🏏 Best memories from playing cricket on random empty plots as a kid

There used to be an empty plot near my old house in Malakpet that basically functioned as our unofficial cricket ground for years, uneven ground, a slight slope on one side that everyone had unofficially agreed counted as automatic six if the ball rolled past a certain rusted pipe sticking out of the dirt, and rules about tennis ball versus actual cricket ball that changed depending entirely on who owned the bat that particular day and how generous they felt about risking it. That entire plot has been built over now, a small apartment complex sits there instead, and driving past it recently genuinely made me stop for a second, trying to remember exactly where our makeshift pitch used to run compared to where the actual building entrance now stands, unable to properly overlay the two versions of that same physical space in my head anymore despite having spent literally hundreds of afternoons there as a kid. What I remember most clearly is not really any specific match or score, but smaller details, someone's older brother occasionally joining in and immediately dominating everyone with an unfair height advantage, the specific shopkeeper nearby who would sometimes shout at us if the ball rolled too close to his stacked crates outside, and the genuine heartbreak of a ball going over the boundary wall into someone's actual house, followed by the whole group nominating whoever was smallest to go knock and politely ask for it back. Most kids in that same neighborhood now seem to play indoors or at a proper turf ground a short drive away instead, which is probably objectively a better playing surface in every practical sense, but there was something about the specific, slightly chaotic unpredictability of an empty plot ground that a properly maintained turf somehow never quite recreates the same way. Did anyone else have a specific plot or ground like this growing up here, and does it still exist, or has it also gotten built over by now like mine did?

The part about nominating the smallest kid to go knock and ask for the ball back got a real laugh out of me, that was such a universal unspoken rule growing up, nobody ever explicitly decided it, it just always somehow ended up being whoever was smallest that specific day. Genuinely miss that particular kind of chaotic, slightly risky version of cricket more than the properly maintained turf grounds available now.

The rusted pipe marking automatic six is such a specific, perfectly ordinary detail that every single neighborhood plot apparently had some version of, ours had a broken brick wall serving the exact same unofficial purpose. Driving past where that plot used to be now, I genuinely cannot even locate where our old pitch actually ran anymore, the whole layout has changed that completely since then.