9
For poise, grace, symmetry, composition and power it might be a picture of a statue by Pheidias.
Ronald Mason, on the batsman Wally Hammond
Pheidias would certainly have taken him for a model.
John Nyren, on the bowler David Harris
Cricket becomes bigger and better as more and more money enters it. Nobody, not even the most nostalgic of old-timers, would dispute that the standard of fielding has gone up as boundary fielders leap to flick the ball back to a converging colleague to complete the catch. The range of shots increases, and the thickness of bats, and the number of sixes. The different types of delivery increase, too, as spinners devise doosras and carrom balls, and pace bowlers do anything not to be slogged at the death. The size of the global television audience grows, if only because India’s population does; and we can suspect an increase in the amounts of money gambled on the game.
In one major respect, however, cricket is reduced. It is a less beautiful game than it used to be – and while its beauty could be recaptured, the forces which spoiled it are not going to recede in the foreseeable future.
The apex of beauty in batting was captured in Sydney in November 1928. A freelance photographer, Herbert Fishwick, who normally specialised in travelling to the Australian outback and photographing Merino sheep for wealthy graziers, decided to go instead to the Sydney Cricket Ground, as the MCC tourists were in town to play New South Wales. He went equipped with his ‘Long Tom’. This new type of camera, between four and six feet long, had been developed for aerial reconnaissance during the First World War. When peace prevailed in the 1920s, it allowed, for the first time, action photographs of cricket matches to be taken from the boundary. Along with his Long Tom – of which only a handful existed in Australia – Fishwick would have carried between one and two dozen fragile plates on which to capture the day’s events. Given so few, his timing had to be as precise as a batsman’s.
Two prodigies, one on each side, were in action at the SCG in this build-up to the Ashes series. Don Bradman, a boy from Bowral, had just slipped into the New South Wales team. The English side contained a batsman a bit older, in Wally Hammond. The previous year, 1927, Hammond had scored 1000 first-class runs in May, which only W.G. Grace had done. It was Hammond’s first tour of Australia, but whenever he walked to the wicket at number three (four in this game), he had either Jack Hobbs or Herbert Sutcliffe to talk him through those early overs when English batsmen must adjust to Australia’s sharper light and sharper bounce.
MCC batted first after their overtly cheerful captain, Percy Chapman, won the toss. The pitch had been rolled and rolled into the consistency of iron; and Australia’s nationwide lack of bowling was reflected in the state side. Since 1912 England had won a solitary Test in Australia. Now they had some fine bowlers who could win this series – provided their batsmen could bat as well as Australia’s (Bill Ponsford had twice gone past Archie MacLaren’s world-record first-class innings of 424). MCC set about amassing a total over 700.
Fishwick’s index finger must have hovered over the shutter of his Long Tom several times in the course of every ball. At some moment after midday, needing to use up at least one plate on England’s prodigy before Hammond was dismissed, Fishwick took the plunge. Cricketers were not so docile or predictable as sheep. As one of the state’s spinners happened to be bowling, Bert Oldfield was standing up to the stumps, and he was Australia’s wicketkeeper. On one plate, Fishwick could capture two major cricketers.
He pressed.
Later that day, when the plate reached the dark room of the Sydney Mail and was developed, what emerged was nothing less than cricket’s most beautiful photograph.
The first to appreciate it in detail was Ronald Mason in Batsman’s Paradise. This photograph, Mason wrote in the 1950s, was:
. . . the most striking action picture of a batsman that has ever been put on record. For poise, grace, symmetry, composition and power it might be a picture of a statue by Pheidias; there is a flawless balance in the distribution of every line and every mass in the field of vision, and moreover it conveys an infinite potentiality of strength . . . Compositionally the picture has built itself up most happily in the form of a pyramid; the wicket-keeper, who is Oldfield and therefore adds an instinctive grace of his own, is bent alertly in such a way that the line of his back and the transverse [sic] one of his arms and outstretched gloves exactly lead into and answer the corresponding lines of the batsman’s figure. All these lines point to the centre; to the great shoulders and whipcord sinews at the hub of this explosive activity.
All true. It is the most beautifully composed photograph of the most beautiful cricket stroke. But Mason devoted only one paragraph to his analysis of this superlative illustration, albeit one page in length. The author was a dear, self-effacing man whose quiet nature allowed him to make invaluable observations about the passage of time in cricket; but the fanfare for this prime example of aesthetics should be blown longer and louder.
I would go so far as to claim that the combination of this photograph and this stroke attains perfection. Change any significant detail of this composition and it would tumble back to earth. And by studying it, we can not only comprehend the elements of its beauty, we can also see what the sport has subsequently lost.
The first point to note is the most basic: the bails remain in their grooves. The whole edifice would crumble if everything were the same except a bail had fallen and Hammond had been bowled or stumped. The batsman would have failed in his primary purpose, that of defending his wicket. The first point, therefore, is that the batsman has fulfilled his primary function.
The second point is Hammond’s posture. As Mason observed, ‘the left toe, giving direction to the stroke, is pointed as lightly and as weightlessly as a ballet dancer’s.’ No less essential is the fact that Hammond is not playing off the back foot. Suppose that the bowler had pitched short and Hammond had driven him in exactly the same direction but off the back foot, he would not have given the same overriding impression of mastery. Instinctively, we protect our head and reproductive organs before any other parts of our body: this is one reason to play off the back foot. If, therefore, a man is ready to commit his head to the combat by pushing it ahead of his body, and to play off the front foot, he signals that he wishes to get as close to his opponent as he can, without hesitation or fear. Given a big swing of his weapon into the bargain, his intent is predatory. Hammond, in the course of his innings, is taking the attack to the bowlers.
Not every stroke played off the back foot is a defensive one, of course. Nonetheless, ‘on the back foot’ has become part of English speech, as a metaphor for being on the defensive. To be on the front foot is to display the will to dominate; and with it, if the posture is correct, comes the most beautiful representation of the male human form.
Let us go back, in order to move forward, to classical Greek sculpture. Take a statue in the British Museum, of the hunter who has raised his right arm to throw his spear. He is a beautiful young man, and strong, as his musculature bespeaks, especially in his thighs and calves. But he is not a threatening figure, or a particularly aggressive one, considering that he is a hunter; and this is because most of his weight is on his back leg.
If we move on to Donatello’s statue of David as a second example, we see the victor, sword in hand, shortly after he has slain and decapitated Goliath. David stands in the contrapposto position: his weight is more on his back leg than his front, but it is spread over both. The impression that David gives us is one of grace and elegance – and, if his smile is anything to go by, a degree of self-satisfaction at his own clever skill with a sling. But, being in the almost upright contrapposto position, David does not radiate strength and menace. He does not need to, having slain Goliath.
For the next picture in this sequence, we should consider an athlete in a half-forward position: again it is David, this one sculpted by Bernini. We can see from the side view that David has begun to transfer his weight on to his right and leading foot, in the direction of his opponent. By so doing he adds to the velocity and accuracy of his sling. Bernini’s David is tense, braced for action, intent on being as brave and effective as he can in this mortal combat. But we cannot feel convinced about his prospects for success, as we do for Hammond after looking at Fishwick’s photograph (Hammond went on to score 225). David does not inspire us with the absolute confidence that would have been conveyed if he had committed himself fully to his front foot and a posture of outright aggression towards his opponent. He has set aside his armour, which leans beside his right leg. We cannot be sure he will not need it.
Modern coaches use the term ‘power position’ to describe the pose in which an athlete leans forward with his head over a bent, leading leg: the position of Hammond at the end of his off-drive. This position achieves the most explosive power, whether in shot-putting, sprinting, throwing, batting or bowling. It captures the essence of masculine strength and beauty.
We can all recognise these qualities when we see them in action, even if we do not have Fishwick’s gift for capturing the moment. We can also recognise them when they are absent. Nobody called the batting of England’s Alastair Cook ‘beautiful’ in the Ashes series of 2010–11: prodigiously effective, and second in productivity only to Hammond in 1928–29 among England batsmen in any series (766 v 905), but neither beautiful nor handsome. The reason lay in the uprightness and stiffness of the position in which Cook played his shots – characteristic of the subjects in early Greek sculpture of the Archaic period, before the concepts of movement and elegance evolved.
Because the power position is most aesthetically pleasing, the cricket strokes which involve it are considered to be beautiful; those which do not involve it are deemed less so, if at all. That is why strokes on the off-side can provoke the praise of ‘beautiful’, but seldom shots on the leg-side. Cricket is thus distinguished from baseball, in which all hits are cross-batted and mostly to what cricket would call the leg-side.
The drive, when well executed from the power position, normally directs the ball to the off-side; only the drive through mid-on goes to leg. In the Kolkata Test between India and South Africa in 2010–11, the master technician Jacques Kallis drove through midwicket a ball from Zaheer Khan, bowling left-arm over the wicket, which pitched outside his leg-stump. This is the squarest angle on the leg-side that I have seen a ball driven from the power position. If a batsman aims any squarer than that, he has to play round a braced rather than bent front leg.
The late cut involves the power position in reverse. The batsman’s head, instead of pointing towards the bowler, is pointed in the opposite direction towards the wicketkeeper. A late cut is deemed beautiful if the batsman bends into the stroke in this way, whereas an attempt at a cut from a stiff and upright position is merely a ‘dab’. But while the late cut can be beautiful – Frank Worrell the supreme exponent – it does not convey power and aggression.
Even the man who is still held to be the paragon of batting style cannot be an exception to these principles. Victor Trumper striding down the pitch towards the bowler was cricket’s first famous action photograph; and he makes a majestic sight as he sets himself to drive the ball straight. But this stroke is not so beautiful as Hammond’s front-foot off-drive because Trumper is playing with both legs braced and his torso upright.
Runs scored on the leg-side are more likely to stem from ‘shots’ than ‘strokes’: the nomenclature tells us that more power than beauty is involved in the pull and the pick-up, or the flick over square-leg, if not the leg-glance. Whether the batsman concerned is Hammond or David Gower, Frank Woolley or V.V.S. Laxman, no pull shot is deemed beautiful. It is the most primitive shot, the nearest to natural. It may even be termed ‘savage’.
When a batsman hooks a ball above shoulder-height, he makes a concession to the bowler’s speed and bounce, either by moving on to the back foot or by keeping his weight spread on both feet. In either event, he does not go down the pitch with his head leading his assault upon the ball and bowler. Brave, yes; effective, yes, and extremely so if the ball is hooked for four or six. But not absolute mastery from the moment the ball leaves the bowler’s hand, because of that initial concession.
Hammond’s physicality is the third most significant feature of this photograph; or, as Mason called it, ‘an infinite potentiality of strength’. A man’s cricket – the style in which he bats, the method he bowls – is shaped, like his character, by his physical characteristics. Oldfield is neatness; Hammond is strength.
Although not naked like the subjects of classical Greek and Renaissance sculpture, we can sense the musculature rippling beneath the white flannels. In particular, as Mason observed, the breadth of Hammond’s shoulders, before tapering to his waist, illustrate the power: a power no less than that of David as sculpted by either Bernini or Michelangelo. By comparison the latent strength of Donatello’s David seems feeble.
Yet all this power embodied in Hammond is perfectly balanced. He does not need to use his heels, like lesser mortals, as a platform for his body weight. He is sufficiently lithe to need only his right toes and the ball of his left foot. He is almost as light as Mercury, as in the study by Giovanni Bologna: his Mercury is a god who cannot be held down by the bonds of earth and gravity, and is almost taking off from the toes of his left foot. Hammond embodies lightness and strength, power and balance, in a perfect equipoise.
Mason calls the composition of this photograph ‘a pyramid’. This is the only point where I would disagree, and it may be the result of his looking at a picture of Hammond alone, without Oldfield (in a footnote, Mason says the only surviving print omits the wicketkeeper, which has subsequently proved incorrect, thankfully). The overall form captured by Fishwick is that of a scalene triangle, one without equal sides or equal angles such as a pyramid has.
This triangle begins at Oldfield’s left heel. One line runs up Oldfield’s back, then along Hammond’s back to his head. The second line runs from Oldfield’s feet and through his gloves to Hammond’s left foot. The triangle is completed by the third line, a vertical running down from Hammond’s hands to the toe of his left foot: a line which exists because Hammond has moved his head and front foot into the technically correct position. This triangle would have been broken if Oldfield had not crouched so low, to the point where his eyes are level with the bails, or if he had stood up too soon, as ordinary wicketkeepers do.
Other details heighten the effect, especially if the person studying this photograph is hibernating in Britain. The light and shade speak of sunshine and heat. Both batsman and wicketkeeper are wearing caps, and the shade that covers their eyes keeps out the sun which warms the rest of their bodies. Neither figure is wearing a sweater; both men have their sleeves rolled up to slightly below the elbow. The time told by the shadows is past midday but not far past. It makes for a not inappropriate symbolism, for some would say the 1928–29 series saw the high noon of the battle between Australia and England for the Ashes, before Bodyline in the following series in Australia foreshadowed the modern era.
Hammond, as a 25-year-old professional sportsman, is unlikely to have been aware of Michelangelo’s technique of polishing marble to increase the effect of light and texture. But we know from the playwright Ben Travers, in a monograph he wrote about this tour, that Hammond spent some of his spare time in the Ladies’ Pavilion at the Sydney Cricket Ground, while his teammates were in the main pavilion, and would sign autographs for female admirers. So we are dealing here with an individual human being, with strengths and weaknesses; we are not dealing with idealised form, as in classical Greek sculpture. The handkerchief in Hammond’s right pocket was a mannerism, perhaps affectation, that he copied from his Gloucestershire captain, Bev Lyon; and he wore silk shirts, like very few cricketers of his day, especially cash-strapped professionals. Hammond’s pride, his polishing of his image, are manifested here, and not without reason.
Note also the creases, and the simplicity of their white lines, by comparison not only with all the lines which now mark a cricket pitch but also the ones that criss-cross an American football field and give gridiron its name. Because we have only two white lines – in a pleasant parallel – they do not distract from the human activity. Indeed, I would argue the straightness of the two lines serves as a counterpoint to the curves of which the two cricketers are composed. Hammond and Oldfield have no straight lines, no sharp angles, no jagged edges: the nearest to a straight line is Hammond’s back or right leg, in conformity with orthodox technique. For Hammond, like other elite athletes in cricket such as Ranjitsinhji and Sobers, the conventional epithet was that ‘he had no bones’.
The simplicity of these two white creases allows us to feel that cricket au fond is a simple game of bat and ball, almost a natural one, with few artificial additions. Or so it was then. Subsequently, from 1963 in England, the front or popping crease became the marker for no-balls, not the back or bowling crease (which had not deterred fast bowlers from dragging their back heel over the line). To accompany this change in the law, the return crease had to be lengthened from a couple of inches to two or three yards.
It might be argued that the equipment, being artificial or man-made, detracts from this composition: the pads of both batsman and keeper, and Oldfield’s gloves, and Hammond’s bat (his gloves seem part of his white clothing). I would argue the pads are not an impediment to the movement of the two players or, therefore, to our enjoyment of this scene; while Hammond’s bat is a simple extension of his arms, less intrusive than the sling wielded by Bernini’s David, or the spear brandished by classical Greek warriors. The bat at the end of Hammond’s follow-through could even be said to lend an uplifting quality, akin to the torch that carries the Olympic flame. It is not an axe or a sword or a spear coming down upon an opponent; the bat has been raised in a positive or life-enhancing act, not a destructive one.
Above all, as Mason says, we have at the centre of this composition this ‘infinite potentiality of strength’. I think of a rowing boat when the crew find their rhythm and suddenly synchronise; of Taiaroa Head near Dunedin, and an albatross, which hangs motionless in the wind then achieves, with no more than a twitch of its vast wingspan on a thermal, surging acceleration; or passages of Beethoven when he goes full steam ahead yet seems to have nuclear power stations of energy in reserve. At such moments we forget that mankind is fallible and, even if it is illusion, sense we are capable of something grander.
Left-handed batsmen, ever since ‘Great Newland’, have been perceived to be more graceful than right-handed ones.
My theory is that this is a function of width. Until limited-overs cricket took off, and especially Twenty20, most right-arm pace bowlers bowled over the wicket. Therefore their line was not at the stumps – because then they would have pitched outside the batsman’s legs too often – but across the left-handed batsman. He was therefore able to ‘free his arms’: to get into the power position and drive the ball through the off-side.
Take a mirror if need be. When a right-handed batsman faces a left-arm pace bowler who is bowling over the wicket, the angles are reproduced, and the effect is the same: if this bowler is not swinging the ball into the batsman, he gives him width and therefore scope to play aesthetically pleasing strokes.
The gracefulness of the left-hander evaporates once the right-arm pace bowler goes round the wicket and angles the ball in. The left-hander who scores most of his runs leg-side is not considered beautiful. Thus the Kent amateur Gerry Weigall compared the two best left-handed batsmen of his day: Frank Woolley, of his own county, and Maurice Leyland of Yorkshire. Woolley flowed through the off-side; Leyland was ‘a cross-batted village-greener, sir!’
My favourite left-hander? Even more than David Gower or Brian Lara, it has to be Pakistan’s opening batsman of the late 1990s, Saeed Anwar. He added an extra dimension. Having reached the power position in which to cover-drive, Anwar would wait for the ball, and if it did not come to him, but was slanted to go further away, his wrists went after it with an amazing elasticity, and they kept on going, extending and extending, until they were on the line of the ball, however wide it was angled, then whipped it. No lazy flicking or wafting.
No longer, however, can a photograph capture a perfect stroke in all its beauty unmarred. Cricket is not only an escape from reality, but an integral part of the commercial world. It might be hyperbole to claim that cricket sold its soul when Kerry Packer launched his World Series Cricket in 1977; but the sport did proceed to sell its broadcasting rights to the highest bidder, to deter the best cricketers from signing for a private promoter. The consequence was marketing, advertising and branding.
When Hammond played his off-drive in 1928, no bat stickers or logos obtruded into the purity of this prelapsarian world. By the time Ian Bell played an off-drive comparable to Hammond’s, the distractions were numerous – and advertisements are meant to be distractions, if only noticed subliminally. Mammon insinuated itself, from the stumps and the batsmen’s clothes and equipment to the outfield and advertising boards – and, in return, paid the money which allowed Bell to devote his whole career to the pursuit of excellence. Hammond was free to wear the white silk shirt he liked, pure and unsullied, because he was not contracted to wear official team kit – but he had to work for a car dealership in Bristol in the off-seasons when he was not touring, to pay the rent.
The photograph is party to this loss of innocence: the advertisements are now captured and passed on to all who look. From the boundary, only the spectator who is very short-sighted can fail to see the logos and lettering.
A second change has taken place since 1928, in addition to the sport’s commercialisation. To hit the ball to the boundary, Hammond had to use his wrists and follow through with his bat in a full circle of 360 degrees. Sobers, into the 1970s, would follow through with his bat so far that, at the end of a back-foot drive, it would slap against his back. No modern batsman has to expend such effort any longer and propel his bat through so generous an arc. Bell’s bat is almost twice as thick as Hammond’s, but barely heavier because of technological advances in compressing the willow. Bell – or anyone else in international cricket, ‘stylist’ or not – has only to play a checked half-drive, little more than a defensive push, to send the ball past mid-off to the boundary, without anything like the same input from his wrists. If Bell did follow through as far as Hammond, he might be criticised for a needless flourish or affectation, for ‘posing’.
A daring, albeit helmeted, batsman who slog-sweeps can get into much the same position as the front-foot driver. But, while using his strength and athleticism to hit a six, he will lack the element of poise and balance as he hits across the line – and perhaps falls over to the off-side, as the brilliant Guyanese Rohan Kanhai did when he began to sweep opponents aside from the late 1950s.
Today’s batsman gets more value, in terms of runs, than his predecessor did for the effort he puts into his shots. As a rule of thumb, the proportion of boundaries in a side’s innings has increased from one-third to almost half. Today’s spectators, however, gets less value, in terms of aesthetic pleasure, for their entrance money.
Any technological advance has to be tried until the lawmakers reject it: it is incumbent upon the professional sportsman to take any advantage he can. But the time may have come for the thickness of the bat to be limited, as its width and length are. This would make the sport safer too, as well as more aesthetically pleasing, by reducing the risk of a ferocious straight drive felling the bowler in his follow-through, not to mention the non-striker or the umpire.
Thirdly, the proliferation of limited overs cricket has made batting less aesthetically pleasing. Its emphasis on scoring-rate has led to an ever higher proportion of runs scored on the leg side. When A.B. de Villiers hit the fastest 150 in one-day internationals off 64 balls, and went on to 162* off 66 balls against West Indies in the 2015 World Cup at Sydney, he hit twice as many runs to leg (53–109). Keeping a high leading elbow has gone; power is generated by clearing the front foot and swivelling the hips. Cricket is growing closer to its distant cousin, baseball.
In the countryside of northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century, a shepherd boy called Andrea doodled and drew graffiti on the walls of caves while tending his sheep. His talent was noticed and brought to the attention of the Medici family, who patronised Andrea del Castagno. It was the same rural pathway, from pastures to professional painting, followed by Giotto.
Castagno brought movement into his pictures – not so much in his Last Supper, or his fresco in St Mark’s Basilica, but in the painting on a leather shield that was to be used in Medici processions around Florence. His subject, again, was David. On this occasion, however, Castagno depicted David as he points with his left arm towards Goliath. His extended right arm holds the sling – presumably with a stone inside – and starts its deadly swing.
No bowling coach could come up with a better model for a right-arm medium-pacer. Cut off most of the hair, remove the orange tunic, add some trousers and boots, and it could be the Australian bowler of the 1980s Terry Alderman in his delivery stride. (There is even a passing facial resemblance between Goliath and Alderman’s opening partner, Dennis Lillee.) David’s left arm points in the fashion prescribed for side-on bowling actions, his head and feet just so. The stone might out-swing nicely, assuming Goliath is a right-hander.
If anyone has known how to get value for money, it was the Medicis. So Castagno would not have been on their books had he not been a fine painter; and here is one of his most celebrated works. The human form is displayed very pleasingly in two-dimensional form. Yet, I would say, there have been bowling actions more beautiful than David’s slinging.
Ted McDonald was Australia’s opening bowler on their tour of England in 1921 and, in company with Jack Gregory, hit batsmen as they had never been hit before. Not everyone in professional cricket wore two batting gloves before Gregory and McDonald, but they did by the end of the decade. Another of Herbert Fishwick’s photographs captures what an extraordinary physical specimen Gregory was, all limbs. As well as for pace bowling, Gregory used those long arms to set two records which have not been equalled, let alone broken, almost a century later: the fastest Test century in terms of minutes, 70, and 15 catches in the 1920–21 Ashes series, mainly at slip.
McDonald had a gliding run-up of 18 yards, according to the best cricket historian between the world wars, Ray Robinson, ‘and there was something ominous about the way he came up, his arm swinging with rhythmic menace, the wrist coiling like a cobra about to strike.’ The book in which Robinson wrote about McDonald, Between Wickets, contained no photograph of McDonald (the author was based in Australia, whereas the bowler spent most of his career in England). But happily another photographer equipped with a Long Tom was present at the start of the Australians’ tour in Leicester in 1921; and what he captured in black and white was, and remains in my eyes, the most beautiful bowling action.
It may be slightly unfair on Castagno and his David, but McDonald has his athleticism heightened by the passivity of the umpire, who stares at where McDonald’s right or back foot is about to land, to monitor the no-ball law of the time. The umpire’s trilby adds to this passivity: no hat would stay on McDonald’s head, so fast is he running. In the complete photograph a fielder, probably at mid-off, looks impassive too, immobile. It was only later in the 1920s that the captain of New South Wales, Alan Kippax, initiated the practice of having fielders walk in as the bowler delivered.
Even if you airbrush away the umpire and mid-off fielder, the figure of McDonald in his delivery stride captures much the same ‘infinite potentiality of strength’. Robinson’s image of a cobra is apposite: McDonald snapped his wrist to strike with fatal effect. He can still be called the most valuable overseas signing made by any county, as he took Lancashire to the Championship title in four of his eight seasons – and in the following 80 years they won it outright only once. When McDonald ripped out Don Bradman’s leg-stump in 1930, McDonald was 38, but still cutting the ball into right-handed batsmen at pace.
Michelangelo lengthened the arms of his David for additional effect, not least because the sculpture was originally to be placed high on a buttress on the side of the cathedral in Florence, and thus viewed from a distance. McDonald, by nature, had exceptionally long arms. He was six feet one inch tall and, according to Robinson, his arm-span from fingertip to fingertip was six feet four inches: even longer than the arm-span of the contemporary world heavyweight boxing champion Max Schmeling, who was the same height as McDonald. The bowler was double-jointed too: able to clasp his hands in front of himself, then pass them over his head and rest them on his backside.FN58 Such a prime physical specimen could be turned by the anonymous photographer into a work of art.
Power is manifest in McDonald’s shoulders and his overall athleticism. Yet poise, balance and lightness are evident, too. As McDonald has both feet in the air – and there is nothing to suggest he will get them tangled up and fall over – he is lighter than Mercury. If Nijinsky had run across a stage and coiled himself into a similar position, I do not see how he could have been more aesthetically pleasing.
Other bowlers have come close. Harold Larwood in one photograph is in the same pose as Castagno’s David, only more muscular; and he too brought down an opposing champion, in Bradman. The Sussex and England bowler Maurice Tate, again side-on, exudes more energy than David with his sling. But if we are hyper-critical, Tate is a trifle too bulky for physical perfection; he has balance, but not poise.
Fred Trueman is the embodiment of power as he pauses in the split second before pounding his left leg down. The Australian fast bowlers Ray Lindwall and Dennis Lillee had most of these qualities. Michael Holding had the most graceful run and run-up. I remember him running round the boundary to his right at Sabina Park in the 1981 Test against England, picking the ball up and throwing in mid-air to the top of the stumps. The crowd – his crowd – groaned in ecstasy.
Only not any more.
To prevent back injuries, bowlers are now coached to keep their spines as straight as they can in the action of delivery. In consequence, they no longer bowl side-on like McDonald, Larwood and Trueman, whose mantra was that ‘cricket is a side-on game.’ The torsos of their successors are more chest-on to the batsman, more stiff and upright: safer, so the medical research suggests, but less aesthetically pleasing. It is as well that Trueman did not live to commentate on T20.
Spin bowlers are still allowed to turn side-on. But their visual effect is not going to be the same as that of a fast bowler, because spinners do not strive for speed, so less power and strength are manifest. The photograph of India’s left-arm spinner Bishan Bedi taken by Ken Kelly captures wristy artistry in action, or poetry in motion, but not awe-inspiring power. So too Rodin’s statue l’Age d’airain: one of the statues cast in the original mould found its way to Leeds, where it could have served as inspiration for Wilfred Rhodes.
Rex Nettleford, as the artistic director of the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica, has observed the parallels between cricket and dance. ‘The game of cricket is reminiscent of a choreographed dance work in which individual players are utilized by a captain to create a unified and technically adept instrument analogous to that by which the choreographer gives effect to his creative imagination. A well-captained team in the field often seems to move like a corps de ballet when it is doing well, as the fieldsmen crouch and/or move forward, as the bowler approaches and the players cover for one another. Similarly, when things are not going well or when the team is badly captained, the team often looks like nothing more than a group of novice students of the dance.’
But while certain exponents of batting and bowling are hailed as beautiful, no fielder is. Why not? Why isn’t a slip-catcher who dives away to his right to catch an edge called beautiful? I think it is because his movement is spontaneous, in the sense that it is governed by the ball and its trajectory. There is no scope for individual, or artistic, interpretation as there is in the act of batting and bowling.
Some of Nettleford’s points are specific to West Indian cricketers, and those of Afro-Caribbean origin in particular. He quotes the former prime minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley: ‘West Indian batsmen escaped the geometric rigidities of the best coached exemplars of the English and Australian game. Instead they moved in a more poetic manner, the stroke seeming to begin with the toes and to move in a supple, flowing line through the legs, arched back and whiplike arms.’ West Indian batsmen, says Nettleford, dance down the pitch.
He ends with this observation: ‘The dance is always “unfinished”, and is itself “dynamic and ceaseless” in its quest for excellence and truth. The ephemeral nature of any performing art would not allow it otherwise. One is, in any case, only as good as one’s last work. Yesterday’s performance belongs to yesterday. One never quite knows what tomorrow will bring.’ Mundane as life itself most of the time, cricket in the right hands, and with the right bodies, can burst into more than one form of art.
Cricket’s most aesthetically pleasing film has to be Out of the Ashes, about the growth of the game in Afghanistan. The eagle that soars against the background of that azure sky captures the ambition of those who learned how to play in the refugee camps of Pakistan. For a painting, it has to be Russell Drysdale’s surrealist impression of cricketers in a deserted town in Australia’s outback. For the most pleasing music in the realm of cricket, I am tempted by Roy Harper’s song ‘When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease’: the ghost of Francis Thompson can be seen humming along.
For a complete experience, for a start, please give me St George’s Park in Port Elizabeth, on the top of a hill a mile from the Indian Ocean, and its band. The Eastern Province association has usually given the band members some lunch or help with the cost of a minibus, but they are not paid: they simply want to play their music at the cricket. And they have something to sing about: in Port Elizabeth, more than any other area of South Africa I have seen, indigenous Africans have been able to obtain decently paid jobs, perhaps in the car assembly plants in the industrial free zone. So when they go to St George’s Park they can readily forget about daily existence, abandoning themselves to the sea breezes and joy of the moment.
Often two church bands come together, in the middle of the old wooden stand to the left of the pavilion, and begin their songs. They will not play all day long, not during a Test match against England, but after a warm-up during the morning session they will sing their hearts out in the afternoon. The state of the match is somewhat immaterial. Before apartheid they always supported the opposition; a newspaper report of England’s 1888–89 tour observed: ‘It is singular that the sympathies of the Native spectators were with the English.’ Now they wave South African flags, but what they are celebrating is not so much an impending victory. When they sing ‘Stand By Me’ or ‘Shosholoza’, they celebrate being alive, and having a decent job, and the freedom to be part of humanity, and being at the cricket on a sunny day – and never have I heard music more joyful, not even Handel.
I would take this old wooden stand running along one side of St George’s Park, along with its band, to create a composite version of the ideal setting for a cricket match. From grounds which have staged Tests, I would take the backdrop of Bequia, which graces St Vincent, to serve at one end; at the other, either Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, which can be seen in the distance from Sabina Park, or else the closer hills behind Queen’s Park Oval in Port-of-Spain.
Add the pavilion at the Sydney Cricket Ground, with its nineteenth-century ironwork (no English pavilion is so open and inviting, because it has to keep out the cold). Plant Adelaide’s scoreboard and cathedral on the side opposite to the old wooden stand and the band. Let the pitch be taken from Bramall Lane, one of those that had something for everyone in the 1960s. Let Michael Holding and Ted McDonald measure out their run-ups to bowl against Saeed Anwar and Wally Hammond, and let the band strike up!