Following directly on from my previous blog, I asked Grant Gordon, captain of the Touregs Noosa team, to write down his impressions of battling the blizzard.

Friday 4pm, mid Feb.  We’re on the runway at Stansted, heading to the wonderful Vienna Winter Cup.

Except we might not be. For the first time in many years, Vienna airport is buried in snow, and there are rumours that all flights today will be cancelled. Four of my team - entertainingly named ‘Touregs Noosa’ in celebration of England’s recent unsuccessful sojourn there - are on this plane. Two hours has passed. The heating is on full. The Ryanair staff are being surprisingly calm and helpful. Babies are starting to scream. Tension is rising, the more disgruntled are demanding answers, but the truth is no one knows what will happen - we are at the mercy of Austrian Air Traffic Control.

Also on this flight is a team from Essex, equally entertainingly called ‘Civic Centre’. We establish contact and have a good cricket chat in the aisle whilst stressed stewardesses push past us. My boys are wearing their luminous orange and blue match gear. Civic Centre are dressed more tastefully in black club-branded polo shirts and chinos. It’s their first time at the Winter Cup, my sixth, so they prime me for information. The fundamentals are the ball keeps very low, nudge it into the spaces rather than hammering it in the air, back up to the very limit of a possible run out, and most importantly - do not bowl down the leg side as it’s automatically 3 wides.

Superb organiser Darren Talbot is frantically texting us all. Churt & Hindhead Cricket club might not make it as they have been told they definitely won’t arrive in Austria in the next 24 hours; one of our guys has been at Heathrow all day and already given up for similar reasons. Our bowlers Vinnie and Ewan were dumped earlier in Salzburg and are now on a pan-alpine train ride to Vienna. Darren, who is very good at this, is throwing restructured tournament ideas out to the Captains WhatsApp chat to accommodate the teams’ crazily messed up itineraries. The tournament is scheduled to start at 9am on the Saturday. Darren is already at the venue for the Friday night social, sitting alone on a table booked for 25, almost all of whom are still in London airports. This meal is cancelled, which is a shame as the teams get to meet each other, and there’s time to walk around beautiful nighttime Vienna. It also means that our schnitzel consumption is slightly reduced. But in Vienna, every meal is schnitzel so we know we can top up later.

RyanAir then tell us we won’t be flying until 8pm. An aggressive groan throbs around the fuselage. This could turn nasty. I think we’re looking at a night in the Stansted Travelodge then maybe a flight in the morning.

When suddenly we’re told that the pilot is happy to fly us to Austria. But to Linz, 140 miles away from Vienna. Feels like we’re a long way from a game of cricket, but let’s do it. However, half the plane don’t like this idea so arguments ensue. These become more heated when Ryanair announce that anybody who doesn’t want to go to Linz can disembark now, but….won’t get a refund (check your Ts & Cs!). More outrage, but we do lose a third of the passengers which means more leg room.

And then, we’re in the air! I try to read an Agatha Christie murder mystery, my son next to me is watching the BBC’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ adaptation. Before we got rid of the more belligerent travellers this plane was in danger of turning into a Lord of the Flies type savage-state mutiny situation.

Linz is a nice small airport. Like the one at Norwich perhaps but with far more snow. RyanAir have laid on coaches, but several flight loads are trying to clamber aboard, and the scenes are reminiscent of Dunkirk. Small children and the elderly are pushed aside in the desperate scramble to get on and get the hell out of Linz.

Two and a half hours on the coach. And because it’s cold the driver has put the heating on to Max. I’ve been on cooler buses travelling across the plains of India in summer. Outside there is ice and snow and we are all dripping with sweat. When will this all end? And still, the texts from Darren, the team, the other captains. Churt are 90% not going to make it at all…then suddenly they are but will need all their matches to be played on the Sunday…so that’s 4 games in a row. I’m knackered after 1 in a row and I don’t drink as much as the Churt boys.

Vienna by midnight. I know the last airport bus leaves at 12:15 and we run to the bus station. Our opening batter Greg heroically drags our enormous team Grey Nicolls cricket bag through the snow. Our two younger team members throw snowballs at each other and do skids on the ice. I wonder if maybe next year we could do this tournament in Barbados.

We push our way onto the bus, and soon we’re in the city. Just the half hour battle with the AirbBnB entry code and door opening procedure to complete before we sight our beds. We collapse into instant sleep at 1:30 having survived on crisps all day.

Thankfully Darren’s rearranged our 9am fixture for 11am so we can sleep in a little before grabbing an authentic Viennese (well, Sausage and Egg McMuffin) breakfast and boarding the tram to the cricket. We stagger into the venue to big hugs from the Vienna CC guys and Darren, who after telling us how awful we look, informs us that the last game finished early so could we start our game asap please.

It’s against Vienna CC themselves, who always smash us and usually win the whole tournament. I’d already written off any chance of winning it and told the boys to just use it as a warm-up.

And so, I crouch down behind the stumps, aching, unstretched, exhausted, look up and see my son pounding in to bowl his inswingers.

It begins. Cricket in Vienna. The greatest form of the game.

(N.B., we came 8th out of 8 but our development team didn’t disgrace themselves even against the eventual tournament winners the brilliant young Vienna Rockets).