I’ve described the Blackheath tours, rather grandly, as offering a pitchside view of history. You sometimes need a lens to compare places, economies and cultures. For the same period we have been touring, The Economist has been comparing Big Macs as a way of discovering the real prices of things around the world: the principle being that the Big Mac is almost ubiquitous.

But football is ubiquitous. We can say that now that the tiny island nation of Nauru, the world’s third-smallest country, looks like getting its first football pitch. (It is also changing its name to Naoero, rejecting a spelling designed to make life easier for their former colonial overlords. Renaming places is something we had better cover in the blog another time).

Cricket, and cricket in Ireland, is another lens. Far from ubiquitous, that sport, and a word also very associated with a former colonial overlord – my lot, the British.

Sport, and the need to privilege national sports like Gaelic football and hurling, was at the heart of Ireland’s independence dream. And when I first started visiting the Anglo-Irish homelands of the south east in the early 1990s, cricket was a sport very much associated still with the old gentry. A fair number of our hosts own crumbling mansions, have grand lineages, went to Oxbridge.

That is changing.

Local sports still dominate. In the middle of an over in Lismore the umpire called out to the batter – Mayo won the all-Ireland! It was a rare case, surely to be recorded in Wisden, of Lifted Curse Stops Play.

But in this century, Ireland has become a more than respectable international cricket nation and the sides we play are now much strengthened with players from south Asia. I was bowled out that day by a brilliant 12-year-old leg spinner (not that he had to be that brilliant to bowl me, an irredeemable tailender). He is from a Sri Lankan family happily settled in this windy corner of Munster where there is a lot of employment in the pharmaceutical sector (that’s not a euphemism: Panadol produces 6.5 billion tablets here). His mum shouted encouragement and advice from the boundary while his younger sister, barely twice as high as the stumps, made a creditable show with a bat before walloping a pull-shot straight into a cousin’s midriff. Here, in a town where the Duke of Devonshire still owns the castle and lots of land, was a new Ireland and – I know, I know, this is my sunny, optimistic, Factfulness, Blairite side coming out again – surely comfortable in its own skin.

We are family: Lismore cricket ground

At the Red House pub afterwards we got talking about a grand hotel opposite that looked not quite shuttered up. It houses asylum seekers.

There was a protest in 2023 when they moved in. There have been trouble and protests across Ireland.

But Jane Jermyn of Lismore for All had made friends with the hotel occupants: ‘We drew up a list of what is available and some of the activities that will be starting up again …and we gave the list to the two women who came to our meeting so they can find out what is happening in the town and what people might be interested in joining’.

More young cricketers in the Lismore team soon, I think. When you travel to or move permanently to a new place, you seek for common ground. People write some silly things about games. But the pitch, the game, the rules, is that common ground we seek.

Who would think it’s all over?

The headline on this piece is ‘refusing to walk’. It’s a cricket reference. Sometimes, when a batter is given out, he or she refuses to leave the field. They don’t bow to the inevitable, whatever the facts of the situation might be. It’s a test of honesty. For we four-decade tourers, it’s a sign of defiance – or denial.

I also have in mind the question Blackheath players, who are mostly in their 60s, get asked a lot: so, is it walking football you play?’

It is not. As our most senior player likes to say, ‘shoot me first’.

Both my sports teams have players who have now entered their seventh decades. They won’t stop playing and nor will any of us that I can foresee. We refuse to walk. The football is a bit harder than the cricket as it involves running around and physical contact. It also gets harder to find opposition teams of a similar vintage. But we manage.

My father, a very good rugby player and a fair golfer, had given up both sports by his mid 40s. We soldier on, driven less by diet supplements and exercise machines than good old peer group pressure. I’m sure the Rolling Stones have the same dynamic. If any one of Mick, Keith or Ronnie felt like giving up touring now they are, after all, in their 80s, the others would stop. But as long as the other buggers keep at it, w will too.

The secret of happiness

I once commissioned an article where a writer interviewed the then foremost academic in a small but interesting field of human psychology: happiness. It was a good piece, but I thought the writer hadn’t asked the obvious question. What, the readers wanted to know, was the secret to being happy?

The writer went back to the Prof and he came back with the answer.

Scottish country dancing.

At least, the Prof explained, it was for him. Happiness is subjective. He explained that he liked music and the challenge of moving your limbs in time to the beat creates something called ‘flow’.

I thought about that on our last night of the Racing Club de Blackheath’s tour of Albania. We were in the function room of the Hotel Partner in the resort of Vlore. We’d played a match earlier and the home team, Flamurtari, invited us for dinner. The DJ played the club anthem and soon all the players, some of them veritable legends of Albanian football, were on the floor, arms on one another’s shoulders stepping in time as well-drilled as Arsenal’s famous back four. (Quick nod to The Full Monty for that analogy).

A couple of our legendary players joined in with more enthusiasm and energy than coordination: Chris L, in a bright yellow suit, throwing mad shapes, Simon F, bouncing up and down like a punk version of a village dance. Then we were all on the floor. A tenor singer came on and belted out Delilah.

I took a breather and a moment to look at everyone’s faces. There was something people don’t talk about enough in travel articles. I am not exactly saying that Albanian folk dancing is the secret of happiness. But everyone was happy. It was a great night.

Songs that take you places

When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease

By Roy Harper

Let’s be honest: Roy Harper’s grasp of cricketing terminology is pretty shaky. A new-ball sting in the tail? A ball spinning in (or out) of an umpire’s pocket? Still, no song better captures the elegiac quality of the game, especially on a summer’s afternoon in England when the shadows are lengthening and the players are well past the bloom of their youth.

The White City All Stars WhatsApp group messages archive now has a growing number of announcements metaphorically framed in black.

Only this week the columnist Rod Liddle died. ‘Sad news,’ said our skipper, Peter. ‘He turned out for us against Horningsham [a village in Wiltshire long connected with WCAS] a few times when he lived in the west country.

‘Undistinguished no 9 bat, did not bowl’.

He was, nevertheless, one of us. Now he’s walked.¹

The full MARKLANDS playlist is here.

Let’s end with a final word from Father Time

Cricket is a game that lends itself to contemplation as you spend many hours moving, or being moved, from position to position on a field; or sitting on the boundary watching what for want of a better word I will call the action unfold.

So it was on the Irish tour in those many idle moments that I got to composing match reports in the style of great Irish writers. James Joyce did Halverston and Thomastown (he wrote about the ‘butterfingerly clusterfeck’ that characterised White City’s performance in the field) , before handing over to Samuel Becket for the Lismore game. (Both writers were mad-keen on cricket, by the way).

I don’t know what it was – the restless wind, the aching limbs, the end of another tour, the peculiar brain chemistry sparked by late nights, exposure to sunshine and Guinness? – or just re-reading Waiting for Godot etc – but an elegiac note crept into the Lismore report.

For those not aware, Father Time is the figure that looms over the weathervane at Lord’s cricket ground. He is shown removing the bails at the end of the day’s play. Our own Father Time, the immortal newspaper editor Roger Alton, requires some editing in this version of the blog is to retain its family-friendly status.

SCENE: A windswept field in Waterford…

In the distant gloom, Father Time sits perched on a shooting stick.

FATHER TIME: F$cking hell, just f*cking get on with it.

We hear a disembodied voice.

VOICE: We will, we promise to get on with it.

But what if it is really against us? What then?

….

White City chase their target.

THE SKIPPER: We have time. Coffin-kitbags of time. Wait for the right ball. Wait until Revelation if necessary. Watch. Wait.

GET A MOVE ON, CITY!!!!!

FATHER TIME: Fast or slow. Over or round. How many left? We’re all f*cked.

….

The players trudge off. The wind howls louder. The skies darken.

PLAYER A: Should have brought a jumper.

PLAYER B: Could have.

PLAYER C: Didn’t.

DISEMBODIED VOICE: Is 142 enough? Is enough a number? Ah, that’s no score. Not these days.

…

FATHER TIME (summing up): We are all f!ckety-f&cked to the power of f*cking ten.

Still, it’s been a lovely tour and the teas have been simply delightful.

But now the time has come to look at the time. It is later than you think. In the shadows Gary [our eternal bus driver] stands ready to ferry us to our inevitable and final destination.

It’s time for a Guinness.

Sign at Dublin airport

1. ‘The Skipper’, or Peter Oborne has also written this piece about Liddle in Middle East Eye. I agree with Peter, and with other commentators like David Yelland, when he says that admiration for his talent should not mask revulsion for the views he often expressed. Was he just, as columnists will, trying to stoke outrage to get a reaction? Maybe. That maybe makes it worse.