State of England

Mike Burgess is a particular kind of Englishman. He doesn't just want to stop cricket being played on a ground where it has been played for the last 169 years. He wants to change the laws of the game, too. 

Four years ago, he bought a cottage by the Shamley Green CC ground. Presumably he saw it when he viewed the house. It's quite hard to miss. The estate agent probably even remarked upon it, in the way that estate agents tend to do. Despite the fact he 'likes cricket' he appears astonished to discover that the ball is hard and sometimes gets hit out of the ground entirely. His house was struck three times last season and once this. 

The club have a policy of replacing any broken windows or roof tiles, and also offer net protection for ground floor windows. Not enough for him; he wants 25-foot nets erected to create 'a safe environment'. More than that, he wants any batsman who hits the ball onto his property to be given out. 

It's been one of the great joys in life to have played on grounds like Shamley Green. I've played at Tilford, where the dressing rooms are on one side of the road and the pitch on the other, and where the picture-postcard pub sits at one side of the green, beckoning; Frensham, a little bowl of a ground with a boundary so short an edge over slip could sometimes carry for six; Hartley Wintney, where roads just wide enough for a car cut around the boundary and painted houses sit on the other side; Farnham, halfway up the hill by the castle, where parked cars get peppered; Rowledge, Churt, Send... grounds without number where cricket has been played for hundreds of years and you can feel the ghosts. 

Mike Burgess might have a legal point, but he hasn't got a moral one, and he has no license over the laws of the game. Nets are one thing. That's arguable. But requiring a change in the law... You've got to have some nerve to ask for that. Especially when you 'like cricket'.