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Such is the love I bear for Life and Cricket.
Samuel Maunder
In addition to all the other reasons for playing and watching cricket, the sport offers a time frame by which we can measure our lives. It has also been known to create the happy illusion that we have lived longer than we actually have.
Thanks to cricket, rather than a photograph album, I can date an early family holiday in Scotland. We went out one afternoon, confident that England would knock off the runs they needed to win the fourth Test against Australia, came back to our seaside cottage, waited for the television to warm up, and watched in dismay as England were bowled out. I have only to look up Wisden to find the date: it was 1 August 1961. Sixteen years later, to the day, I was decorating a bedroom.
In the fifth Test of that series between England and Australia, England’s opening batsman Raman Subba Row played his last Test innings before retiring at the age of 29. As he walked out to bat at the Oval, for the final time, I was probably affected more than he was. I came to know him when he managed England’s tour of India in 1981–82, and he kindly wrote a foreword to my book about the tour, Cricket Wallah. He seemed to have enjoyed his career in business, and never expressed to me any regret about giving up the game so young. But for a seven-year-old watching black-and-white television, Subba Row’s retirement – premature in terms of his cricket – was my first rite of passage, and one which moved me very close to tears. It was my first sense of loss, the first time I felt that time was passing, never to return.
We can measure so much of our lives by cricket’s time frame because it occupies so many days of the calendar. I remember exactly where I was on the morning of 17 February 1971, to the very point on the stairs, on hearing that Ray Illingworth’s team had regained the Ashes: it was the first occasion in my conscious life that England had held them. The afternoon of 21 July 1981? Why, I was pacing round the back of the press box at Headingley as if outside a maternity ward, while Bob Willis put the finishing touches to Ian Botham’s 149 not out and the biggest turnaround in England’s Test history. (Afterwards, as the nation celebrated, I caught a lift with Graham Gooch, who must have been the only person in England not euphoric: his Test place was in danger.) Many of us can recall where we were on Sunday, 7 August 2005, when England beat Australia at Edgbaston by two runs, to turn the wheel, at long last.
Other sports offer a similar service of escapism. But cricket has been going on longer, for the best part of three hundred years. It offers us this time frame, as well as a brace to stiffen us against the blows of Fate.
Cricket’s interaction with time serves other uses. Together, as a pair, they can keep memory alive. This will become ever more relevant as more of us live to an older age. The last memory that Alzheimer’s leaves us may be that of the first Test match we attended, or the shot that brought up our maiden century.
Dudley Carew survived the First World War, then suffered, among countless others, a sense of purposelessness. He decided to spend the summer of 1926 watching cricket matches and writing about them. England Over contains some of the finest writing of any cricket book: at least two chapters deserve to be ranked as English literature. When he visited the Oval, his attention dwelt not only on the game between Surrey and Cambridge University but on spectators, who were coping with the start of the General Strike and Great Depression, as well as the effects of war. Carew met
an elderly man who will talk to you for so long as you care to listen of Abel and Richardson, Lohmann and Lockwood. While he is talking one has time to observe him carefully. One notices the square-toed, unpolished boots, the rucked waistcoat with the spot or two of grease on it, the clean, ill-fitting collar, and one wonders, if one has an inquisitive mind, what manner of life this man has led. What suffering has he been through, and what happiness? Who is his God, and what in life or in death does he most fear? One wonders what he has worked at, and whether his wife is alive, and whether he has children. One wants desperately to pierce to the reality behind the clothes and talk, and it is only after one has been listening to him for some time that one begins to realise that the reality may lie precisely in those words ‘Abel,’ ‘boundary,’ ‘slow-bowler,’ he is perpetually uttering. We are always so insolently certain that the accidents which over-shadow the world such as death and suffering and love are of immense importance to everyone. We do not allow for the curious filter of the individual mind which can rob such words of all significance and distil from such apparently trivial occurrences as a cricket match, a night at a theatre, an unexpected five-pound note, essences of strength and purity. Looking at the particular old man to whom I spoke, the conviction grew on me that this was reality for him, this ground, this scoreboard and these slim, yellow stumps, and that he would carry out with him into the darkness, not the recollection of a woman’s lips against his own or of the laboured, weakening breath of a child, but rather of Richardson walking back to begin his run or of Hobbs lifting his cap after completing his century.
After this Oval game, Carew visited Lord’s for the annual two-day fixture between Eton and Harrow, not that he had attended either school. He found this match to be still a highlight of the social calendar:
The Eton and Harrow match keeps up its ritual wonderfully well. Year after year coaches gather round the tavern, the popping of champagne corks is heard, salmon mayonnaise is handed round. Top hats glitter in the sun and gaitered legs perambulate backwards and forwards by the pavilion. The ground itself seems to become jolly and benevolent, like an old gentleman who puts his age and dignity by and exerts himself at a children’s party. The parade at luncheon and between the innings somehow carries one back to the days when Dan Leno held the Empire in adoring silence and women stood on chairs to catch a sight of Lily Langtry. Immaculate old men, leaning on sticks as they walk, seem to have come out of Meredith’s world.
The cricket itself is mundane as Eton score 312 in their first innings. Carew looks around, and in front of the Tavern he notices a woman whom he observes all the more closely as the first day wears on. And time, having offered an illusion of the early Victorian era of George Meredith, kicks in again with a reference to the eighteenth century: ‘Her black dress, elaborately pleated, spoke of another age, and the white feather in her hat, a full voluminous feather, gave her, for all her ampleness, a faint but startling resemblance to the women that Gainsborough delighted to paint.’
This woman stirs to life when Harrow commence their innings on the first evening. In his curiosity, Carew approaches her, on the pretext of offering his scorecard, but she does not need it. She knows full well who Harrow’s opening batsmen are: ‘Crawley and Clover-Brown, we should see some good cricket now, Crawley is the best bat on either side.’
Carew, impressed by her knowledge, continues the conversation and asks if she watches Eton v Harrow every year. ‘Oh! no, only since the war and the one year before it.’ At this point she turns away. Their conversation has been terminated, at least for the day.
When Carew arrives a little late at Lord’s on the second morning, this woman is in exactly the same seat. She informs him: ‘Crawley is out, there is no chance of a Harrow win now.’ She has no beauty of face or physique, but there is something of it in the way she speaks. ‘Her actual voice was more perfect than the ghost of it my memory and imagination had created together in the night.’
The match is heading for a draw, as it is a four-innings match spread over only two days, and it resolves into a fight for first-innings lead and a modicum of honour. ‘Excitement hung electrically in the air, and the shouts of “E-ton,” “Har-row,” which are supposed to be becoming fainter every year, took on the robust note of an earlier age.’ Spurred on, Harrow take the first innings lead, and extend it to 64, before Eton comfortably bat out time.
I turned to the woman beside me. ‘Another draw, I wish Harrow could win, it would do them a lot of good.’
Slowly, reluctantly, she turned her eyes from the cricket, and in her exquisite voice there was a faint note of rebuke. ‘There are years to come,’ she said slowly. ‘Years and years, years and years.’
It seemed as though as she spoke she saw in her words a vision of those years to come which upheld and elated her.
Feebly I murmured, ‘You like cricket, then?’ She turned towards me and her vacant, slightly protruding eyes searched my face as though to discover an expression, a feature known to her. ‘He said that,’ she murmured at last, ‘that Harrow would win, he was always so optimistic, so full of plans. The things he was going to do! He loved cricket so. He thought he might even play for Harrow if he stayed long enough. He always said they would win, though. In 1914 he said, “We shall win next year, mother.” There was no match in 1915, you see, so he was wrong, he was wrong.’
Carew is horrified. Only at this instant does he realise why this woman comes annually to Lord’s. He stammers that he is ‘so terribly sorry’.
She replies: ‘You are not old enough, young man, to know how easy it is to forget, not half old enough.’ She continues, after a pause: ‘When you are old it is difficult to remember, to remember clearly. Memory lives not in the brain but in places, young man. You must go out and find memory if you want her, she waits but does not come.’
She turns away, to absorb the scene she would not see again until her pilgrimage the same time next year. ‘She stopped gazing at me, and took in, in a slow and comprehensive glance, the pavilion, the coaches, the stands, the scoreboard as though to illustrate to me how, in this ground at any rate, memory waited for her faithfully and enduringly.’
The result of the match being certain, Carew decides to leave Lord’s. Before going, he asks the woman if she will stay till the end. ‘Her voice, resonant, deep and beautiful, echoed my words. “Till the end.”’
After walking away, Carew turns to see her, still in her seat, ‘watching with a glowing intensity the last few overs of a dying game.’
‘Memory waits,’ she had said, and I know that I shall never enter Lord’s again without finding her ghost there, tragically and pitifully evoking the memories of her dead son.
Those last three monosyllables are hammer blows. They nail the coffin.
Cricket can be used not only to keep memory alive and vivid in the present. Ronald Mason, in Batsman’s Paradise, believed it can also serve to create the illusion that time has halted. This is what great painters do.
When Denis Compton made his first-class debut for Middlesex in 1936, Mason was avidly watching at Lord’s. It was the Whitsun Bank Holiday Championship match against Sussex, and on a fresh morning Middlesex’s batsmen had not coped with the seam bowling of Maurice Tate. At number eleven, a 17-year-old walked out to join Gubby Allen, the England captain. The boy, ‘spruced up and looking new and nervous’, played back to his first two balls from Tate and missed. After Allen had gestured to him, ‘the boy shook his head as if the flies were at it; played desperately forward at the next ball and got it clearly in the middle.’ Compton went on to score 14 before being given leg-before, after a half-hearted shout. Before the end of the following season he was batting at number five for England.
In 1953 Mason saw Compton bat again at Lord’s. In the long interim ‘the boy Compton had gone . . . The pinkness had left his features, his mischievous eyes had retreated behind contemplative wrinkles; he was soberer, firmer set, authoritative, assured.’ Mason asked himself where the delightful urchin had gone. And gradually, while Compton battled against an Australian attack led by Ray Lindwall, the author ‘glimpsed the touching struggle for re-emergence of my lost and charming urchin from the other side of the war, from the other side of a barrier of destructiveness, from the other end of a moving and unreturning band of Time.’
Mason’s hypothesis was that the game itself – the way cricket was played, its style and method – did not fundamentally change. Neither did cricket grounds, like Lord’s, change ‘barring certain structural alterations which do not much matter’. Only the players change, Mason argued, from one generation to the next.
Therefore we are presented with the illusion of a constant watcher of a constant background, marking dutifully off as they [i.e. the players] pass before his eyes the only elements in the scene which vary. If they did not vary, there would be no Time. Their variations are the only means of marking Time off, in the context of the game.
This hypothesis has not, however, stood the test of time. It worked for Mason, but not for us, his successors. Even on a ground which has not been structurally renovated, the game has changed, a lot. When Mason watched Compton batting at Lord’s, all the attacking was done by the bowler, whether Tate in 1936 or Lindwall in 1953. The run-rate was seldom so high as three per over. Bats were light, and the ball was stroked along the ground, neither a helmet nor an advertisement in sight.
Since the 1990s – Sri Lanka’s winning of the 1996 World Cup makes as definitive a starting point as any – the batsmen have done ever more of the attacking. Caution and the fear of getting out have disappeared, replaced by bravado and an obsession with strike-rate. A 17-year-old making his county debut now would be barely able to show his face in the dressing room if his innings of 14 did not include a four and a six.
On only one occasion in Mason’s long experience of watching professional cricket did he glimpse this future which has become our present. It occurred in the end-of-season fixture of Champion County v The Rest at the Oval in September 1924. Frank Woolley and Percy Chapman, perhaps the two most attacking batsmen of the period, were facing Wilfred Rhodes and Roy Kilner, the Yorkshire left-arm spinners who were the two most economical bowlers of the period. They spent whole seasons conceding fewer than two runs an over.
Woolley and Chapman, both left-handers, took Rhodes and Kilner apart. Judging by Mason’s description, they mostly drove or pull-drove, or slog-swept as we would say, over midwicket. The author, aged 12, was sitting amid a gaggle of schoolboys near the gasometers. In exactly seven minutes by his reckoning, perhaps three overs, they scored 50 runs.
Never again did Mason experience such joy:
I felt, innocent and inexperienced as I was, a sense of tremendous exultation. It was elementary, charity-match stuff; but it affected me as no incident at any cricket match has ever affected me, before or since . . . Whenever I woke up in the night visited by such fears as often plague our humanity for very little cause, I would find my palpitations quietened almost inevitably by a handhold out of the past from that bright little incident of my boyhood. The sunny Oval, and Chapman, all red-faced and laughing, dancing out to drive, and the ball soaring and the crowd rising and cheering, made a living light-giving cameo that very many times in the lonely night-watches of real or imaginary distress cooled and soothed my agitation and eased me into a quieter mood of resignation or sleep. It is a part of the past that is bodily of the present still.
Since the 1990s, and especially the growth of 20-over cricket, a 12-year-old going to the Oval has not been surprised by the sight of 50 runs being struck off three overs. Indeed, he has probably gone there expecting to see such a scoring rate. In many a training session, no doubt, Surrey’s batsmen have rehearsed ‘50 off 18’.
The gasometers outside the Oval have not changed. Inside, almost everything has.
It is partly because the element of time is right that the Test match is widely considered to be cricket’s highest form. In most cases, five days allow for a fight to the finish. The contestants are not mindful of time until the fifth day approaches. It has long been axiomatic that a team which sets out to draw a Test match usually fails. A Test is a 15-round boxing match; a one-day international a bout of three rounds, and a Twenty20 of one.
The duration of a Test match has not always been five days, but it has for the last half-century; and the proportion of draws has diminished from a third in the 1960s to the point where a draw has become a rarity in some countries in the absence of rain. Five days: any less, and some players would be tempted to enter the match with the aim of achieving a draw, a stalemate. Any more, and the intensity of each day would be diluted, and the focus could wander.
A span of five days allows for an almost infinite number of variations to unfold; and, having seen almost a fifth of all Tests, I cannot think of two the same. The physicist Professor Brian Cox equated cricket with the universe – except that the former has far more laws governing it than the latter. ‘When you get so many variables [of pitch, ball, weather, human characteristics etc], the number of possibilities becomes enormous,’ Cox said. ‘Cricket is more complicated than the Universe.’ Preserve the Test match and cricket will carry on creating novel possibilities.
It is a coincidence that the most epic battle in the western world lasted for six days: five days of fighting and a rest day, such as Test cricket had until the 1980s. Or maybe it is not a coincidence at all. Maybe the ideal time span for any epic contest is five days.FN67 When Homer composed The Iliad, his time span allowed the action to breathe, to have light and shade, quiet and tumult. The final showdown between the Greeks and Troy after the ten-year siege had time for the revelation of human character, but not too much time, so the action was sufficiently compressed to generate tension.
Suppose the fall of Troy had occurred in the same time frame as a one-day international. Achilles would either have sulked in his tent throughout and missed the action, or he would have come out to fight before the tension became unbearable. Either way, we would have been deprived of the ‘will he, won’t he’ come to the aid of the Greeks. We would not have had time for more than one duel between Achilles and Hector, no time for Achilles to chase Hector around the walls of Troy three times. Once round the block would have been somewhat less dramatic.
The lengthier time span of five days of fighting allows the advantage to swing from one side to the other and back. Each evening, everyone can look back and take stock: has the Greek position improved since the day before? Everyone has to endure an anxious night before finding out what happens next. Homer could have been describing an England captain who had sent Australia in at Brisbane, not King Agamemnon wondering how to win without Achilles: ‘Groan after groan came up from the depths of his being, and his heart was shot through by fear.’
Other similarities between the Siege of Troy and a Test match suggest themselves. The fighting begins when Paris and Menelaus draw lots to see who will throw the first spear; the equivalent in cricket, of course, is the tossing of a coin. Duels simplify the action, whether between Greek and Trojan, or Shane Warne and Andrew Flintoff, England’s Achilles in 2005. The team game of cricket has thrown up individual champions since ‘Great Newland’ challenged Hodsoll in 1744, and such duels are easier to describe and follow than amorphous meleés.
Some Homeric descriptions of death are brief and conventional, like a spear through the shoulder blade, whereas more spectacular demises are recounted in the goriest detail. The downfall of a batsman in a Test match is analogous. We can be given a stock phrase – ‘he was trapped lbw’ – or treated to a blow-by-blow account, like his being set up by a bowler before he is caught at deep-square off a bouncer, which heightens the drama.
Homer’s time span of five or six days allows for soliloquies by men and gods, and conversations between the two; the parallel is the press conference or television interview. The speech of both warrior and cricketer is filled with conventional epithets and pious aspirations, infused with sufficient modesty to offset the accusation of hubris. Hector declares to Achilles: ‘I know that you are a great fighter, and I am much your inferior. But these things [i.e. the outcome] lie in the laps of the gods.’ Ditto the Test captain in his eve-of-match conference.
Some consider it a defect when Homer warns us of what is to happen because it lessens the drama: he tells us that Athene has lobbied Zeus to ensure victory for Achilles before his final duel with Hector. Others say this foreknowledge allows us to concentrate on how the protagonists develop in the face of their impending fate. Does not the spectator of a close cricket match enjoy the best of both worlds? He does not know the outcome, unless he has paid for the result to be fixed, and he can see the players reacting in extremis. Only on its first night does a play in a theatre hold so much glorious uncertainty.
Homer uses time in another way familiar to followers of cricket. He tells us that Nestor’s squadron numbered 90 ships, Diomedes commanded ‘80 black ships’, and the Athenians had 50 ships, many more than the Greeks of Homer’s day could muster – and they were crewed by virtual giants and commanded by demi-gods. Ever since John Nyren insisted in The Cricketers of My Time that bowlers were quicker in his day, as well as the beer being so much stronger than in the effeminate 1830s, cricket has shared this tendency to aggrandise the past – more so than other sports or human activities, I would observe. Cricketers are never so good as they used to be. The selectiveness of memory is at work here: we have forgotten the mistakes and mundane passages, and remember only the outstanding moments. In addition, we have the narrator at work. He wants his listeners or readers to be awed by the past, to stay tuned.
We also have in The Iliad the first account of sport in western culture. Achilles organises funerary games in memory of his friend Patroclus: a chariot race, boxing, wrestling, discus-throwing, archery, throwing the javelin and duelling until blood is drawn. These sports keep the Greeks fighting fit during the truce, and nourish competitiveness, but they also present Achilles in a far more attractive light. He had been the spoilt brat in his tent, then savage in his treatment of Hector’s body, letting each of his men stab the corpse in front of the walls of Troy and Hector’s parents. But he is redeemed in our eyes by staging these games, and chivalrously adding an extra prize for a contestant who had been unfairly impeded in the chariot race. His sportsmanship proves Achilles has a generous side, and a sense of fairness, in peace if not war.
The place where time has come closest to standing still for me is Hinton Charterhouse, outside Bath. For well over 30 years I have played there and the ground has not changed. The air is fresh and the light clear as Hinton is reputed to be the second highest settlement in Somerset, and the westerlies blow the rain clouds down the valley below. Every community is more settled, more knitted together, for having a cricket team.
The manor house through the trees, blessed with an orangery, is Georgian architecture in Bath stone at its most handsome, not austere and symmetrical. The elder brother of Raymond Robertson-Glasgow, cricket correspondent of The Observer in the 1950s, used to live here and laid out the ground. The tradition is that he had the soil for the square brought from Lord’s, and the pitches have always been good for batting, except for an hour after rain. Every tree in the grounds of the manor house is different, creating an arboretum.
In my devotion I am not alone. Our head groundsman, Ed, is over 90, artificial hips and all. Old Al has been mowing the outfield since the 1970s; and for over 30 years several of us have put the ‘creak’ back into cricket. We cannot bring ourselves to retire, even when the ball trickles past our ankles, or between. Hinton players tend to move to another area for work, or die on partially active service. Alan, our second-team wicketkeeper, was hit on the head by a top edge, diagnosed with cancer when he went to hospital, and died within the six-month, leaving a wife and three young children. In January, we huddled in the cold of the churchyard beside the manor. ‘Can’t be a god, can there?’ asked our first-team keeper.
Old Shardy took hundreds or rather thousands of wickets with his unerringly accurate medium pace, nibbling away around off-stump, creating so many chances that one afternoon I held three catches at second slip. He kept on playing friendlies into his seventies. His shoulder had long since stopped him bowling, he hid in the field at 45 degrees, and wanted to bat no higher than eleven; but he could not give up playing cricket at Hinton.
On a Sunday in spring and summer, playing at Hinton is for us as much a ritual as attending church. We are like Hindus or Jews in worshipping our way of life, only in the English countryside.
Going up the drive, I look first to see if the stumps are up: if not, Ed might think the ground is too wet for a game.FN68 Then I look for a few cars parked behind the pavilion: too few and it might mean the opposition will not turn up, and the afternoon is lost.
If the visitors are warming up with nets and drills, if they are aged between 20 and 30, or if they have a cricketer of note, I am confident we will play our best. When the opposition look a shambles of too old and too young, we will relax and probably lose. We are lucky to have entertained some of the finest cricketers at Hinton Charterhouse. When he was the professional for Imperial in Bristol, Shane Warne was not yet the master of spin-bowling psychology. (He took 200 Test wickets when he ripped his leg-break, and 500 wickets after he damaged his shoulder but mastered mind games.) At Hinton, he left the field for a fag and a pint after his brief spell: 4–0–15–1 in our scorebook.FN69
Viv Richards graced our stage before my time when qualifying for Somerset in 1973 by playing for Lansdown; so did Ian Botham and the rest of the Somerset team when they played a couple of benefit games at Hinton in the late 1970s (one of the rare occasions when Botham kept wicket). Colin Croft once became bored with off-breaks and rolled back some of his years; Jon LewisFN70 bowled a lot here, then for Gloucestershire; and Marcus Trescothick, a Keynsham teenager, slog-swept spinners into the arboretum.
To avoid the tendency to aggrandise the past, we have had our lean seasons, very lean in the early 1980s. The only new members who joined would say: ‘I haven’t played since school but . . .’ When posted to mid-on, they would not walk in, but bend forward, hands on knees.
Whatever the game, I prefer to field first. My teammates who have played a league game on Saturday, and obviously socialised until late, want to bat first on Sundays, but I am nearly as keen to take the field as I was in my childhood. I like fielding for an hour or so, catching up with news and banter, before a bowl. A batsman stumped when charging a leg-break or gated by a googly: these are my favourite dismissals, and not so familiar that they breed contempt. A buzzard has taken to flying over Hinton in recent seasons, but it never seems to spot easy prey when I am bowling.
Sharing a meal with fellow-believers is a part of most rituals. Home-made tea, in the pavilion or on the verandah, is another of Hinton’s delights. Ivo Bligh, unwittingly, set a long-term trend by visiting Rupertswood. All cricketers now worship the urn.
I don’t mind a bit of umpiring afterwards: anything but scoring, because that still evokes the frustration of my childhood. When the bowling is from the other end, I like to alternate between square-leg and cover, to take in the views. My favourite umpiring moment comes in April, in the first game of our season, before a leaf on the trees. It is an insight into how God must have felt at the launch of creation when I drop my arm and joyfully shout: ‘Play!’
If it happens to be a perfect afternoon, I will go in about number seven or eight with 30 runs to win off the last few overs and help knock them off. Very seldom, if ever, is life perfect. Whatever runs I have scored or wickets taken, I will replay them in my head when I wake up during the night, stiff, and content if we have won our league match and I have done my bit by taking a few wickets and dragging the rate back. If I bowl well in April, the pleasure is flooded with relief: I have one more season, at any rate. Does anyone who plays sport have to go through the self-doubt of the ageing club cricketer? He has to wait seven whole months before he knows whether he can perform again or not.
The ritual after the game is to shake hands with the opposition, and for us to clear the field while they cluster in their dressing room and maybe shut the door to review their performance. The clunk when carrying the stumps back to the pavilion contrasts with the clink of the metal poles when we take them out to rope off the square. We share a drink or two, pay our match fee and set off home, when the tops of the trees are tall enough to catch the lingering light. It is only on driving back that I realise the outside world has not intruded all afternoon, not even the sound of traffic through the trees.
Sunday evenings are best. After the game I drive into the sun setting in the west, along lanes where the followers of the Duke of Monmouth straggled before the last battle on English soil, at Sedgemoor; but I only identify with them if Hinton have lost. When my wife awaits at home, and one or two of our children, and some of my wife’s cooking, and a bottle of wine, and I have taken a few wickets, I cannot think of anything to make me happier.
I hate September when leaves from the lime tree that towers above the pavilion scud into the nets and across the square: yellows and auburns are inadequate compensation. The far side of the ground sloping towards the manor is damp from dew when I get slogged over there. Only a few packets of peanuts are left for sale on the wall of the bar. I want to play on and on, as some trees are still fully leafed. How about a friendly on the last Sunday of September, Ed? Or a 20-over game in early October starting at noon? Please, please? But we have to reseed the square and ‘put the club to bed’, tenderly, as if it were a baby.
The next time I go to Hinton I will be another year older, and even less capable of stopping the ball that swirls past my left ankle, even with my boot. The gap between knowing what to do, and being able to do it, grows larger and larger. An injury takes longer to heal, not days but months. Next year I shall be even more racked with self-doubt: have I lost what little I had? Only one thing is to be said for old age as a spinner: the ball is less likely to bounce over the bails. The silver lining in Shardy’s death was that he had never quite reached the stage of saying: ‘This is my last ever match for Hinton.’ For me, knowing I was playing my last game of cricket would be as poignant as knowing I was making love for the final time.
All too soon I will resemble that old man Carew met at the Oval. Except that on my final bed, before going into the dark, I will not remember Richardson walking back to his mark or Hobbs raising his cap on reaching his century. It will be my wife and children, and my few proud moments on the field for Hinton. Until this time, ‘such is the love I bear for Life and Cricket’, I hope to watch and play.
To know ourselves, Chekhov said, we should find out our desires. Our actions are to a large extent imposed upon us. It is by our desires that we can know ourselves.
So deep was the sense of rejection I felt when invited not to play in that school match, but to score instead, that I used an opportunity that presented itself 40 years later when I became editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. I had started an after-school cricket club at the primary school that my son attended in Bristol, where the children whacked plastic balls and whizzed around the playground even on the wettest afternoon in January: if you cannot play, the next best thing is to see kids enjoying themselves at cricket.FN71 One year we had four pupils in Gloucestershire’s junior teams: not much by the standards of Lascelles Hall primary, or Wolmer’s, but not bad for a school which had never had a cricket team.
As Wisden’s editor, I was able to use the name and start the Wisden City Cup for lads aged 16 and over who lived in inner cities and did not have access to cricket grounds, let alone proper pitches. The competition grew steadily from its base in Middlesex, where the director of cricket, Angus Fraser, and the chief development officer, Phil Knappett, trialled it – until it spread to eight cities, then twelve, too big to be a labour of love, and the England and Wales Cricket Board adopted it. The competition evolved into the Lord’s Taverners City Cup, in association with the ECB, MCC (who contracted the most promising player as a Young Cricketer) and Wisden. Inner-city, then inter-city in the knockout stages, it became established as a pathway to the top for those outside the traditional club and county structures. The games had to be played on midweek evenings, because clubs with decent pitches used them at weekends: so 20-over matches they had to be.
The competition spread to cities like Wolverhampton, which had never produced an England Test cricketer. The difference now is that England’s inner cities are populated in large part by British Asians, for whom cricket has always been the number one sport, and always will be – until role-model footballers come along and lead them away from cricket, as was the case with Britain’s Afro-Caribbeans. I want to see, in parallel, a semi-hard-ball competition for girls, because the south Asian female population has to be the biggest potential growth area for cricket in Britain. If they play cricket, the sport’s future is guaranteed; if they do not, it will likely shrink into a middle-class niche.
Outside inner cities, in towns and villages and suburbs, the future of amateur cricket is fairly healthy, in spite of the sport being removed from terrestrial television at the end of 2005. It is governed by people who care for it: those who volunteer to organise, help, coach and play. A single match can include all manner of physiques, temperaments, personalities and age groups, and both genders, unlike most sports.
Every English county, whether first-class or minor, should have not only its current team but also a Veterans XI and Rookies XI, who play each other. The seniors will have crafty spinners, such as the juniors would never meet if they bat against only their contemporaries. In my retirement I would pay to watch a county’s past players playing against the future ones at a scenic out-ground, no longer used by the county side. To extend this intermingling of the generations – at which Anglo-Saxon society, unlike Mediterranean, is bad – I would like to see each county’s Over-50 team play against their Under-15s in an annual fixture or best-of-three; and their Over-60 team play against their Under-13s, and their Over-70s against their Under-11s. Fathers v sons is traditional, so why not – given greater longevity – grandfathers v grandsons? There is no better motive to play on.
Amateur cricket has social responsibilities yet to be fulfilled. It is said to be the ideal sport for those with Down’s Syndrome, because it can be broken down into comprehensible units, one over at a time, whereas a football match can appear an overwhelming mass. So why not an inter-city competition for them too? But it is, overall, on the right lines.
Professional cricket around the world is mostly governed by businessmen and politicians who are skilful at committees, and some use cricket for their own advancement. Kerry Packer was able to buy up the best cricketers for World Series Cricket because administrators before 1980 were unworldly paternalists, who had played themselves. Not any more; nobody can accuse their successors of being unmaterialistic. And until the boards of the International Cricket Council and the Test-playing countries follow New Zealand’s example in creating an executive board of independent directors who are ‘great and good’, without conflicts of interests, and some of whom have played at first-class level, professional cricket will be ever more infected by its rulers’ values.
Each of the last four centuries has witnessed a match which has been a turning point for the sport. Kent v England in 1744; the inaugural Test match, between Australia and England, in 1877; the World Cup final between India and West Indies in 1983, which engaged Asia’s interest in 50-over cricket. In this century the turning point was the World Twenty20 final between India and Pakistan in Johannesburg in 2007, which prompted India to launch their own domestic T20 league.
The time is coming when the majority of professional cricket matches will be T20; and if they are televised, there is a distinct possibility they will be corrupted, especially if they are part of a domestic league. The ‘legs’ at Lord’s, whom Mary Mitford and John Nyren deplored, have spread around the world. In 1827, the Sussex v England game at Brighton was fixed; in 2011, it was the 40-over game between Sussex and Kent. Once bookmakers and punters began to make significant sums in the 1980s, the mafia bosses moved in, including the biggest in south Asia. Such forces above the law are never going to disappear, even supposing that governments wanted them to.
The cricketer who represented his country, or his county or state, used to have a tie of local loyalty to overcome before he was tempted to fix; the T20 mercenary has none. George Smith held the franchise for the Artillery Ground and made a few profits; the T20 franchise-holder, who owns his cricketers, can make enormous profits through dishonest means.
International cricket has become too cosy, in that it is in the interest of almost all the stakeholders to let fixing continue under the table. I was told by a most senior official of the ICC’s Anti-Corruption and Security Unit that one of the most famous of all cricketers would be exposed as soon as he retired; but I am still waiting, my breath no longer held. It is more alarming for the authorities if fixers are exposed, because then broadcasters could be scared away, taking the basic revenue with them. The very occasional player who confesses is sufficient – and, by definition, he is low down the food chain, because the major fixers have a mafia behind them.
Even when a 20-over match is not corrupted, it lacks an essential ingredient which longer formats have. The finish may be exciting – indeed, through being shorter, it is more likely to be exciting than the end of a first-class match – and the skills on parade are certain to be spectacular. But the human interest has dwindled. The batsman is not presented with a range of options, as he is in a longer format; decision-making has been simplified for him. He has been reduced to a hitting machine. After a few balls to play himself in, perhaps, his aim is to hit the ball to or over the boundary: one or the other.
Such a game is all action, no drama, and sometimes not much action either: the bowler runs in, bang, the ball sails out of the ring, and nobody moves. Does a crowd assemble to watch a golfer in a driving range hitting every ball as far as he can? When big hitting is routine, it is less of a spectacle, not more: the spice of variety has gone.
A 50-over game has time for batting and hitting, for the agony of indecision and the revelation of human character. In the titanic World Cup semi-final of 1999 between Australia and South Africa at Edgbaston, Shane Warne rose to the occasion, to turn and tie the match, so that Australia went through to the final, while some of his opponents wilted.
Ultimately it is this revelation of human character, and how it develops under duress, that is the fascination of cricket, or fiction, or theatre. Had W.G. Grace been born not in 1848 but 1990, his appetites would have led him to be a full-time, round-the-world T20 specialist. He would have channelled his energies into earning as much as he could. In the process, his personality would have been submerged, like the beard beneath his helmet.
Scott Fitzgerald suggested that life is best observed through a single window. It is not true. Life is best observed through several windows, but there is nothing wrong if cricket is one of them.
As the world subsides into lawlessness and violence, largely through un- and under-employment, some would argue that cricket should take a back seat. I would argue the opposite: if people cannot obtain a decently paid job, they should be offered all the more encouragement to play sport.
Limitless greed, and the new tribalism, are the twin evils of our time. The greed of a few individuals, and of unregulated multinationals, has concentrated the world’s wealth in a few hands. How else are rich and poor ever going to meet now except on the sports ground? The old tribal structures have broken down, to be replaced by a new tribalism, like that of extremist religious sects. Sport, especially cricket,FN72 promotes the contrary value of inclusiveness.
I am conscious that international cricket depends on the rivalry between countries; and that the brutal conflicts around the world, especially the Middle East, are predicated on national boundaries. It would be a far happier world if they were dissolved and countries were replaced by city-states. We would simply vote in and pay taxes to the city in which we live, or else the nearest. But in this utopia, if so it is, let national boundaries be retained for sport: we have seen enough of franchises to know that the highest form of cricket will always be England v Australia, or India v Pakistan, not Warriors v Raiders.
In the film Out of the Ashes, the opening scene is of the visionary Taj Malik driving through the devastated streets of Kabul, having launched the Afghan game on a concrete strip in a refugee camp in Pakistan. ‘As you know, there is a lot of problem in the world today, no?’ he says with half a laugh. ‘The solution of all the problem is cricket.’ In Afghanistan, it has become the best way to promote peace and integration. In some Taliban areas, schoolgirls play the game.
Cricket is so flexible that it can play a positive role in any society. In the Negev Desert, an Arab and a Jewish village played each other at cricket in their first social interaction, as chronicled by Tom Rodwell in Third Man in Havana. Had it been football, there would have been physical contact, and the chance to misinterpret and take offence, but cricket orders its players to maintain a respectful distance.
In Rwanda, cricket has become the sport to heal the wounds of genocide. When its people fled to neighbouring countries like Kenya and Uganda in the 1990s, they saw cricket being played, and brought it home after the civil war, for fun, and therapeutic comfort.
In some countries, like the Netherlands, cricket is the elite sport. In Cuba it is the sport of the lowest sector of society: people of West Indian origin who left Barbados and Jamaica between the World Wars to work on the sugar plantations and the American naval base at Guantanamo. Cricket represents everything that Guantanamo does not: fairness, nobody above the law, a level playing field, respect for those who are other.
Nothing makes me count my blessings like the sight of visually impaired people playing cricket. I heard the captain of England’s first V.I. women’s team before they toured Nepal and she scarcely contained her joy. Hundreds upon hundreds of women in Bangladesh have had acid thrown in their faces by the most contemptible cowards: please let them have the chance to play cricket, and go on tour, and represent their country, and alert the world to stop this tragedy.
This game can bring together so many sections of society to play and watch, whether people do so for the camaraderie; or for the gratification of physical sensations; or to make a statement about themselves, or their ethnic group, or their country; whether they enjoy the game’s language or literature; whether or not they are intrigued by the numbers the game generates; whether they admire the game’s ethics, or enjoy its aesthetics; whether or not they are fascinated by the game’s psychology; whether they use the game’s time frame like a Zimmer frame, as something to cling to in the face of eternity. This sport can support us all. Cricket is the game of life.
James Love, first of all cricket reporters, was right. All that has to be done is to extend his vision, from male to female, from country to country, to all social groups and ages:
Hail CRICKET! Glorious, human, global Game!
First of all Sports! be first alike in Fame!