Leith Franklin Academicals Beige Cricket Club

Several semi-prominent Leith cricketers have declared this week that they’re completely clean of performance enhancing drugs. This bold statement comes in the wake of Riccardo Ricco’s positive test for blood booster EPO. The buccaneering Italian’s expulsion from this year’s Tour de France has shocked several uninformed cycling fans from New Zealand but it’s not just cycling’s integrity that’s under the threat. High profile drug scandals like that involving Mohammed Asif have tarnished the fair game of cricket.

In a hastily convened press conference at a Portabello bus stop, club enigma Gavin Fisher insisted that while he ‘resorted to a small red wine on occasion’, he had never sought to sharpen his probing right armers with testosterone, human growth hormone or even an asthma inhaler. ‘It’s important to remember that many clean cricketers do well enough to get in the newspaper. Quite close to the crosswords in fact!’ A tired looking Alex Sutcliffe echoed Fisher’s sentiments but acknowledged ‘there’s a lot of pressure’ on ‘guys in their 30s, desperate for one more year in division 2.’

A forthright Rodney Mathos was less restrained. ‘I hate them. We should make them live in a flat above Priscilla’s for six months.’ He further asserted that ‘I’ve maintained my game, not to mention my hair, without resorting to chemicals!’ Although the wink suggested this was only half true, this symbol of the new, clean, generation brought the assembled media to tears.

Stories like this are what keeps people going in the mid to lower leagues of a niche sport in a country with the wrong weather. It almost makes you feel, that the next game of cricket you play, will be contested in a competitive, yet sporting, atmosphere. I hope this is true, though fear it’s more likely there will be no more doping scandals before they sip champagne on the Champs Elysees.