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CoriNthiaN CriCket Thinking outside the box I am very fond of Malcolm, the progenitor and obsessive captain of our occasional cricket team, but I did become slightly concerned about the future arc of our relationship when, shortly after he founded the team, he started sending me texts, often late at night, asking me for my shoe size, my inside leg measurement, and a whole range of other vital (and mildly embarrassing) statistics. It was only after some time that he divulged to me that he was spending his spare moments scouring the internet and local sports shops for cheap cricket kit. When he saw a bargain, he would try to marry it up with one of the squad; hence the odd requests for personal information. In truth, given our enormous range of bizarre shapes and sizes, I imagine it would have been a much greater challenge to go out and find something that would not fit at least one of us. The nadir came when I arrived home one evening to find a plastic bag hung on my front door containing an early birthday present from Malcolm. It looked like a hammock for a pet hamster, but the packaging informed me that it was in fact a ‘cricketer’s support’. Admittedly, I had complained a few weeks before that, when batting, even wearing two pairs of underpants failed to keep my box in place properly, sometimes leaving me with what appeared to be a third kneecap halfway down one thigh, a (frankly disappointingly) long way away from its intended contents. I had not just volunteered this little piece of W W W. V i Va L E W E s . C o M s p o r t personal information to the team willy-nilly, as it were, but rather had deployed it to parry the lighthearted, yet valid, criticism of my dismal attempts to run between the wickets, which were said to be reminiscent of Danny DeVito’s portrayal of the Penguin in Batman Returns. I confess, there had been times when I was at risk of being lapped by my batting partner. This accoutrement, claimed Malcolm, was the answer to my problems. But to me it looked like something that normally would only be worn by a much younger, fitter man, who also had a six-pack, a litre of extra virgin olive oil rubbed all over his twitching muscles, and an inebriated hen party screaming for more. Damn it, the thing even had a pocket at the front where the ladies could shove their moist £20 notes. I found myself somewhat perplexed. Should I, a middle-aged married man, be receiving specialist underwear as a gift from another middle-aged married man? And, if so, what was I meant to give him in return for his birthday later in the year that could adequately express (a) my gratitude, and (b) my firm conviction that a line had to be drawn somewhere and I definitely did not want him buying me any more foundation garments in the future? And, most perplexing of all, given that he had not sent one of his usual texts, how on earth did he know that it would fit me? ‘Plum’ Photo: rob read 9 7