Frankly it’s a miracle that we’ve made it this far with the blog without so much as a mention of cricket. I blame COVID-19 and the fact that it’s put the kybosh on pretty much all sport in front of a large audience. But with Test Match Cricket resuming in the UK today, perhaps now’s the time to examine – however superficially – this most beautiful of games.
Let’s quickly establish that I’m not a player myself – my one experience of a competitive match was as numbers nine, ten and eleven in my house team at school, making up the requisite eleven for the match from the eight available players. I made two runs for my three wickets, not having managed to see the ball once. I blame mono-vision.
Thankfully, being a non-player is no obstacle to being a Cricket tragic – albeit a late-blooming one. As part of a broader rejection of sport in my bid to become a sensitive romantic poet at uni, I didn’t give it a thought until the World Cup in 1992, which was the first in which South Africa played having been readmitted after the release of Nelson Mandela – so we got it on TV.
The real draw was Zimbabwe, playing as an associate nation, beating England in a round-robin dead rubber — and captain Andy Flower scoring a big hundred against Sri Lanka. Later, in London, a good friend became a member at Lord’s and we’d show up for Test matches in the Members’ Enclosure, spending a day among the privileged, the elites, and the barmy — all constituencies closely associated with the game.
But it was the BBC’s Test Match Special that really knit the sport into the fabric of my existence: the clipped, polished commentary, the expert summing-up, the stellar guests – and the eccentric rituals, from donated cakes to baiting Geoffrey Boycott while the crew guffaw in the background. On a hot Sunday afternoon, with the match drifting toward a draw, nothing could surpass TMS’s blend of crowd noise and cultured commentary susurrating gently as backdrop to a snooze on the sofa.
It was the Ashes of ’05 that threw a spanner in the works: there wasn’t much chance to watch Zimbabwe in action, but here was England fighting to regain the urn against Ricky Ponting’s invincible Aussies. We sat through the Saturday of the Lord’s test: rain until mid-afternoon, and then England losing their last five wickets to Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne (whose unconventional red shoes drew much attention from hecklers). But Kevin Pietersen made 64 not out, so something positive came out of it.
It was a spanner in the sense that after the unsurpassed drama of that series I found myself supporting England – except for when they played Zim, of course. And I’m afraid there was a corresponding anyone-but-Australia attitude, which now, being in Australia and all, could turn out to be a problem. I have no defence – it was peer pressure m’lud.
But really, it’s not about national teams and tribalistic allegiances. It’s those rituals; the incredible complexities of the rules; the deep heritage and the arcane language of the game – it’s the kind of rabbit-hole you can burrow deeply into year after year and still be learning new, fascinating things.
I do like that at grass roots level, Cricket can be played between teams comprising fourteen-year-olds and sixty-year-olds – and that on top of Olympian feats of hand and eye, it requires bravery and character, confidence and humility, laser focus and relaxation to the extent that the players’ split-second skills are nothing without mental fortitude.
And yet this monolithic system of ingrained practice somehow manages to evolve and develop, despite gloomy prognostications of its imminent doom. Professionalism, pay-to-view TV, ball-tracking tech, tattoos and corruption scandals haven’t scuppered it yet. Its survival is precarious, but survive it does.
Much is made of the eccentricity of a five-day game that can end without a result, and its near-dead gentlemanly codes, and the fact that it’s a team sport played by individuals. A three-minute blog can’t even begin to match the wonderful writing this game has inspired – not to mention some rather jingoistic poetry.
But to its fans, the five-day game is very much an epic poem in five books or an opera in as many acts: it encompasses the broad and significant matters of nationhood, as well as complex sub-plots – opening bat against express fast-bowler; wily spinner against middle-order debutant; dash and verve against grit and intractability. Heroic triumphs are as likely as tragic failures; hubris is mercilessly exposed; there are fools and knaves and brutes – all performing live in a huge oval amphitheatre.
It requires the captain to husband his resources, place his fielders in synch with his bowler – or watch from the balcony, helpless as his batsmen strive for dominance on the pitch. It demands strategies and tactics over fifteen sessions of weather – rain, overcast or scorching sun – as well as a softening ball, a wearing pitch, the pressure to take twenty wickets and put up a decent score before the clock ticks down. Earth, wind, fire and time – immutable elements of the universe. Which is quite a lot to think about when you’re watching a bloke trying to clobber a ball another bloke is trying hard not to let him clobber.
For hours it’s taken to write this, play in Southampton has been rained off, extending the anticipation unbearably by another few hours. But given everything that’s going on in the world, and the turn of events that’s deposited us in Braidwood, the return of Tests feels like finding a new book by a favourite author, or sitting down to a five-course meal with wines and liqueurs. Even if things aren’t coming right again quite yet, having this feast in prospect certainly feels like the planets starting to align again.