Kindle Notes & Highlights
In fact, under Oliver Cromwell’s leadership (1649–58) England became a rather joyless place ruled by Christian fascists determined to section anybody who was enjoying themselves. Music and gambling were banned, theatres closed, and penalties imposed on anyone found indulging in sporting endeavours, to satisfy the Puritans’ religious zeal. So for a short time, God suspended cricket.
Women’s matches were also staged at the ground, often between Sussex villages, and, if the mothers’ races at school sports days are anything to go by, they were taken very seriously.
John Small, from Empshott, a few miles north of Petersfield, pioneered the ‘straight’ bat method of play, working out that you had more chance of making contact with a bouncing ball if you kept the blade vertical rather than horizontal. This was in about 1765. He would be amazed to know that this still takes an age to dawn on schoolkids, village players, wholehearted clubmen, even international tailenders. In fact, virtually anyone who has ever played the sport. Apart from Geoff Boycott, who realized it aged 4½ months and has been reminding everyone ever since.
Lord Frederick Beauclerk, one of the best amateur batsmen of the day, called Harris’s bowling ‘one of the grandest sights in the universe’. Clearly he needed to get out more.
He knew how to exploit a pitch and in one match in the mid-1780s took 3 wickets in 3 balls. He was presented with a gold-laced hat for his achievement. By the 1800s it was the norm to give a bowler a similar gift for such a feat. It is the origin of the term ‘hat-trick’, now common parlance in most sports for an individual getting three of a kind whether it be wickets, goals or wins.
Harris was so good that even when in later years his body was ravaged with gout he was allowed to walk to the middle on crutches, bowl his deliveries and then recline in an armchair for the rest of the game. Now that’s the way to play cricket.
The cockier someone sounds about the lbw law the greater the likelihood that they are absolutely clueless. It has spawned a sort of unofficial private sect – the LBW Society – containing a select band of individuals who properly understand its intricacies and have honey and Marmite finger sandwiches religiously at 4.10pm every day and make the legs of their children’s beds from old wickets. Yes, Dad, you!
It is, of course, impossible to be sure the ball was going to hit the wicket if the batsman’s leg hadn’t been in the way, just as it’s impossible to be sure that driving a gas-guzzling Range Rover in Chelsea is going to ultimately bring about the flooding of Holland.
Usually, though, it’s total guesswork, and as time has gone on more complexities have been added to the lbw law – ‘Was the batsman struck outside the line of the stumps?’, ‘Was he attempting to play the ball?’, ‘Did he buy me a beer last night?’ – to make the umpire’s job even harder.
In that bustling location, Henry Blofeld would have had a field day on commentary: ‘Oh I say, there goes the Oxford flying coach, and just behind it the Liverpool stagecoach, packed with people and their belongings, and I say, isn’t that the Whitbread brewery wagon crammed with beer barrels? My dear old thing, the poor old carthorses are really heaving that one along . . . now . . . Beauclerk polishes the ball on his cream breeches, adjusts his cuff, moves in and bowls another one to Walker, a loopy delivery, and he pats it gently to the short cover point fielder and there’s no run . . .’
My Ladybird book of cricket made the sport appear beautiful, refined, elegant. And then, on my first day as a county player, I encountered Mike Gatting demolishing a plate of lamb chops.
I always assumed this to be an old wives’ tale similar to the assertion that eating carrots improves your eyesight and masturbation makes you go blind (both erroneous, though I have had problems deciphering street names in A–Zs lately).
But interest lingered on, and in 1844 the world’s first cricket international was staged at St George’s Cricket Club in New York, when the USA invited Canada down for a challenge match. The game was attended by more than 10,000 people, many of whom felt inclined to shout, ‘You’re the man!’ and ‘Get in the hole!’ at every opportunity. The United States lost the match by 23 runs.
‘There’s a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket,’
Americans haven’t got the patience to wait two minutes for a burger never mind half an hour for a boundary.
Like the single-wicket game between two octogenarian Cambridge blues. One man, known only as ‘B’ in the story, batted first and made 12. But ‘A’ was so exhausted from his bowling and fielding he was unable to bat (there was method in the madness of that Middlesex man’s sheepdog). Therefore, to win, ‘B’ merely had to go out and bowl down his absent friend’s wicket. Lying on the sofa indoors bemoaning his lost youth, ‘A’ was startled by the return of his friends. ‘Bravo, you’ve won the match!’ they cried. ‘He’s bowled 13 wides!’
A massive outbreak of silly facial hair resulted in King Camp Gillette introducing the disposable razor. This was the great ancestor of the twenty-first century Mach III Turbo triple-blade – supposed to ‘shave you closer than ever before’ but which generally just cuts you deeper than ever before.
Spofforth had slipped away into the crowd. His duels with Grace were described as ‘like forked lightning threatening the great oak’.
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!’ The sand of the desert is sodden red – Red with the wreck of the square that broke – The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead, And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The river of death has brimmed its banks, And England’s far, and Honour a name, But the voice of
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It’s a powerful bit of rhetoric. Bloody infuriating that it doesn’t tell you if they got those ten to win though.
Cricket is like sex: much more fun to do than it is to watch.
at Cootamundra in New South Wales, George and Emily Bradman had a son they called Donald, and whose first words were presumably ‘Yes . . . two!’
Without ego, each had a waspish sense of humour, which in Gooch’s case was often at the expense of Mike Gatting. Remarking on the ‘Ball of the Century’, Shane Warne’s first in an Ashes contest which cleaned up a bemused Fat Gatt at Old Trafford in 1993, Gooch said, ‘If it had been a cheese roll it would have never got past him.’
And all because a young airman was caught reading Wisden. How the Muslim world might be different if he’d been caught reading Beach Volleyball Monthly.
His comment to an astonished young teammate after one such episode is beautiful in its simplicity: ‘If you can play, son, you can use the leg of a chair.’
Elvis and rock and roll were all the rage in America in 1956. In England there was petrol rationing and the 150th anniversary of the Gentleman v Players fixture.
(Yorkshire, of course, steadfastly refused to play anyone unless they were both born in the county and had ‘Ilkley Moor bar tat’ tattooed across their chest.)
Jack Hobbs might have said Bradman was a team on his own. Well, the Don couldn’t bowl a hoop down a hill. Sobers really was about six players in one.
The rest is history. Don’t you just hate it when people say that, assuming that you should know everything and therefore it is not worth repeating? Pure clichéd laziness if you ask me. Of course it’s worth repeating.
Peter Oborne argues coherently in his award-winning Basil D’Oliveira: Cricket and Conspiracy that it is the greatest innings ever played. No other has been ‘against an attack comprising Prime Minister Johannes Vorster and South African cricket at its most corrupt, supported by the weight of the British establishment . . . No other cricket innings in Test history, to put the matter simply, has done anything like so much good.’
in Swansea, where Garfield Sobers, playing for Notts, struck the hapless Glamorgan left-armer Malcolm Nash for six sixes off one over,
Thomson’s pace was measured at 99mph at the University of Western Australia, but he never had much faith in speed guns. ‘I just shuffle up and go wang,’ he once said.
Test match tickets were £1 and the income from television and sponsorship was about £400,000 in the early 1970s, meaning each county received about £20,000 from the board (they now get £1.3m). Therefore the average player’s annual salary was barely above the minimum wage – roughly £1,200 a year. (A first-division footballer was on about £7,000.) Winning the John Player League might net them an extra £200. A Test match appearance was worth £150.
The Australians appreciated his spirit, even calling him back when they felt an edge to the keeper might not have carried. No, I have not made that up.
And there was one other development. After Greig’s very public fall from grace, the search was on to find a new England all-rounder. Someone who could cure the perpetual selector’s headache of whether to pick a full complement of five bowlers and leave yourself a batsman light, or pick six batsmen and manage with just four pie throwers. Someone, in other words, who was competent in both departments. In the third Test of that summer, at Nottingham, about the time Hot Chocolate had got to no.1 with ‘So You Win Again’, they gave a début to a young, thrusting chap who’d been doing quite well for
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Some things are meant to be. Sid Vicious was always going to die of a drug overdose. Steve Redgrave was always going to win a fifth Olympic gold having previously asked to be shot if he was ever seen getting in a boat again. Elton John was always going to get a divorce.
Randall’s input at team talks was priceless. When Australia had been on top, he piped up, ‘We must rise from the Ashes like a pheasant!’ ‘Don’t you mean phoenix?’ someone said. ‘Oh, I knew it were a bird beginning with F,’ Randall replied.
On the domestic front, Essex won their first County Championship title, now sponsored by Schweppes, in 1979. Appropriately their success was based on an effervescent spirit. The team was bursting with characters, from the mischievous Scot Brian ‘Lager’ Hardie, an uncomplicated opening bat and masochistic short leg, through the lugubrious Gooch and the debonair South African Kenny McEwan to the chirpy left-arm swinger J. K. Lever and the mad antics of the spinners David Acfield and Ray East.
It was the third Test between the West Indies and England in Barbados and it featured Michael Holding, the Rolls-Royce of bowling, against Geoff Boycott, the Morris Minor of batting (slow, but it goes on for ever). The pitch was like greased lightning and so was Holding.
It was one of the most sensational overs in Test cricket history. Even watching a poorly filmed version on YouTube, you want to do it from behind the sofa.
the Ashes were England’s. And the world was Botham’s. Through supreme talent, subtle goading from Brearley and innate desire, he had turned the series, and the Australians, upside down. Even worse, if you were an Australian, he had made their captain blub.
(Anyway, if you disagree with Botham you get serious earache.)
Last word should go to a Guardian letter-writer. ‘Sir,’ he wrote, ‘on Friday I watched J. M. Brearley directing his fieldsmen very carefully. He then looked up at the sun and made a gesture which seemed to indicate it should move a little squarer. Who is this man? Yours sincerely, S. A. Nicholas,
I met one of Lara’s old schoolmates at the back of the stand later and he gave some insight into how he’d developed his technique. ‘Sometime we used a scrunched-up evaporated milk can for a ball,’ he said. ‘If you miss it, it cut your leg.’
There was real progress in one direction: women. On 29 September 1998, just 211 years after their formation, the MCC finally admitted women members.
England had won the Ashes at last, their most distinguished sporting achievement for thirty-nine years. It definitely entitled someone to piss in the prime minister’s garden.
As cricket’s marketers attempt to stuff the schedules with Twenty20 tournaments, they should reflect on that. Too much Twenty20 cricket will make a lot of people quite sick.
Ponting sacrificed the moral high ground in the aftermath. He drew attention to England’s apparent sharp tactics (i.e. time-wasting), while completely overlooking his own conduct, which involved questioning a number of umpiring decisions, a far greater sin than waving the 12th man on to use up a couple of minutes. All it did was emphasize that the Australians were bad losers. Which, if you think about it, they have always been, from Bodyline onwards. It was they who invented whingeing, not the English.
The beauty of the game, as the American philanthropist and cricket nut John Paul Getty once said, is ‘its 360-degree possibility’. It is still a game where there is decency and respect for your opponent and a general camaraderie that no other sport can match. It is fascinating and bewildering and fast and slow and regular and unpredictable and apparently static but always evolving. And, in the end, cricket is the prime subscriber to the most famous sporting line ever written: ‘It’s not who won or lost that matters, but how you placed the blame.’
