By Paul Baldry

The stick was never just a stick. It was polished by imagination long before his hands found it, its bark worn smooth by a hundred invisible innings. Every step down the pavement was another run scored somewhere only he could see.

The street became Trent Bridge. Garden walls were packed grandstands. Parked cars were fielders waiting for a mistake. The old lamp post marked middle stump, the cracked paving slab was the popping crease, and every driveway held a bowler with impossible pace.

He nodded to them all.

The first ball came whistling from the shadows. A forward defensive. Soft hands. “Well played,” murmured a crowd that existed only inside his head.

Another ball. Short. He hooked it over the rooftops and listened as thousands rose to their feet. Somewhere a neighbour closed a gate. To everyone else it was only a gate. To him it was thunderous applause.

A milk bottle clinked on a doorstep. That was the umpire calling, “Play.”

A pigeon burst into flight. A magnificent catch… but no, dropped at deep square leg. Lucky escape.

He grinned without knowing why.

The score climbed with every lamppost passed. Fifty before the corner shop. A century by the bus stop. Double hundred before he reached the end of the road, where the bowling grew quicker and the field spread wider, searching for a weakness they would never find.

Sometimes he whispered the commentary himself.

“An extraordinary innings here at Trent Bridge… the Nottingham lad simply refuses to give his wicket away.”

No one heard him except the breeze.

People smiled politely as they walked past. They saw a boy swinging a stick at nothing, stepping sideways now and then, pausing to leave an invisible ball outside off stump. They could not hear the roar from Trent Bridge, or see the scoreboard glowing in the afternoon sun, or feel the weight of expectation resting on young shoulders that carried nothing heavier than dreams.

The match ended only when his front gate appeared.

With one final flourish he drove the winning runs high over long-on and into the River Trent beyond the boundary. The crowd erupted. Hats flew into the air. Teammates rushed from every direction to lift him high above their shoulders.

Then the garden gate clicked shut.

The stadium vanished.

The stick became a stick again.

But only until tomorrow.

Because every Nottingham boy knows that the walk home can become the long path to Trent Bridge, and every fallen branch waits patiently to become the finest cricket bat the county has never seen. Some dreams begin not under floodlights, but on an ordinary pavement, with nothing more than a stick, a boundless imagination, and the heart of a young lad who believes that one day, the crowd’s applause might just be real.

I’ve always loved writing story poems, especially those born from my daydreams. As a young lad, my imagination could carry me anywhere, turning the simplest moment into an adventure. Truth be told, I still daydream today. Writing these poems is like opening my own book and stepping inside its pages. And that boy you meet in many of my stories? He’s me—the boy from Nottingham, still wandering through his imagination.

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