Thank heavens for ‘Swish’ll Know’, whoever he or she may be.

“Was it just in Adelaide backyards where you had to call out ‘crease’ before wandering down the pitch?” ‘Swish’ asked on Twitter.

With those words, Swish transported hundreds of grateful followers from the undignified, bloviating aftermath of the Lord’s Test to the relatively carefree – if nonetheless ruthless – days of backyard cricket in 1970s and ’80s suburban Australia.

Was it just in Adelaide backyards where you had to call out “crease” before wandering down the pitch?

— Swish’ll Know (@swishtter) July 4, 2023

Of course, being from the Land of the Pie Floater, where German sausage masquerades as ‘fritz’, this terminology was not universally shared.

Just as we have bathers, togs, trunks or cossies depending on where you grew up in the wide brown land, so there were regional variations for the term batters used to seek permission to leave their crease, thereby claiming stumping immunity. Cricketing ‘barley’, so to speak.

Melburnians who replied to ‘Swish’ were generally in agreement that the term was ‘wicket leave’.

Queenslander Chris Bingham said it was ‘leave wicket’, a hardly surprising inversion of the language for a place that doesn’t know the difference between a potato cake and a scallop.

In Darwin, the shorter ‘safe’ was preferred, according to Jason King, although ‘crease’ was also used.

CA Short elaborated that ‘wicket leave’ was used for leaving your crease, but ‘crease’ was used when you were “batting solo due to low numbers and you wanted to indicate you weren’t running back for a second, so don’t even try to run me out down that end”.

Sarn Katich said it was ‘crease’ in Fremantle in the 1970s, although fellow Western Australians Ken Buzzins and Matt used ‘crease leave’.

Sydneysider Lester S and pals used ‘batsman’s leave’, or ‘BL’ for short, as well as ‘BR’ for returning to the crease.

In Tasmania, wrote Lee Hallam, it was the rather more formal ‘wickets release’.

The survival instinct was so ingrained that JamesR remembers running inside from backyard cricket to answer the phone crying out ‘crease!’, which must have somewhat surprised the caller.

Which is all a pleasantly nostalgic way of saying that, from the moment they picked up a bat, young Australians quickly came to understand the importance of staying in their crease until it was understood – by all parties – that the ball was dead.

This was codified in a sort of unwritten, suburban common law, along with other bespoke playing conditions such as ‘six and out’, ‘one hand one bounce’, whether ‘last man gets his tucker’, or the consequences of hitting the ball into Miss Pern’s vegetable patch.

Break that law and you were a goner – even if you did have to run inside to answer the phone.

It was a lesson little Jonny Bairstow obviously never learnt.

Patrick Smithers is a former cricket writer for The Age and sports editor of The New Daily