🏏 Paid turf in Kondapur or the free cracked ground behind our colony, my Sunday cricket problem

Our group of eight books a box cricket turf near Kondapur every second Sunday, and it costs 1,600 an hour. Split eight ways that is 200 each, which sounds cheap until you do it every two weeks for a year. Last month someone suggested we go back to the old government ground behind our colony, free but uneven. We tried it the next Sunday and I have not stopped comparing the two since then. The turf is clean. The ball comes onto the bat properly, nobody gets a scraped knee, and the lights work. But you only get one hour, so just when the game gets going the next batch is standing at the net. Half of that hour goes to arguing about who bowls first and whose turn it is to field. So we pay 200 each for roughly forty minutes of proper cricket, and everyone knows it but nobody says it. The old ground is a different thing. The pitch has a crack across the length and a bump near the stumps. Nobody counts overs there. We played from 7 in the morning until the sun was too hot to stand in. My cousin hit a tennis ball onto a neighbour's roof, and getting it back took twenty minutes and a ladder. Everyone was laughing so much we forgot the score, which never happens on the turf where it is on a screen. The problem is the ground has no shade, no toilet, and two buffaloes sit near the boundary on some days. Three of our guys have back problems and said the uneven surface left them limping for two days. One of them sits at a desk all week and cannot afford a pulled muscle. So the turf has the comfort and the old ground has the fun, and neither has both. I suggested alternating, one Sunday turf and one Sunday ground, but our group chat is split right down the middle. The younger lot want the turf for the photos and the reels, and the older lot want free. Maybe I am overthinking a game of cricket, but it is the only thing that fills my Sundays. Tell me which one you would pick if it were your own group, turf or the old ground.

Careful with the plastic sheet idea, on our ground a loose mat slid under a fielder and he went down hard. We nailed pegs at the corners after that, which fixed it. The 3 to 1 split sounds sensible, but I would flip it for money reasons and do one turf day a month. That is 1,600 once instead of four times, and the free days feel like the main event.

Our group in Manikonda tried the free ground for a month and lost two players to sore knees. Nobody missed the turf until we tried an evening game, then everyone wanted the lights back. The buffaloes made me laugh, though, ours was a stray dog that kept stealing the ball. I would say pick the ground when the older lot are away and the turf when they come.

We went through exactly this in Miyapur and ended up splitting the month, three turf Sundays and one ground Sunday. The ground days are the ones people still talk about, the turf ones just blur into each other. One tip, bring a plastic sheet or cheap mat for the cracked part of the pitch. It costs maybe 400 rupees and saved us from at least two twisted ankles.