[1] Find a place to play
This really shouldn’t be difficult: after all, you are in Oxford, and there’s a good chance your college has a croquet lawn. Of course, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got the right lawn: for example, in Magdalen the New Buildings centre lawn is the croquet lawn and St Swithun’s lawn is the Frisbee lawn. You don’t want to get those two mixed up in case you end up having to roquet with a Frisbee whizzing through your hair. But that hardship, unlikely though it is, is as nothing compared to what some people go through in order to find the perfect croquet location: croquet has been played on iced over lakes, in Nevada’s Black Rock desert, and even at the South Pole.
[2] Get your equipment
Again, you should be OK here to borrow your college’s gear. Take care to keep it in good nick, though: competition-standard equipment doesn’t come cheap – for instance, the only set of balls recommended by the Oxford University Croquet Club costs £139 for four, and the set of hoops costs £188. And if you’re buying a mallet, you have to contend with almost as much conflicting advice as when buying a golf club; some of this advice centres on, for example, the relative merits of wooden shafts and fibreglass shafts, but some is a little more obvious – here’s a direct quote from the OUCC website: “For inexperienced players, it is advisable to have a mallet with a relatively wide head to reduce the likelihood of mis-hitting.” If only that could apply to cricket bats, I’d be sporting a two-foot-wide one.
[3] Decide on the rules
Most croquet played in Oxford is Association Croquet, but that’s not to say that other forms of croquet don’t exist. Golf Croquet, in which each player takes turns trying to hit a ball through the same hoop, the winner being the player who manages to hit the ball through the most hoops first, is the fastest-growing version of the game. For a less simple and more strategy-heavy game, you could always try American-rules croquet, in which physical skill counts for less than clever tactics; or, if you find croquet a little bit too easy, you could always try playing it on a bicycle – Bicycle Croquet hasn’t caught fire worldwide yet, but it does have a dedicated following in Graz, Austria.
[4] Learn the lingo
‘Hoop’ and ‘mallet’ are nice and easy, but you should know at least a few more terms. ‘Making a roquet’ is when your ball hits another ball; ‘running a hoop’ is when your ball passes through a hoop in the correct order; and ‘becoming a rover’ is when your ball has scored its last hoop point. That’s only the start of the jargon, though: ‘Von Schmieder Sweep’, anyone? (It’s a stroke played with the mallet held horizontally with the shaft just a couple of inches off the ground played on a hoop-bound ball lying about a foot behind the hoop which allows you to roquet a reception ball lying further behind the hoop, if you really wanted to know).
