6
What was exquisite and memorable was the lyric movement of the artist in action.
Denzil Batchelor, on the England batsman C.B. Fry
He bowled like the devil.
Mike Selvey, on the West Indies fast bowler Patrick Patterson
Graham Gooch emerges from England’s dressing room at the bottom of the George Headley Stand in Kingston at 10.20 a.m. on Friday, 21 February 1986, and walks up to the raised platform where players can see the field. He puts down his white helmet, bat and gloves to listen to music on his earphones before England open the Test series against West Indies.
Dire Straits would be appropriate.
England’s captain, David Gower, on winning the toss, has decided to bat first because he feels he has to bat rather than because he wants to. Like most pitches, the one at Sabina Park is expected to get worse as the game goes on. Unlike most Test pitches, this one does not look sound at the start.
In the previous Test England played in Jamaica, in 1981, Gooch and Gower both hit centuries of 150-plus on an old-style belter. It was so shiny the batsman could see his shadow.
This time, one of the England batsmen in Gower’s squad looks as though he is wearing dark glasses to combat the shine. But the pitch has changed a lot. The darkness on Mike Gatting’s face has been caused by something more immediate.
At 10.28 a.m. Gooch hands his earphones and cassette recorder to Peter Willey, who is down to bat at number seven. He walks out alongside his partner, Tim Robinson, then ahead to the far end, to receive the first ball of the series from Malcolm Marshall. Nobody disputes that Marshall is the best bowler in the world at the moment. Has there ever been a better fast bowler?
The omens for this series have not been encouraging for England. The third ball of their tour hit Gooch on the helmet and rocketed skywards. It was delivered by the left-arm medium-pacer Desmond Collymore of the Windward Islands on a pitch in St Vincent that had started damp. It had been prepared by prisoners at the gaol in Arnos Vale, and they were said to be getting their own back with a spot of grievous bodily harm.
Gooch’s helmet has no metal bars or plastic visor: he has rejected both options on grounds of weight. His teammate Allan Lamb, another renowned for his bravery against fast bowling, had also brought a helmet without visor or bars, but after being pounded by Jamaica’s Courtney Walsh in the third and last warm-up game, Lamb added the bars. Gooch and Gatting went into the internationals with the helmets they had.
Before this tour, Gooch had carefully reassessed the rest of his equipment, to prepare for an attack by four outright fast bowlers. From the start of the 1985 season, he had worn special pads made for him by his former Essex teammate Rodney Cass, which were half the normal weight. To his batting gloves Gooch had added an extra layer of protection, coloured green, to the index and middle fingers of his right hand – the two most vulnerable. On his left forearm he wore a protector held in place by two sweatbands.
In that first warm-up game, to make up for the pitch, Arnos Vale had offered the most beautiful backdrop of any first-class ground I had seen: the island of Bequia across the sparkling waters of the Caribbean. But when Gooch had faced up to the bowling from the Bequia end, he saw a tramp steamer anchored behind the sightscreen. There would have been some delay if the umpires had suspended play while ordering the ship’s captain to get steam up and move. Here was the second omen.
Three days before the first Test at Sabina Park, in the first one-day international on the same ground, came the third. Gatting – no visor, no bars – had his nose broken by a ball that kicked off the uneven surface. Marshall, the unwitting perpetrator, had wheeled away in horror. Gordon Greenidge had scratched at the pitch like a frantic chicken to remove the blood. A piece of bone or cartilage was reported to have been found in the ball. Gatting had been advised to fly back to London for surgery, but first he had to wait for the bruising to subside. Hence the England player in what appeared to be dark glasses.
Before the series, the West Indian selectors had been looking for a fourth fast bowler to partner Marshall, Joel Garner and Michael Holding. They had an embarrassment of riches, even though Sylvester Clarke, Colin Croft, Ezra Moseley and several others had been banned for going on a rebel tour of apartheid South Africa. Other candidates were queuing up in a plenitude that no Test team has enjoyed before or since. Walsh had given England a taste of the refined threat of short-pitched fast bowling from round the wicket; Trinidad had Tony Gray; St Vincent had Winston Davis; tiny Antigua alone boasted Winston Benjamin and George Ferris. All were straining at the leash to win a place in the West Indies team or, at least, a contract with an English county. All had been overlooked in favour of someone still more fearsome.
In what had been scheduled as a four-day game at Sabina Park a month before the first Test, Patrick Patterson had blown away Guyana in a single spell of seven wickets for 24 runs. Guyana had been dismissed for 41, the lowest total ever recorded in the Shell Shield. Holding, Jamaica’s captain, did not even get a bowl.
Patterson, aged 24, was not from the conventional mould of Jamaican cricketers – not from Kingston or Spanish Town, not from the middle or lower-middle classes. He was from the east coast of Jamaica, ‘the real Jamaaaica’, far removed from the capital and the tourist beaches of the north-west coast. It was no coincidence he had sprung from the same background as Roy Gilchrist, who had terrified batsmen in the 1950s with his bouncers and beamers until he had been banned from Test cricket.
Patterson had been born and schooled in Happy Grove, ten miles north of Morant Bay. In the 1980s, the courthouse in Morant Bay looked exactly as it had when it had been the focus of the British Empire. Riots had broken out in 1865 on a scale unknown in Jamaica. Paul Bogle, a black Baptist minister, had called for an improvement in working conditions for the masses. Governor Eyre had retaliated by having Bogle tried and hanged in that very courthouse. More than a century later, judges in antiquated robes still sat in judgment over young men with incomprehension in their sullen eyes.
After being selected in the West Indies squad for the first one-day international and first Test, Patterson stayed with his elder brother in downtown Kingston. From the team hotel in the des-res suburbs in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, the sports photographer for The Observer, Adrian Murrell, and I shared a taxi. We figured we would be safe as soon as we reached the area where the Pattersons lived. Nobody would mess with them.
Patrick, taciturn yet amenable, posed for a photograph – first with his shirt on, then without a shirt, exhibiting the upper body of a heavyweight boxer like Joe Frazier or Sonny Liston. In the first one-day international Patterson took a wicket with his fourth and eighth balls for West Indies. England, in 46 overs of the heaviest going, scored 145 for the loss of eight batsmen – long-term in the case of Gatting. It had not been a match-winning total.
Gooch takes guard from the Barbadian umpire David Archer, who is standing at the Headley Stand end. Archer is relatively experienced for the period before professional umpires outside England: this is his 15th Test. His colleague Johnny Gayle is in his third and has never officiated in a Test outside Jamaica. When it comes to intimidation, England can realistically look only to Archer for protection. The current Laws allow any number of bouncers in an over, up to six if so desired.
It is quiet before the cyclone.
But warning signs are instantly apparent, like palm trees beginning to bend.
Marshall opens the attack, sprinting in, pigeon-toed, to four slips and Garner in the gully, and his first ball lifts sharply to beat Gooch.
The pitch is grassy. Clippings have been rolled in – it is not natural grass binding the surface. The second ball is short. Gooch fends it down to Desmond Haynes hovering at short-leg.
Already Gooch has seen enough to judge the amount of new-ball bounce. He lets Marshall’s third ball, pitching on the short side before cutting back, pass over his stumps. He gets off the mark when Marshall pitches up his sixth ball, with a single pushed wide of mid-on.
Garner, the fastest bowler over six and a half feet there had been, aims a fuller length and is perceptibly slower. Garner is on-driven for four by Gooch with the full face of his bat.
Marshall eases into his work, athlete that he is: bowling fast never seems to take much out of him. In his third over Gooch, after fending down another bouncer, turns a four behind square, and at the end of it wipes his head with the white towel he has tucked into his trousers. Kingston is already hot, and he has faced 23 of the 31 balls, as a senior partner should.
Marshall switches to round the wicket for his fourth over: cue an all-out bouncer assault. Gooch, the non-striker, ironically raises his arm for Robinson’s benefit, as if the sightscreen could be adjusted to suit the batsman. But the screen at the Headley Stand end is a permanent one, and permanently too low. The hand of tall bowlers comes over the top of the screen, out of the background of spectators in the stand – and they are not wearing white clothes. England’s management had complained after the match against Jamaica and the pounding by Walsh. The response of the Jamaican authorities was that nothing could be done because the seats above the screen had been sold.
To roars from his home crowd, Patterson replaces Marshall for the ninth over. It is time for ‘Pattoo’, their Pattoo.
The stomach upset Patterson had before the game has cleared up. What he has to do is find some rhythm before working up to full pace. Unlike Marshall, the physical effort he puts into bowling is manifest.
Off a long straight run, he storms towards the batsman, pumping every piston, like Sonny Liston, and hurls himself at the crease.
On reaching it, he heaves his left foot so high the batsman has a full view of Patterson’s studs. The look on Patterson’s face adds to the impression he gives the batsman.
Patterson wants to crush him.
Gooch, unperturbed outwardly, takes a two and a single off Patterson’s first over in Test cricket. The drinks break is close at hand, after almost an hour’s play, England unscathed.
But Patterson has time for a second over before the break. The first ball lifts and leaves Robinson. His sixth ball angles in at Robinson and follows him like a mugger. He is forced to steer it to first slip, where Greenidge traps his fingers in catching it low.
The eruption would make a seismometer spike. It is a weekday, money is tight as always in Kingston, the ground is little more than half-full, but throats roar and umbrellas, serving as parasols, wave like palms in a cyclone. When the roar starts to subside, conch shells reinforce it. England are on the ropes and it is Pattoo, their Pattoo, who is pinning them.
Speedometers to gauge Patterson’s pace have yet to be invented. For The Guardian, the former England swing bowler Mike Selvey writes that Patterson ‘bowled like the devil in front of his home crowd’.
As negative evidence, Gooch does not try to hook Patterson, not after Gatting had been skulled by Marshall in the one-dayer. Because Patterson is not swinging or seaming the ball, he is reminiscent of the first English express bowler, Charles Kortright of Essex, Gooch’s county, back in the 1890s. A contemporary batsman, asked whether Kortright swung the ball, replied: ‘No, there was no time for anything else.’
When two England subs trot out at the break, Gooch gulps two glasses of Gatorade supplied by Bruce French and takes a fresh left glove from Neil Foster. He pours water down the back of his neck while he waits for Gower, at number three, to join him. Gooch has scored 25 of England’s 32 runs.
West Indies had begun with the all-Barbadian attack of Marshall and Garner, to be succeeded by the all-Jamaican attack of Holding and Patterson. The background behind Holding consists of the Blue Mountains and a popular stand where he is relished like the curried goat served in some stalls. The four West Indian fast bowlers are not only competing individually. Inter-island rivalry also spurs them.
Gower drops Patterson’s first ball at his feet. He follows by upper-cutting him for six and four. Although Sabina’s straight boundaries are short, here is further evidence of Patterson’s mounting pace.
Holding at the other end hits Gower on the shoulder: not exactly head-hunting, but West Indies have developed a tactic of targeting the opposing captain. At second slip, Viv Richards, Gower’s counterpart, claps his hands to stoke the boilers of his bowlers and make them even hotter.
Holding’s next ball is full, swift, straight: Gower gone, lbw for 16, in a flurry of ten balls.
Gooch’s new partner is the left-hander David Smith, very tall for a batsman, almost big enough to be a West Indian fast bowler. It is Smith’s Test debut, and he cannot do anything beyond get off the mark before being caught by the wicketkeeper, Jamaica’s Jeffrey Dujon.
Gooch’s next partner is Lamb. By now, even on the few occasions when the ball is fuller, Gooch is reluctant to push forward, as the bounce is becoming inconsistent. In the 18th over, his score 30, he edges Holding short of second slip.FN42
At 12.10 p.m., by when he has reached 42, Gooch calls for another fresh left glove from French. If nothing else, the delay takes him a minute closer to the 12.30 interval. Until then, he keeps ducking under the short ball and, with Lamb, survives.
In the dressing room Gooch consumes ice cream, cold water and energy drinks, along with salt tablets. He returns to the platform for another quarter of an hour of music, before having to face it. By the time he goes to the middle, the sponge inside the rim of his helmet has dried in the midday sun to the point of merely damp.
Marshall resumes his attack from the Headley Stand end in place of Patterson, and is pushed straight for two runs by Gooch. This takes him to 51, as brave a fifty as ever made for England, out of 83 for three.
In my notebook I list the visiting batsmen who have subdued the West Indian fast bowlers in their own backyard in the 1980s: Allan Border, the hardest-boiled Australian who ever batted; Mohinder Amarnath of India; and Gooch. Amarnath had hooked everything with almost masochistic glee to total 598 runs in nine Test innings in 1982–83. A few months later, back in India for the return series, he had six more Test innings against West Indies – and scored one run. I interviewed him after this extreme reverse – six innings for a single run, against the same attack – and Amarnath’s explanation was that he had a virus. But, though English was not his first language, he sounded as if he had something akin to shell-shock.
Sooner or later on this pitch a ball is bound to come along with Gooch’s name on it. In Marshall’s second over after lunch it arrives, lifting off a length around off-stump, and Gooch can only fend it to Garner in the gully. Although the bowler is not Patterson, the crowd celebrates as much as the players at the departure of their chief adversary.
Back in England, E.W. Swanton, the doyen of cricket correspondents, opines that a line should be drawn halfway down the pitch. Anything short of this line, he writes in the Daily Telegraph, should in future be called a no-ball.
But this match is not being televised at all. It is the last Test match that England played without any film footage. It is only being broadcast to Britain on radio. In Trinidad, where there is oil and money, a Test is sometimes televised, but not in the rest of the West Indies. And the essential point is that these balls are rearing at the ribcage from a length, or barely short of a length. They are not halfway bouncers.
Marshall is yet more threatening in his second spell than his first. He scents a rival to his status as West Indies’ fastest bowler. He soon switches to round the wicket again and dares the batsman to hook. Ian Botham tries and is caught at deep backward square-leg.
Lamb, meanwhile, hooks Holding for six and sees him off. Or, rather, Holding walks off nursing the hamstring that had limited him to a dozen overs when England faced Jamaica. Garner replaces him and bowls Lamb with a shooter that goes under his bat. The correspondent for Wisden, John Thicknesse, estimates the ball hit Lamb’s stumps ‘no more than six inches above the base’. Shortly afterwards England, after opting to bat, are dismissed in only 45.3 overs for 159.
Haynes and Greenidge are almost as demoralising as the West Indian fast bowlers have been. England hope for a few quick wickets to get them back in the game. Greg Thomas, on his Test debut, is almost as fast as some of the West Indians, but two hard chances are missed in his first two overs, in the slips and gully. Haynes and Greenidge counter-attack to take West Indies to 29 without loss from four overs.
Greenidge begins limping, as he often does when in the mood, after being hit on the knee by Richard Ellison. He goes off after being struck again, this time over the left eye by Botham’s bouncer, but already West Indies have responded with 79 for no loss.
On the second day, a Saturday, the home side’s total mounts, if not so rapidly as the tourists’ sense of foreboding. The West Indian batsmen are ever more troubled by the inconsistent bounce while adding 183 runs in the day from 75 overs (there are no penalties, however slow the over-rate). Quickly as Thomas bowls, he is on his own, not hunting in a pack.
On Sunday morning, West Indies take their first innings to 307. In my notebook I jot: ‘Sabina packed and buzzing. Ten years since India reached 97 for six here and declared, because no one else was left in one piece to bat.’
By lunch, Gooch and Robinson are gone for ducks, the pitch even more unpredictable now the new ball is in West Indian hands. Gooch inside-edges a tentative push at Marshall, then sits on the platform with a book, perhaps reading it, perhaps not. Robinson is castled by a shooter from Garner, before picking up his earphones. Beside them on the platform, two England batsmen wait padded up. When West Indies had batted, only one man had been padded up on their platform.
Patterson, more settled and rhythmic than in England’s first innings, dismisses Gower with his third ball after lunch. Richards had posted a fielder on the third-man boundary for the England captain’s upper-cut. But Gower could consider himself unlucky that such a shot against Patterson had not flown over third man and out of Sabina Park, if not into the Blue Mountains.
The crowd, packed because it is the weekend, seems to be in a similar mood to the Colosseum on a Roman holiday. One after another, England’s batsmen enter the arena and depart, vanquished.
‘Patterson pitching 3/5ths of way down the pitch & Dujon either taking it above his head or Lamb, ducking, taking it on the shoulder or arm’: so I note. Soon Lamb is no longer prepared to be a sitting duck. He dares a hook at Patterson and is, inevitably, late. The top edge spirals and is caught by Roger Harper, substituting for Greenidge, running back from first slip.
When Botham tries to hook Patterson, the top edge flies straight over the wicketkeeper for six. Another indicator of Patterson’s pace is the ball that rockets over the head of Peter Willey the batsman and of Dujon the keeper, and pitches once – about ten yards inside the boundary – before going for four byes.
The press box is at the opposite end to the Headley Stand. It is open, without any windows and air-conditioning to shut out the atmosphere. When Patterson is not hurtling towards us, I look to the right, over the old pavilion of Kingston Cricket Club, to their reserve ground alongside Sabina. Another game is going on, from another era. For Jamaica Colts a left-arm spinner and right-arm medium-pacer are bowling at batsmen who push safely forwards. This scene is closer to Hambledon than to what is happening in the Test.
Patterson is rested. ‘Gone back to his cage for raw meat,’ quips The Sun.
A motivated Marshall replaces him. Almost behind his arm, on England’s platform, while Gooch reads and Robinson listens, a game of chess is being played by John Emburey, not in the XI, and Thomas, the last man.
England’s physiotherapist is also on the platform, ready to run on at any moment. ‘Too much like an executioner’s platform, waiting for the end, while ever-helpful Laurie Brown offers the next man a final drink.’
At the peak of his manhood, Botham takes on Marshall. No shirking, no ducking. Seeing Botham hook his first ball for six provokes Marshall into going round the wicket, not to deliver half-volleys.
Botham hooks the second ball too, but though it flies to the fielder stationed halfway between the square-leg umpire and the boundary, Botham has no time to run a single, such is the speed of the action. So rapidly does the ball reach the fielder, a 17-year-old schoolboy called Jimmy Adams acting as sub, and so rapidly does he fire it back to Dujon, there is no run.
Botham hooks the third ball of this same Marshall over, above Adams’s head, for four. The fourth is too high to hook. Sensing the fifth ball might also be on the short side, Botham is again waiting on the back foot, and he middles it, and I swear the ball would have killed Haynes at forward short-leg if it had hit him over the heart. Instead, it flashes past his unturned, unhelmeted head. The cricket hereabouts is as incandescent as the light away over Kingston harbour towards Port Royal.
Marshall’s sixth ball whistles past Botham’s swish and off-stump. So five balls, the first five of the over, have all been bouncers – and about as fast as any bouncers ever delivered. Yet umpire Gayle, now standing at the Headley Stand end from which Marshall and Patterson are bowling, passes no obvious comment.
Botham attempts to hook the first ball of Marshall’s next over as well, but it keeps much lower than he had expected. The death rattle is loud, never mind the roars.
Willey had been promoted to number four, because Smith suffered sunstroke while fielding on the second day. Willey has mostly been at the other end, coping with Garner and the slightly hamstrung Holding. Willey’s bottom-handed cuts and off-side slashes are far more suited to these circumstances than the orthodoxy of staying in line and playing straight with a raised left elbow.
Off one of the few balls from Patterson that he faces before tea, Willey is dropped by Richie Richardson. When he reaches his fifty, the press box breaks with convention and applauds his bravery.
At the interval I ask Tony Cozier, who has covered West Indies on radio and in print since the 1960s, how he rates the pace in this match of Marshall and Patterson. ‘I can’t honestly say I’ve seen faster bowling than today,’ says the West Indian commentator.
I ask John Woodcock of The Times to rank Marshall and Patterson among the fast bowlers he has seen over three decades. He cites Frank Tyson, of the immense shoulders, bowling downwind at Sydney in 1954–55, reflects and says: ‘There’s nothing in it.’ But he adds the point that Tyson pitched the ball up as regularly as Marshall and Patterson are pitching short, and therefore it was a completely different game. I wonder if someone bowling at 90 mph in the 1950s would have appeared faster, because of the novelty, than someone of the same speed in the 1980s.
Another consideration is that amateur and semi-professional bowlers were allowed to be inconsistent, and bowl flat out only when they felt like it, without speedometers and analysts and bowling coaches measuring them. Fast bowlers now bowl the same pace consistently – without peak or trough.
In any event, in The Times, Woodcock writes: ‘I have never felt it more likely that we should see someone killed.’
After tea only the last rites remain. Willey upper-cuts Patterson for six, before stepping away once too often and seeing his stumps demolished by Garner. Bouncers and snorting lifters from Marshall and Patterson at one end, shooters and yorkers from Garner at the other. ‘No way to build an innings against such bowling because no knowing what the pitch would do,’ I superfluously note.
Even when Patterson does not use the pitch, he is lethal, or even more so.
He hits Phil Edmonds in the ribs with a full toss – a beamer from the same parish as Roy Gilchrist. Edmonds is wearing a chest-protector made of foam that is designed to protect a fallen jockey from horses’ hooves. Even so, Patterson brings out such a bruise, as if caused by a kicking horse, that the photograph of Edmonds’s torso makes the back page of the Today newspaper. And they say cricket is a non-contact sport . . .
Willey’s 71 makes West Indies bat a second time, before they win by ten wickets. The Test is over by the third evening, though West Indies have averaged only 11 overs per hour and England 12.
The tourists head off to the north-west coast with wives and girlfriends to drown their sorrows and fears. My final note: ‘The assignment of going to the West Indies for 3 months to beat them at cricket must be the hardest, most taxing in all sport.’
A camera crew flies to Trinidad for the second Test on behalf of Independent Television News, and some footage of the remaining matches is shot. But Patterson does not touch quite the same heights away from home and Sabina’s broken pitch. He does not need to: several of England’s players are scarred if not scared. West Indies win the series 5–0. No England player bats for two sessions.
The second of those omens in St Vincent is therefore clear long before the end. The signature tune for England’s 1985–86 tour under Gower – the unofficial one, of course, sung by local fans – rings around the Caribbean. ‘Captain, the ship is sinking!’ they sing. ‘Captain, the sea is rough.’
Because the Kingston Test was not filmed or televised, readers who were not there – without images to cloud their memories – can judge the extent to which words can convey the reality of it. I would say, but then I would as a cricket correspondent, that words can go a considerable way towards conveying the reality of a match. Following the game on radio, or the ball-by-ball commentary on Cricinfo, we can picture the action in part and feel all of the tension being ratcheted up as a close finish approaches.
From the objectivity of ringside, it is easier for a reporter or spectator to see which team is winning than it is for a player. What a reporter cannot convey is what it is like to be out in the middle of the match he is covering. What we miss if we are not playing, or umpiring, is not the detail of the action – the slow-motion television camera, and Spidercam, can now see more than any human being – so much as the essential character of the protagonists. I learned more about James Anderson in one net session, where the England media were allowed to participate, than in watching him from a distance for a decade. Even though it was in an indoor school in Hobart, where he had been hanging around like an unemployed teenager on a street corner, the moment Anderson took hold of a ball and mooched back to his mark, a wild energy came over him. It propelled him on to the prairies, the wind in his mane, making one mettlesome colt into a stallion.
When we babble of green fields, language cannot answer our questions about how many runs have been scored or wickets taken, or how much time has been lost to rain, without the aid of numbers. But the written or spoken word can still tell us to a large extent about what happened in a cricket match, and how it happened, and why.
The language of cricket, I have come to realise, is predicated on batting being a very difficult act of survival.
When our terminology was first shaped, by James Love in his report of the Kent v England match in 1744, none of the four totals neared 100. Scoring 18 runs in one innings, as ‘Great Newland’ did, was almost a match-winning feat. For everybody in the world except W.G. Grace, batting remained difficult until the 1890s. The first Test between West Indies and England in 1986 was, in this respect, a return to the sport’s infancy, when bowlers were ascendant.
From the beginning, therefore, the language of cricket sympathised with the batsman as the underdog. And our sympathy towards him, based on batting being so difficult, is reinforced by the fact that he is outnumbered. He has eleven opponents pitted against him, and only one ally – and even then his partner is an ally only when the ball is dead. Once the bowler begins his run-up, it is elevenFN43 men against one – or even twelve against one, as the partner becomes a potential enemy who can run the striker out. Darwinians would say it is the same with every underdog: we identify with the batsman, and want him to survive, because the time might come when we find ourselves in his position.
The language of cricket has thus evolved to present the batsman as being positive, even creative, in the most arduous circumstances. No cricket team is on record as having been dismissed in ten balls, but in theory it could happen, and then the game would be terminated most abruptly. It would not be much of a day for anyone except the winners – certainly not spectators, including reporters. Anyone who is not a rabid supporter of the fielding side wants the game to go on for a certain length of time, and is therefore prepared to view batting – for prolonging the game – in a positive light.
The bowler, on the other hand, is portrayed as destructive, sometimes to the point where the language implies that he is morally reprehensible. In this dualistic world, as in no other English sport, one group of players on each side is cast as ‘goodies’, i.e. the batsmen, and the other group as ‘baddies’, i.e. the bowlers. If they are too effective, bowlers can ruin the game by ending it prematurely.
When Marshall opened the attack at Sabina Park, Gooch tried to ‘build’ not only an innings of his own but a partnership with Robinson. In the process, he tried to ‘construct’ or ‘create’ a platform for his side, a metaphorical version of the one outside England’s dressing room. When Gooch ‘made’ runs, the implication again was that he was being creative. ‘Make’ is the verb the Bible uses to describe what God did to the world: what, in the eye of believers, could be more creative? ‘Make’ has become a synonym for ‘score’, for the basic function of a batsman.
When a batsman hits the ball skilfully and often, he becomes a ‘stroke-maker’. When the ball hits the meat of his bat, he hits it ‘cleanly’ – a healthy act in itself. A batsman who makes runs quickly can also be described as scoring ‘freely’. In the words of the song commissioned by Frederick, Prince of Wales: ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!’ We have always treasured freedom, for ourselves.
A batsman has to defend his wicket, stumps or ‘castle’, unlike Tim Robinson in the Sabina Park Test, who was ‘castled by a shooter from Garner’. As an Englishman’s home is his castle, what could be more precious to defend? If the batsman can defend his castle for a prolonged period, the implication must be that he is worthy of our approval, even admiration.
Some words of Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’ must have crept into the brain of every cricketer in England:
There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night—
Ten to make and the match to win—
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote—
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’
Here the boy, on Clifton College Close, is instructed to hold up his end until the last ten runs are made for victory. Once he has grown into a man and joined the army, and his regiment is on the verge of defeat – when ‘the sand of the desert is sodden red’ – he is again instructed to ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’ The boy who defends his wicket is as courageous as the soldier who defends the last ditch; or at least the father of the man.
The area inside the creasesFN44 has to be used just as much by bowlers as batsmen, for every ball. Yet the Laws of Cricket, officially unbiased, term this area ‘the batsman’s ground’. They do not call it the bowler’s ground, although the crease is pivotal to a pace bowler’s physical well-being, even his whole career: he has to bring his front foot down somewhere inside the crease without twisting his ankle in a worn patch or tearing his Achilles. So the Laws award the crease to the batsman: he is defending his ground, as well as his wicket, against eleven aggressors.
Radio and television commentators reinforce our perception that the crease is the batsman’s, and his alone, by saying the batsman, having completed a run, has ‘got home safely’ – never that he has reached the bowler’s crease in time. We are reassured when we hear that a person has got home safely, as a child from school. We infer that he is worthy of our interest and support.
The sympathies of the neutral observer are enlisted again if he is told that a player is brave or courageous. Graham Gooch was described as both, most deservedly. But not Michael Holding, although he braved the risk of further injury by returning to the field with a hamstring strain to bowl West Indies to victory.
A batsman like David Gower can, in addition, be showered with praise normally reserved for the fairest of the female sex. His batting can be described as ‘dazzling’ or ‘beautiful’, or even ‘divine’. Nobody in cricket is more romantic than the free-spirited stroke-maker who plays the occasional brilliant innings – especially if he is left-handed or dies young. (Archie Jackson, Bradman’s contemporary and equal until Jackson died aged 21, could be regarded as the Keats of cricket.) ‘Brave’ and ‘beautiful’, these batsmen are called, combining the most desirable of male and female qualities.
Even he whose batting is the opposite of beautiful normally escapes any linguistic censure. He might make ‘ugly runs’ but he himself is not called an ugly batsman: functional or efficient or workmanlike, but not ugly. If he ‘carts the ball to cow corner’, or ‘mows to leg’, or ‘scythes’, the analogy is derived from farming, that valuable work upon which our existence depends; and if he ‘farms the strike’, he is being thoroughly responsible, a fellow of yeoman qualities. Such a batsman might go on to ‘nurse the tail’ – and how gallant is one who follows in the footsteps of Florence Nightingale!
Even batsmen who do not make a run for their side are treated very differently from bowlers who do not take a wicket. Negatives are heaped on the bowler who toils ‘in vain’, ‘fails’ to make an impression and is ‘ineffective’ or even ‘impotent’. Aspersions can be cast on his very manhood.
On the other hand, the batsman who scores zero ‘makes’ a duck. This has creative, even humorous connotations. If he does so twice in one game, he ‘makes’ a pair of spectacles. If he is out first ball in both innings, he ‘makes’ a king pair; and if he is dismissed in both innings without facing a ball, he ‘makes’ an emperor pair, more regal still! The more a batsman fails, the grander the language to describe – and excuse – his failure. When he scores nothing, he is deemed to be polite and considerate too, because ‘he does not trouble the scorers’.
When the bowler fulfils his role – or, in professional cricket, does his job – the language used to describe his achievement is often, at best, negative. It can even be pejorative, to the point where Patterson in Kingston was reported – by a former professional bowler – to have ‘bowled like the devil’. (The bowler with a suspect action is also ‘diabolical’, or so the batsman mutters to enlist our sympathies after his dismissal.)
Various attributes are used to describe an effective pace bowler, not a single one complimentary: hostile/nasty/destructive/dangerous/threatening/mean/menacing/vicious/explosive. They have connotations of such immoral and violent aggression that the pace bowler, as he wreaks havoc and mayhem, is no better than Genghis Khan.
What is actually being described here is the bowler as seen from the viewpoint of the batsman – and therefore of the reporter, too, with his conditioned sympathy for the batsman. An effective ball is ‘hostile’ or ‘vicious’ or ‘threatening’ – both to the batsman’s wicket and, as at Sabina Park, to his physical well-being. But the adjective is transferred by the reporter or commentator to the bowler himself, who is thereby made to sound morally reprehensible.
It is the same whether he is a ‘shock bowler’ in traditional parlance, or ‘a strike bowler’ in modern: he is still one of the ‘baddies’. And this is not just the modern English press failing to give the opposition’s fast bowlers their due. Sir Frederick Hervey-Bathurst of Hampshire, the swiftest bowler of his day, was described in 1851 as ‘if in the vein, very destructive’.
A pace bowler will, of course, learn from experience that these epithets are actually compliments. He will come to appreciate – he has no alternative – labels like ‘hostile’ and ‘menacing’. After striving flat out all day, he has to be content with being compared to the devil, while his teammate up the order is said to bat ‘like an angel’. The nearest to a consolation for the bowler is that football’s multi-million-pound strikers can also have some of these epithets, like ‘dangerous’, ‘menacing’ and ‘penetrative’, thrust upon them.
Such language must predispose the newcomer or neutral observer against bowlers, albeit subconsciously. At any rate, in England and most Test-playing countries, batsmen have always been more admired than bowlers; and if it cannot be proved that language has played a part in shaping this perception, it cannot be disproved. In England, the big money – from sponsorships, benefit matches, books, newspaper contracts and endorsements – has traditionally gone to batsmen, and more lately all-rounders, notably Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff. Of the seven highest benefits between the First and Second World Wars, not one went to a specialist bowler. Knighthoods too. The ones awarded to British citizens for cricket have gone to batsmen or administrators, with two exceptions: the all-rounder Sir Ian Botham, and the bowler Sir Alec Bedser, who made much play of being the first bowler to be knighted since Francis Drake (Sir Frederick Hervey-Bathurst was an hereditary baronet). If language has shaped our perception of cricketers, the consequences have sometimes been lucrative – for batsmen.
While batsmen can be compared to the deity, pace bowlers for their pains are likened to animals. The less threatening ones are mere beasts of burden: they ‘do the donkey work’ or act as the ‘workhorse’ of their team. The more threatening ones bowl ‘a brute of a delivery’ and ‘hunt in a pack’, no better than wolves, preying on hapless batsmen.FN45 The implication is that the fast bowler, even Sir Frederick, contains an element of the primitive or savage.
A batsman ‘makes’, constructively. A bowler ‘breaks’, destructively. The law uses the neutral phrase ‘put down’ to describe the bails being removed from the stumps; the rest of us do not. If a bowler bowls a batsman out, we say he ‘breaks’ the wicket. If he takes several wickets early in an innings, he ‘breaks’ through and wrecks the opposition’s top order. If he ends a long stand, he ‘breaks’ the partnership. (Breakback, off-break and leg-break are derived from another meaning of ‘break’ and do not, or should not, have this connotation of destructiveness.)
In dismissing a batsman, a bowler makes a wicket ‘fall’, either factually, by dislodging the bails, or figuratively. This word adds to the impression of wanton destruction. Batsmen making and creating on the one hand, bowlers taking and breaking on the other, or causing things to fall: they could be good children and bad children, given toys to play with, if not actual representatives of good and evil.
A spin bowler is also viewed in a negative light, linguistically. He is cunning/wily/tricky/deceptive – no better than Eve tempting Adam to fall from Paradise. Like a cruel hunter, he traps, snares and deceives poor batsmen. Sometimes he too uses ‘bait’ in his deception. No wonder no spinner has been awarded any honour approaching a knighthood. He is no better than an animal – if he bowls ‘donkey drops’. As for bowling ‘under-arm’, this is being ‘under-hand’, a condemnation in itself, or else he is bowling ‘sneaks’, beneath contempt.FN46
Even accuracy is not an admirable quality in a bowler, according to the vocabulary we have inherited. At best, the accurate bowler is ‘economical’, like a civil servant with the truth; more often, he is labelled ‘tight’ or even ‘miserly’. ‘Keeping it tight’ sounds mean-spirited. Even if he ‘makes the batsman play’, this is not ‘make’ in the creative sense: the bowler is forcing the batsman to play the ball, coercing him unkindly.
All bowlers, whether fast or slow, are portrayed as bloodthirsty. The batsman who falls prey to a bowler is a ‘victim’, like one who has suffered at the hands of a heartless criminal. The successful bowler either ‘takes’ wickets, or ‘snares’ them, like an illegal trapper, or ‘grabs’ them, like a burglar. A ‘yorker’ was not only the speciality of bowlers from Yorkshire, according to Michael Rundell in The Dictionary of Cricket: to ‘york’, or ‘put Yorkshire on someone’, originally meant to trick or cheat a person.
The balance between bat and ball has fundamentally shifted since 1744. The process was started by Grace, and the hand-mower, and the roller. Starting with the 1996 World Cup, when Sanath Jayasuriya of Sri Lanka attacked like no opening batsman before in international cricket, batsmen have done more and more of the attacking: they can now ‘destroy’ or even ‘murder’ bowling with their power-packed bats. Especially in the Twenty20 format on a flat pitch, bowlers have become the defenders. But the language has yet to evolve sufficiently to encompass this new reality: it is still predicated in favour of the batsman. The nearest he can come to being condemned as immoral is to be called ‘a flat-track bully’.FN47 Cricket is renowned as a batsman’s game, and it is linguistically too.
Suppose we are in a train that stops beside a village ground while a game is going on and we know nothing about either team. Almost all of us, I suspect, would instinctively support the batsmen.
Batting, however, can still be difficult – heaven knows! – in certain circumstances. On a rough pitch, or against very fast bowling, or both as at Kingston, it can still be perceived as an act of survival in itself, a matter of life and death. When facing fast bowlers on a pitch of variable bounce, or spinners on a turner, the batsman sooner or later will get a ‘ball with his name on it’, as Gooch did. The metaphor is taken from warfare, from the First World War if not before, where situations were so hopeless that a soldier was doomed to be hit by a bullet.
When Desmond Haynes was dropped early in his innings at Sabina Park, he was ‘given a life’ by England’s slip-fielders. It is an extraordinarily potent phrase. We are saying that a batsman is alive when he is at the wicket. When he is out, therefore, he is dead, killed by the bowler, perhaps aided and abetted by fielders. If the batsman makes a false stroke, it can be a ‘fatal’ mistake. Thus a dismissal in cricket can be equated to death. We must empathise and sympathise with the batsman all the more.
This perception is reinforced by the phrase often employed at funerals. As people gather to reminisce about the departed, they may well say that Old So-and-So ‘had a good innings’. A person’s life is equated to a batsman’s innings, never to a bowler’s spell; or indeed anything else. If a person survives a major operation or accident, he can be said to have had a second innings.
I take this as an amazing compliment to cricket. The sport has had such a profound place in English, or British, life for so long that one of its phrases has been taken by the public and used as a metaphor for life itself: he, or she, had a good innings. Another famous saying – ‘it’s not cricket’ – is now seldom used;FN48 while ‘keep a straight bat’ is well on the way to being an anachronism in the era of 20-over cricket (much better to heave across the line). But ‘he had a good innings’ remains part of our daily discourse.
We can say that a dead person has ‘had a good run’ – a phrase that can be used to describe a batsman who has played a succession of large innings, without being derived from cricket – but it does not extend to his whole lifetime. At a funeral, for example, it might be said that somebody, following a major operation, had a good or decent run. But ‘to have a good innings’ is borrowed from cricket alone. And I can think of no other phrase which is used as a metaphor for a life or lifetime – the single most important thing in our existence.
Samuel Maunder composed a poem called ‘The Game of Life’ in the 1820s. Maunder opens with his observation that people philosophise about life and its ups and downs; and he himself thinks that life is like a game of cricket; and that ‘a steady Player’ (i.e. person) may ‘have a good long Innings’. Cricket was therefore used as an analogy for life two centuries ago.
Death then intervenes – and, according to Maunder, Death is the bowler. Death can bowl out some people ‘before they’ve got a notch’: infants, as I interpret. Or else, being so cunning, Death can throw a person off guard with some easy balls ‘till presently a rattler stops his breath’. This metaphor persists today: a batsman who is bowled is sometimes said to hear ‘the death rattle’, like Ian Botham at Sabina Park. So the most devastating and destructive force in human existence has been likened to a bowler.
And while Death bowls, according to Maunder, Time keeps wicket. A batsman/person may go through life virtuously and carefully, and block Death out, but Time will prevail in the end. In the words of his poem, Time watched the popping-crease ‘until the wish’d-for opportunity arriv’d’, then stumped the batsman out. One or the other will get you in the end: if not Death the bowler, then Time the wicketkeeper.
On first reading this poem, I was shocked. I had thought of bowling as an activity full of vitality; wicketkeeping might be a pretty dumb thing to do, except if you want to break a finger, but bowling! If a spell goes well, it ranks among the happiest times of my life. Yet Maunder equates bowling, not with joy and animation, but death and destruction.
Maunder, mercifully, concludes on an optimistic note:
And yet, although old Messieurs Death and Time
Are sure to come off winners in the end,
There’s something in this ‘Game of Life’ that’s pleasant;
For though ‘to die!’ in verse may sound sublime—
(Blank verse I mean, of course—not doggerel rhyme),
Such is the love I bear for Life and Cricket,
Either at single or at double wicket,
I’d rather play a good long game, and spend
My time agreeably with some kind friend,
Than throw my bat and ball up—just at present!
Apart from the fact that I would much prefer to play eleven-a-side, because of the camaraderie, this is my philosophy too.
Words can add up to fine writing, and fine writing makes an additional source of pleasure for those who follow the game, almost a reason in itself. This applies not only to English but to the sport’s second language. Several dozen Bengali newspapers are published in Kolkata and Dhaka, and several cricket books containing fine writing have been written in Bengali.
If we argue that Mary Mitford’s subject in Our Village was village life in the 1820s rather than cricket, the first cricket book in prose is also the first to contain some fine writing. The first half of it, The Young Cricketer’s Tutor, was written – or more likely dictated – by John Nyren in the 1830s. He teaches us basic principles of the game, some of which have not changed in two hundred years. Among these eternal verities, the role of the leading elbow in the biomechanics of batting: ‘If you do keep that [leading] elbow well up, and your bat also upright (in stopping a length-ball), you will not fail to keep the balls down; and, vice versa, lower your elbow, and your balls will infallibly mount when you strike them.’
Nyren instructs us that every fielder should be alert to the wicketkeeper’s directions, for he is ‘the General, and is deputed to direct all the movements of the fieldsmen: not, however, by word of command, like the military commander, but by the simple motion of his hand.’ Although the hand now wears a glove, here is another eternal verity. So is Nyren’s instruction that the bowler should practise bowling over and round the wicket, though this was neglected in the twentieth century before one-day cricket. Also, the best cricketers seldom become the best coaches: Nyren says of one Harry Hall that ‘like many of inferior merit in performance, he made nevertheless an excellent tutor.’ Nyren’s definition of the qualities required of the fielder at point and midwicket – or the middle wicket, as he called it – still applies to a Twenty20 specialist.
The second half of Nyren’s book, The Cricketers of My Time, moves from the didactic to such fine writing in some places that they make our first sample of cricket literature in prose. He fondly recalls the players of his day, and what they used to drink after the matches at Hambledon, though without declaring his interest: the landlord of the Bat and Ball Inn was his father Richard Nyren. The punch was ‘good, unsophisticated, John Bull stuff—stark!—that would stand on end—punch that would make a cat speak! Sixpence a bottle! We had not sixty millions of interest to pay in those days [a reference to the crippling national debt after the Napoleonic wars]. The ale, too!—not the modern horror under the same name, that drives as many men melancholy-mad as the hypocrites do;—not the beastliness of these days, that will make a fellow’s inside like a shaking bog—and as rotten; but barley-corn, such as would put the souls of three butchers into one weaver. Ale that would flare like turpentine . . .’
In his dotage, Nyren also waxes lyrical about some of his teammates: how they were honest men, above all, who did not engage in match-fixing or spot-fixing, or ‘trickery’ and ‘crossing’, as he termed them. He testifies to the character of John Small junior: ‘The legs at Mary-le-bone never produced the least change in him; but, on the contrary, he was thoroughly disgusted at some of the manoeuvres that took place there from time to time.’
Nyren launches cricket nostalgia: he was the first, of many, to write that the cricketers of his day were much superior to those of the present. No bowler since Hambledon, he says, has been so quick as Thomas Brett, who ‘was, beyond all comparison, the fastest as well as straightest bowler that was ever known’. William Beldham was ‘the finest batter of his own, or perhaps of any age’ – or at least ‘the finest player that has appeared within the latitude of more than half a century’. Tom Sueter was not only the first batsman to use his feet to leave his crease and get to the pitch of the ball, according to Nyren, he was also the finest of all wicketkeepers: ‘Nothing went by him; and for coolness and nerve in this trying and responsible post, I never saw his equal.’
While some of Nyren’s passages are fine writing, they do not, however, amount to a work of literature. Internal inconsistency, for a start: the page after saying of Sueter that ‘nothing went by him’, Nyren tells us in detail about his long-stop, George Lear, and how accomplished he was. It may be that in the Hambledon era the wicketkeeper was allowed to ignore any ball going down the leg-side, and to confine himself to balls on the stumps and wide of off-stump. In that case, though, Nyren should have clarified or qualified that phrase about Sueter.
While we concede that Nyren is looking at the human condition from a new angle, which is necessary for a book to be regarded as literature, too many of the other alchemic ingredients required to turn fine writing into literature are missing. Firstly, while the language is at times elevated (probably where the literary figure of the 1830s, Charles Cowden Clarke, embellished Nyren’s dictation), the didactic parts of The Young Cricketer’s Tutor are mundanely prosaic, and rightly so in the interests of clarity. Thus the instruction for an outfielder: ‘When the ball does not come to his hand with a fair bound, he must go down on his right knee with his hands before him; then, in case these should miss it, his body will form a bulwark.’
Secondly, it follows that the author’s imagination is not, or should not be, at work in these passages of instruction. As one of very few images he employs, Nyren gives us a picture of Lear’s attributes as a long-stop: ‘The ball seemed to go into him, and he was as sure of it as if he had been a sand-bank.’ Nyren does let play a little with his imagination in The Cricketers of My Time when he describes how John Small senior saved his skin, by using his violin, after being confronted by a vicious bull while walking across a field: Small ‘with the characteristic coolness and presence of mind of a good cricketer, began playing upon his bass, to the admiration and perfect satisfaction of the mischievous beast.’ Most of his book, though, is a combination of didacticism and straightforward recollection.
Several pieces of cricket poetry deserve to be ranked as literature. They give us an insight into the human condition and are flavoured by the imagination. Their language synergises with the content, thus opening them to literary appreciation.
Francis Thompson’s poem ‘At Lord’s’ should still be accorded the highest place in cricket’s contribution to English literature. It consists of four stanzas, but generally only the first – which is repeated as the last – is quoted. The second and third stanzas tell of Gloucestershire, driven by the ‘resistless Graces’, going north to play Lancashire in 1878, ‘long ago’ when Thompson was aged eighteen. But the poem has stood the test of time.
The first, and fourth, stanza looks at the human condition from a new angle. Most of us find solace in trying to recreate the happy moments of our youth. Not Thompson in his middle age, when he thinks of going to watch Lancashire again, playing at Lord’s. Not now he is down and out on the streets of London: ‘The field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast’. Already he has premonitions of his death, which occurred at the age of 47.
Thompson finds little or no consolation in seeing the successors of Hornby and Barlow playing at Lord’s. The single most poignant word in the poem, I feel, is ‘my’: ‘O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!’ Thompson is telling us that he used to be so physically and emotionally close to these two Lancashire batsmen of his childhood that they were, in effect, his. But now they have retired and are no more than ghosts flickering to and fro, to and fro. Time has separated them, for ever, from him.
It is usually when cricket and time interface that the game’s fine writing transcends into literature. Dannie Abse pursues the same theme in a poem called ‘Cricket Ball’, which deserves to be ranked as English, and Anglo-Welsh, literature.
Among poems about cricket and the evocation of lost youth, I would place it second only to ‘At Lord’s’. But whereas Thompson, a drug addict on the streets of late Victorian London, did not want to go to Lord’s to see Lancashire play again, because it would be too poignant, this poem is life-affirming.
As a boy, Abse watched Cyril Smart of Glamorgan, or ‘slogger Smart’, hitting the ball out of the ground at Cardiff in 1935. But so many years have passed since then that he refers to himself as ‘I, a pre-war boy, or someone with my name’.
Abse is captivated by one of Smart’s hits, in particular. In reality, the ball disappears through the window of a hotel outside the ground, but in his imagination it soars away, over the roofs and the River Taff, into the Caerphilly mountains. Such is the flight path of a boy’s aspirations.
Now, in his old age – it is late, Abse says, and ‘the sky is failing’ – he recalls this golden moment of his childhood, a time of innocence, for him especially as a Jewish boy in the mid-1930s, before the Holocaust. Yet the Taff is still running. And a particular smell comes to him which evokes his past. All is not lost, not yet.
I smell cut grass.
I shine an apple on my thigh.
No book of prose specifically about cricket has been accepted unequivocally as literature. The two authors who have come closest wrote in much the same time and place: Edmund Blunden in Cricket Country and Hugh de Selincourt in The Cricket Match, published in 1924, set in his Sussex village. Literary figures like Mary Mitford, Thomas Hughes, Siegfried Sassoon and L.P. Hartley have devoted part of a book to cricket. So too Sir Neville Cardus in Autobiography, a work of such impeccable prose that barely a punctuation mark is out of place.
C.L.R. James wrote some brilliant chapters in Beyond a Boundary, not so much the Victorian history as his profiles of the West Indian cricketers of his time, such as Headley and Constantine. Cricket serves as the backdrop in Netherland as a Dutchman comes to know the immigrant underclass of New York, and the novel deserves to be ranked as American literature. But it is not specifically about cricket; it is more of an update of The Great Gatsby, as its author Joseph O’Neill agreed.
The cricket writer and critic Stephen Chalke, in a lecture about cricket writing at Lord’s in 2010, observed that no book had been devoted to a single non-fictional match except for Alan Ross’s West Indies at Lord’s, and regretted this failure to make use of the dramatic possibilities. But, fine writing though it is about the 1963 series in England (not simply the Lord’s Test), Ross’s book cannot be ranked as literature, because factual reportage – or ‘run of play’ – cannot be turned by the author’s imagination into literature without violating the truth, as recorded by television and/or reporters at the match. I do not see how Rahul Bhattacharya’s description of a one-day international between Pakistan and India in Pundits from Pakistan could be improved upon; but again his imagination was perforce circumscribed by a mass of data.
I take this to be partly the result of the nature of the sport itself. Cricket is easier to describe, or more reportable, than most if not all other sports. The bowling of a single ball is a distinct, or discrete, event; so is the batsman’s stroke; so is the fielding of that ball. A bouncer from Marshall, bowling round the wicket to Botham, which is hooked to Adams, can take several words, or sentences, to describe in detail. James Love takes twelve lines of verse to describe Thomas Waymark’s attempt to make the decisive catch in 1744. (The zenith was reached when A.G. Macdonell in England, Their England took several pages of side-splitting humour to describe a ball slogged high in the air and all the palaver that occurs during its descent.) But that which makes cricket so reportable prevents it being taken over by the imagination and transformed. When a ball is actually bowled and a shot played, there is – or should be – little that the imagination can do to embellish these facts.
A pass in football, hockey or rugby is more difficult to isolate and describe than a cricket stroke or a ball bowled, because it is one part of a larger on-going movement. Furthermore, several people may be involved in the passing move, rather than the two cricketers who bowl and hit the ball, thus blurring the picture. The time between deliveries helps the cricket reporter to make notes; but there is time too after a free kick or penalty has been awarded. It is the less distinct nature of the action leading up to the free kick which makes it harder to analyse in detail and describe in words.
An actual cricket match leaves little scope for the writer’s imagination. The action is too easily anchored by words and numbers to be thus exploited. Nevertheless, on a winter’s evening when no match is being played at home or broadcast from overseas, plenty of fine writing about cricket can supplement the warmth of the fire; and the pick of it is literature.