The rules of cricket are famously incomprehensible to anyone not
brought up on the game. Looking though Tom Shaw's lens the
viewer comes away with a deeper understanding of the changing face of the country which invented the game even if the rules are no clearer. If anything cricket is as much about place as it is about play.  

"Cricket by rights shouldn't really happen." says Tom Shaw who
spent nearly two decades photographing the English national
side. "It goes on for so long that for much of the time very little
happens and the bad days are really bad. And yet, I don't think I
will ever understand why but it's just fun".

“Having spent almost 20 years shooting cricket at the top level, I went back to playing cricket – at almost the very bottom level – and realised that the game is full of characters. I began to notice things about the game that I hadn’t seen before. There was one moment when I was batting, I looked behind me and realised the man fielding in the slips (a position on the field) was smoking a cigarette and he would put the cigarette down when the ball was in play to be ready for a catch and then pick up the cigarette again afterwards. The beauty of cricket is that you can play almost up to any age and almost any standard and that there is always a place for you in the game."

Tom’s Portrait of Cricket sets out to challenge the accepted view of the grassroots game across the country - often shown being played on leafy bucolic village greens by white middle class middle aged men with a pub, a church and a thatched cottage in the background. For many who play cricket this is not their reality. The game has very strong working class roots, particularly in the North of England, where many clubs were born out of works crickets teams (teams made up of workers for industries such as the railways, collieries and chemical works). This is reflected in Tom’s photographs of the Winnington Park chemical works team and Hartlepool Power Station cricket club who play beside the nuclear power station on a bleak flat landscape.

The Cricketing landscape has also been shaped over the years by the diaspora from cricket playing nations across the world who have brought their own passions, styles and traditions to the game. Having originally been a symbol of the British empire it was transformed into a platform for national identity and resistance: Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and West Indians challenged and beat their masters at their own game.

“One of the more remarkable places I went to was Perry Hall Park in Birmingham. It's an amazing place with 16 cricket pitches all squeezed into a park often with the cricket pitches crossing over eachother so that all the players will be on different pitches looking in various directions. It is the home of the Birmingham Cricket League, which is one of the oldest Cricket Leagues is in the world and it's mainly played by players of Pakistan heritage. Everyone seems to know everyone and as a community it is fantastic with all the kids running around who will know each other. The parents are there playing on various different pitches and at lunchtime, a huge Biryani appears, and they all eat together, which creates a wonderful sense of community. What was lovely was that they always insisted that I ate first - a lovely gesture - but one which is quite hard when I wanted to photograph what they were doing!

"As the project progressed - more revealed itself about the game - about how rooted in the community it was, and how special the game is to people. They often weren’t there for the sporting endeavour, but for the friendships and camaraderie - evident in 85 year old Alec in Scotland who still plays with his oxygen tank on his back due to a lung condition.

The last place that I ended up in was Queensbury in Yorkshire - reportedly the highest ground in the UK. I was struggling to find somewhere to photograph - I had intended to be elsewhere - but the rain across the north west of the country was making sure all the games were cancelled - so I headed east over the Pennines and remarkably found a match taking place in the thick fog. Now as everyone knows cricket is a summer sport, and always played in fair weather - but to see a match in these conditions proved to me what a remarkable, and strange, game it was - you could barely see what was happening. Its a funny old game, but I think that's why people from all backgrounds love it."