Port, cricket, the British Army & Navy...

[benread]

This little anecdote was in an email I received from the MCC this morning. It describes everything that is great about cricket & port!

My naval career gave me many wonderful opportunities to play cricket in most of the Test-playing countries including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies and India, and many other very unusual places such as Copenhagen, Honolulu, Vancouver, San Francisco, and Corfu. When deployed to the Caribbean in 1983 in the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible, we arranged a match against the Army Garrison in Belize, even though we never got nearer than 50 miles to land. At dawn, three Sea King helicopters flew our ship's sports teams ashore and, after a quick dip in the swimming pool, play started promptly at 8am, by when it was already extremely hot and humid. Us sailors of course had no opportunity whatsoever to practise but the challenge of an inter-services match far from Lord's made for a competitive 35-over game which - to our great surprise - we won.
The Army magnanimously gave us a wonderful curry lunch and the port was passed several times. Then it was time to fly back to sea. Unfortunately, on taking off, noisily, our helicopter rotor's down wash blew the flimsy thatched roof right off their smart pavilion leaving a trail of major destruction. We left our hosts, waving furiously, none too pleased. By mid afternoon we were back on board, on duty. That evening it was hard to believe that we had ever left the ship that day, let alone beaten an Army cricket team by now over a hundred miles away. Our next match was against the Barbados Fire Brigade, another amusing encounter, which we lost...
Vice-Admiral Sir John Dunt