Pub Cricket Challenge, August 2020

With the Claremont ladies having beaten the men in every team challenge so far, we decided to mix the teams up for this one and have seniors v veterans. As we have more, in UK Athletics terms, more veterans than seniors in the club, it was agreed that, for the purposes of this competition, veterans would be over-45.

Pub Cricket was a way of keeping the family entertained on long car journeys, whereby you scored “runs” for each leg in the name of the pub that you passed. So, the Red Lion would score 4 runs, the Dog and Duck 6 runs etc. For our game, the rules were adapted to give 1 run to any pub that didn’t have legs too. An “extra” would be scored for every unique pub name. Each innings would be limited to 6 balls.

So, in simple terms, you had to pass 6 pubs on a run and accumulate points for the number of legs in the names. If nobody else claimed a pub with the same name, you scored an extra point.

There were a few high scoring pubs in Newcastle that featured in numerous runs, with the highest scorer of all being The Fox and Hounds (12 runs). Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out to be much of a contest as most of the youngsters stayed in the pavilion, while the older generation showed them how to go on a pub crawl!

The final score was:

Veterans 332 v 72 Seniors

Individual scores can be found here.