May 21st
In Britain, the Bank Holiday weekends often see the evening TV screens occupied by compilations of clips you’ve seen a million times before with titles like ‘Top 100 screen pratfalls’ or ‘Your favourite 100 newsreaders’. The choice of item is often said to be governed by viewers’ votes, though no one’s ever asked me. One screen kiss merges into another as far as I’m concerned, though obviously a lot of people care enough to complete a survey. From the TV company’s point of view of course this kind of thing is great telly. Dead cheap. Zero creativity. Fire and forget. You will have these programmes in the US. Hell, you probably invented them.
Christopher Martin-Jenkins is a man some of us have grown up with. It comes as a surprise to find him now the senior ‘voice of cricket’ on BBC radio (though not their cricket correspondent), insofar as it only seems like yesterday that he was the rookie, pitching himself nervously alongside radio greats like John Arlott and Brian Johnson. But that was probably nineteen seventy-something. In comedic terms he’s still a straight man (he has a son who plays county cricket with moderate success so it’s a fair assumption this is also true in the sexual sense), and maybe there are too many straight men in the radio commentary box these days. Sometimes indeed he seems entirely devoid of a funny-bone. But that’s not his fault. He’s a sound judge of the game, as befits a man until recently the Times’ cricket correspondent. He obviously loves it to pieces: it’s been his life.
I find him less compelling to read than listen to. And I won’t be rushing out to buy his latest offering ‘The Top 100 Cricketers of all time’, for which the Times newspaper is offering much support this week. It turns out I’ve seen 61 of Martin Jenkins’ 100 play, either on screen or in the flesh, which gives one pause for thought. He’s selected only from the game’s modern era, but that still gives at least 132 years to look at, if one takes as a starting point the first accepted Test Match in 1877, so clearly his choice his canted towards the very modern. On the other hand, I have to face it. I am now quite old.
Readers of this blog may be interested to know that Donald Bradman is no 1 in CMJ’s list, but as I’ve suggested, few will argue about that. Les Ames is there at 64, Vijay Merchant at 96. Tendulkar makes it to no 9, but poor old Brian Lara languishes at 24, surely too low. The leading bowler is the near-contemporary Shane Warne at 4, and the first wicket-keeper on the list is the recently retired Australian Adam Gilchrist at 10, although it’s a combination of Gilchrist’s keeping and his electrifying batting which gets him there.
But while it makes for a good evening’s argument down the pub on about the third pint after a moderately awful local league game, I can’t see the sense of a list which somehow rates F. R. Spofforth (27 – ‘The Demon’) many places higher than C.T.B. Turner (95 - ‘The Terror). In their day (both nineteenth century figures) they were deemed to be the best there was. Sorry, Christopher, and not that you’ll care what I think or possibly ever know, but this is a pointless exercise, and one that smacks of a desperate search for a new angle on a book.
The thing which strikes me as I look down the list of great names (and of course there’s not a dud one among them, for all that I’m cavilling about the nature of the project) is not a query about whether no. 74 or is better than 47, but the elusive memory that each provokes. It arouses a profound and genuine regret for the lost moments from past time, and a longing to have seen the thirty-nine of whom I have no personal knowledge.
Even the replay on TV of relatively recent great moments of cricket history carries little charm. To see again, as we frequently will on wet days this summer, the highlights of the 1981 series against Australia, when Ian Botham in his pomp won the unlikeliest of victories for England, reduces the experience rather than enhances it. The greatest cricket moments for me are entirely in the head. They still conjure up the tastes and sounds of an era in a way old clips can never do. Colin Cowdrey’s (78) smooth, elegant, cover drive or nonchalant slip catching (his party trick was to pocket the ball after he’d caught it, and look behind him towards the boundary, pretending to search for its onward direction), Ted Dexter’s (75) ferocious raging bull square cut, Fred Trueman’s (22) mop of dark hair and perfect aggressive bowling action, all define my late childhood and teenage years. I don’t want to see the pictures again. And I don’t care a jot where the individuals are ranked. It’s the ephemeral image located somewhere in the middle brain, complete with what I had for tea that day and what was no 1 in the pop charts, fading a little with each year rather like Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, which makes these people so close to my heart. We are so literal these days. Let it go. Let it go.
In Britain, the Bank Holiday weekends often see the evening TV screens occupied by compilations of clips you’ve seen a million times before with titles like ‘Top 100 screen pratfalls’ or ‘Your favourite 100 newsreaders’. The choice of item is often said to be governed by viewers’ votes, though no one’s ever asked me. One screen kiss merges into another as far as I’m concerned, though obviously a lot of people care enough to complete a survey. From the TV company’s point of view of course this kind of thing is great telly. Dead cheap. Zero creativity. Fire and forget. You will have these programmes in the US. Hell, you probably invented them.
Christopher Martin-Jenkins is a man some of us have grown up with. It comes as a surprise to find him now the senior ‘voice of cricket’ on BBC radio (though not their cricket correspondent), insofar as it only seems like yesterday that he was the rookie, pitching himself nervously alongside radio greats like John Arlott and Brian Johnson. But that was probably nineteen seventy-something. In comedic terms he’s still a straight man (he has a son who plays county cricket with moderate success so it’s a fair assumption this is also true in the sexual sense), and maybe there are too many straight men in the radio commentary box these days. Sometimes indeed he seems entirely devoid of a funny-bone. But that’s not his fault. He’s a sound judge of the game, as befits a man until recently the Times’ cricket correspondent. He obviously loves it to pieces: it’s been his life.
I find him less compelling to read than listen to. And I won’t be rushing out to buy his latest offering ‘The Top 100 Cricketers of all time’, for which the Times newspaper is offering much support this week. It turns out I’ve seen 61 of Martin Jenkins’ 100 play, either on screen or in the flesh, which gives one pause for thought. He’s selected only from the game’s modern era, but that still gives at least 132 years to look at, if one takes as a starting point the first accepted Test Match in 1877, so clearly his choice his canted towards the very modern. On the other hand, I have to face it. I am now quite old.
Readers of this blog may be interested to know that Donald Bradman is no 1 in CMJ’s list, but as I’ve suggested, few will argue about that. Les Ames is there at 64, Vijay Merchant at 96. Tendulkar makes it to no 9, but poor old Brian Lara languishes at 24, surely too low. The leading bowler is the near-contemporary Shane Warne at 4, and the first wicket-keeper on the list is the recently retired Australian Adam Gilchrist at 10, although it’s a combination of Gilchrist’s keeping and his electrifying batting which gets him there.
But while it makes for a good evening’s argument down the pub on about the third pint after a moderately awful local league game, I can’t see the sense of a list which somehow rates F. R. Spofforth (27 – ‘The Demon’) many places higher than C.T.B. Turner (95 - ‘The Terror). In their day (both nineteenth century figures) they were deemed to be the best there was. Sorry, Christopher, and not that you’ll care what I think or possibly ever know, but this is a pointless exercise, and one that smacks of a desperate search for a new angle on a book.
The thing which strikes me as I look down the list of great names (and of course there’s not a dud one among them, for all that I’m cavilling about the nature of the project) is not a query about whether no. 74 or is better than 47, but the elusive memory that each provokes. It arouses a profound and genuine regret for the lost moments from past time, and a longing to have seen the thirty-nine of whom I have no personal knowledge.
Even the replay on TV of relatively recent great moments of cricket history carries little charm. To see again, as we frequently will on wet days this summer, the highlights of the 1981 series against Australia, when Ian Botham in his pomp won the unlikeliest of victories for England, reduces the experience rather than enhances it. The greatest cricket moments for me are entirely in the head. They still conjure up the tastes and sounds of an era in a way old clips can never do. Colin Cowdrey’s (78) smooth, elegant, cover drive or nonchalant slip catching (his party trick was to pocket the ball after he’d caught it, and look behind him towards the boundary, pretending to search for its onward direction), Ted Dexter’s (75) ferocious raging bull square cut, Fred Trueman’s (22) mop of dark hair and perfect aggressive bowling action, all define my late childhood and teenage years. I don’t want to see the pictures again. And I don’t care a jot where the individuals are ranked. It’s the ephemeral image located somewhere in the middle brain, complete with what I had for tea that day and what was no 1 in the pop charts, fading a little with each year rather like Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, which makes these people so close to my heart. We are so literal these days. Let it go. Let it go.
