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[WalkingWicket37]

Evening all

After a post on another thread about my days of playing school cricket (those were the days...) it got me thinking about the shared kit bags lying around.

From memory the school bag made an appearance every summer. For those wanting to be in the cricket team who didn't have their own kit, there was a selection of pads with buckles on, these buckles had two fittings - flop about or cut off the circulation! Ther were some slightly newer cloth covered pads, brown with (what I assume was) mud, with nifty Velcro straps that didn't do up, and the pads themselves were paper thin.
There was a vast selection of batting gloves, some from the 1970's, going right up to the 1990's when the bag was last topped up. Some gloves had been chewed by the resident mice, but somehow there was not a single marching pair in the bag.
There were two helmets, one with a mouldy sweatband inside and another with no internal padding at all. The Kerry Packer era motorcycle helmet had apparently been binned shortly before I started at the school!
There were 2 bats, both slazenger and with grips that had long perished. One had a chunk missing from the toe "stop moaning and use the middle" and the other was poly coated all over and sounded suspiciously like a rattle when you waved it.
Then there was the centrepiece of the school kit bag, the communal box! It was literally a soap dish with holes in. No padding in sight, no real protection on offer and a suspicious yellow stain on the inside!

If those items don't get you feeling nostalgic about your days playing school cricket I have no idea what will!

[Cin88]

My school communal bag:

Buckle using pads (same tightness settings as your school's). Mostly brown/perished owing to decades of use.
Various sausage fingered gloves with holes in and badly sweat stained.
Slazenger size 4-6 bats (one each size) with next to no grips, polycoated and very much a set of planks.
Two bats that a clueless PE teacher got from those GM kids cricket sets, they were all but in half after one over.
Many communal boxes! All but one of them was brown from what I hope was degrading plastic and not anything else. I pitty anyone who ever actually had to use one of those.
No helmets for some reason involving head lice outbreaks.


Makes me glad I had all my own kit.