F TROOP sounded like an inelegant type of cricket team. Even the training sessions must have been funny.

With a line-up generally on the wrong side of 40 and one or two handy 14-year-olds for speed, they specialised in hilarious yet polite "sledging".

But at its heart was a young bloke earmarked for the state team and possibly better.

What he was doing with these no-hopers is hard to fathom but I suspect they did a very good line in post-game analysis at the pub.

He had also been battling cancer on and off in his young life and seemed one of those cases that made God look a bit silly to give so much talent and personality only to blight it with disease.

This particular season they find their lowly outfit to be the only ones left in the comp, with the first and second teams already knocked out, so someone decides to get a real coach to give the boys a leg-up in the finals.

He has to, for instance, come to terms with blokes turning up for games in their steel-cap boots. A problem quickly remedied with a rummage around in the ute for a can of white spray-paint.

Anyway, against all logic, they make it into the final against, like all good stories, an uppity, well-off and correctly-shod team from the leafy suburbs.

The momentous decision is made by the captain to avoid the pub the night before and have all the boys for a quiet sausage at his place to ensure their good health for the game.

At five in the morning, they stagger home for a couple of hours' sleep before dragging themselves to the oval and collapsing into the shade of the trees.

But for this game, surely his last, the ailing star-batsman, is determined to play and, if this were a film, he'd make a parting double-century. As it happens, he's out for a duck.

In the absence of any real cricketing talent at all, this teams' only advantage was a fearless disregard for personal safety in fielding and the amount of potential fours and sixes that were blocked with the chest, stomach and head within metres of the bat was horrifying but effective.

One bloke could proudly count 16 runs prevented in the four bruises on his torso.

Somehow, the fairy-tale did play out and they won, by the thinnest margin, the district's only trophy for decades.

Knowing such a feat could never be topped, they all triumphantly retired from the sport. I presume there was a party.