Sticks and stones

Unlike football, cricket requires several implements (and a reasonably flat piece of ground) to play comfortably. But in informal games, you usually only get a ball and improvise the rest. Sometimes even the ball is an amalgamation of things vaguely mashed into a sphere. But the easiest set of objects to improvise is stumps.

In the photo above, from Swansea in 1910, the ladies use their umbrellas as a very sturdy set of stumps, which, at a pinch, could be used to cover the pitch if it rains.

If there's no maidan, play in the bed of a dry lake, as these kids do in Sarkhej Roza, a 15th-century mosque-and-tomb complex outside Ahmedabad. Plenty of rocks around to use as stumps (and to sit on while disputes over who fetches the ball are sorted).

The advantage of using a steel bucket as stumps is that the batsman can't claim the ball didn't hit it. What was the loud clang then?

Three twigs and you're set. In fact, bind them together and you've got yourself a bat - though it won't fetch you any sixes. But will those twigs withstand the incoming sea? And can you claim a dismissal if the water knocks one over? You thought the mankading debate was complex.

London, 1930: stumps and floodlight rolled into one.

Protesting miners find dual use for their picket sign, near Rotherham in Yorkshire, 1984.

What did/do you use for stumps? A pile of shoes? The schoolyard wall? Stack of coats? A chair? Your younger sibling?