Quick-thinking cricket players paused their match and rushed to help tackle a wildfire as it encroached on a nearby home.<\/p>\n
Firefighters were called to the blaze on a field off Aliwal Road, Whittlesey, at about 16:30 BST on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Cambridgeshire Police said it was investigating it as a suspected arson attack.<\/p>\n
Andrew Ward said he and three teammates from Whittlesey Cricket Club, based at the nearby Manor Leisure Centre, hurried to help as soon as they realised something was wrong.<\/p>\n
“The smoke was coming across slowly and then all of a sudden it became unbearable to carry on playing and you could all of a sudden see the flames,” the 38-year-old told the BBC.<\/p>\n
He said the cricketers – including teammates David Drage, 59, Andrew Phillips, 42, and Brian Warwick, 48 – ran towards a house on Aliwal Road which the fire was heading towards and alerted the people living in the house they were in danger.<\/p>\n
“Our instinct was to look after the people in that house, to make sure they were out, and to make sure that we could try and save it in the best way we could,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think at that point in time cricket even mattered. We needed to get across there and make sure [they were OK].”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Quick-thinking cricket players paused their match and rushed to help tackle a wildfire as it encroached on a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":715110,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-715109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/715110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}