Graham Bucknall owns the Ship Inn in Elie, Scotland. Or maybe he owns a cricket team that happens to pour beer. “I still don’t know which,” he said, clearing seaweed and tamping down sand. James Hookway’s page-one story in Tuesday’s Journal visits the world’s only cricket club that plays every home match on the beach.
Beer breaks and flip-flops
The pub has fielded a team for more than 30 years, taking on visitors from across the U.K. Highlights this summer: the yearly match against the Marylebone Cricket Club, which looks after Lord’s Cricket Ground in London, and a grudge match with Earlsferry, the village across the bay.
Nobody takes it too seriously. During what other sports would call hydration breaks, staff carry pitchers of beer onto the sand. The umpire works in shorts and flip-flops. Over the PA, Bucknall’s wife, Rachel, a classically trained singer, drifts through the scores — “A swing and a miss. Oh dear!” — and the odd bulletin about a dog making off with a ball.
Then there are the house rules. Catch a ball in the beer garden as a spectator, and the prize is your height in beer, or in soft drinks. Before play, a steel roller towed by a quad bike packs down the sand as the tide goes out.
An old game, new fans
Scotland long shrugged off cricket as a game for the English upper classes. Now it’s reviving, and the theories vary: English transplants like Bucknall, who moved north from Yorkshire, immigrants from cricket-mad nations of the old British Empire, and warmer, drier summers.
Scottish teams once might travel 100 miles for a match, only to be rained out. John Amis, chair of the Bass Rock Cricket Club across the Firth of Forth, says his club hasn’t had to cancel a game in two years. Duncan Hodge, a former Scottish international rugby star, says more people in Scotland now play cricket than rugby.
Fans are arriving, too. Scott Carrick started watching cricket on TV during the pandemic, while working from home, and has since traveled across England to see matches. He figures about 90% of his mates don’t get it. A beach on a sunny day helps.
Call it a playbook for any tradition-bound business hunting new customers: keep the rituals that give it character, loosen everything else down to the umpire’s footwear, and recruit wherever people already gather.
Ask any Scottish cricketer who drove 100 miles to a rainout: the umbrella goes in the car first. Bring a recent statement, and fifteen minutes will show whether yours is packed.