The road to perdition

This morning in The Times the sportswriter Simon Barnes described it as the worst example of cheating in sport, and who’s to disagree. The idea that a young Formula One racing driver should be asked by his team boss to crash at high speed with incalculable consequences to himself, other drivers and even spectators, so that another team-member can win a race, is deeply shocking.

This is no longer sport as we like to conceive of it. Arguably, if we were to do some linguistic analysis of the notion of ‘sport’, we might conclude that in fact we should have to define such actions out of the term. Have an argument around the family table about that one.

As Barnes points out, money is the determining factor in all Formula 1 business, and so a turn of events like this isn’t completely surprising. Money has been the theme behind many of the articles in this blog, alongside dissertations on the aesthetics of the Game We Love, to the point that to underline the issues again would be wearisome. However, and not in the spirit of ‘I told you so’, I did say at the outset that Pietersen and Flintoff would be crucial factors in the account of this summer, that I expected that never subsequently would they be a major part of English cricket success, and that knowing what the major stories of the season might be was difficult.

Perhaps the most significant event of all is Flintoff’s announcement this week that from now on he intends to be ‘free-lance’. There’ll be no allegiance to Lancashire, his home club, or to England, except when he chooses to make himself available (which will presumably be only for major one-day tournaments). He’ll go where there’s most financial reward. His choice of agent, one Chubby Chandler, should have led us to expect this. Some commentators have welcomed the decision as a brave new honest world for cricket, and to be sure where Flintoff has led, others, presumably Pietersen included, will follow sooner rather than later. We will have to get used to enjoying the flowering of great talent for a shorter time, until sufficient momentum has been generated for the player concerned to take his business where the real money is.

It’s hard to conceive where this all takes us. I’ve already sketched out some of the possibilities. Hard though, not to feel a certain despair that in terms of direction of travel and theme, so much time, so many words have been spent on this.

As far as Flintoff goes, personally I hope that England wishes him well, but doesn’t consider him for selection again. They must move on without regret, accepting that he was a whole-hearted trier for his country, who ultimately failed to deliver to his full potential but gave us many memorable moments. We will have to learn to love the ones we’re with, game by game, and not grow too fond of them. And thank God, that in contrast with motorsport or football or athletics, the opportunities for the perversion of our sport are limited.

Not with a bang but a wimpy

As I write, the sixth one day international between England and Australia is about to start. Australia have won the first five by playing competent cricket at a consistently higher standard than England, and at the moment look as if they might win the next hundred games were the series to be prolonged that far. As well it might be, if the ECB thought it could fill the stadiums and make a buck. In this form of the game, England aren’t very good just at the present. Times without number in this series, their batsmen have got set, only to make an error at a point which has disrupted the rhythm of the overall batting performance. Their bowling although solid and reliable, has lacked the cutting edge to put pressure on their opponents. Their fielding has been no more than respectable. It’s been dispiriting to watch and listen to. It’s taken the edge off a season which might have been remembered with affection. Now we just all want to get it over and done.

This isn’t how a story should end. The action should move from one fast-paced chapter to another, a cliff-hanger at every turn, until in the last twenty pages, there’s a dénouement of startling originality, with the intriguing possibility of a sequel left hanging in the air. If I tried handing in something like this, my editor would send me a stern note and tell me to do better, and quickly.

But maybe if you or I had bought a ticket to one of the games, and we hadn’t seen the Australians yet this summer it would still have provided golden moments. The chance to see heroes at close quarters is always special. Otherwise why attend athletics meetings in the aftermath of the World Champs, or be present for your football club any time after Christmas, when the writing’s on the wall that yet another mid-table slot is more or less guaranteed. We want to be there at Trent Bridge or Southampton, in the company of others, to appreciate just how blisteringly quick Brett Lee is at full throttle, to see Ricky Ponting bat in case he never returns to England, to enjoy the sight of Michael Hussey dropping a catch he’d have taken ninety-nine times out of a hundred, to remember how beautifully a cricket ground is mown, to take in the atmosphere a crowd creates, and have a memory to cherish over the Yuletide sherry. If you were there, what does it matter that the game was meaningless or pedestrian. You’ll have noticed, of course, but not as much as we who watch at a safe uninvolved distance from the comfort of our sofas will have noticed. Cor blimey guvnor, the TV pundits have even been on the backs of the crowds for not making enough noise, as if it’s their fault or something, rather than their right, handsomely paid for. Maybe athey were just engrossed in what was happening. You don’t have to shout your head off to enjoy something.

I remember watching absolutely inconsequential games of cricket in my youth, and revelling in them. Images stay with one for ever. Derek Shackleton, the Hampshire medium pace bowler of legendary accuracy and subtlety fielding tall and lean at the boundary’s edge, and swapping friendly words and a cigarette with a spectator, before going back to his bowling mark and putting six balls on to the pitch within a half-crown of each other. Can that have been so? I think it was. And in the same match, his bowling partner ‘Butch’ White, delivering at express pace from the ‘wrong’ foot, dropping short and being pulled off the front foot an inch or two from his eyebrows by my hero Colin Cowdrey to the midwicket boundary. How did Cowdrey have the bravery and time to do that? Without a helmet! Or another time at Canterbury, the Kent stalwart Alan Dixon, bowling off-cutters that looked so easy, I reckoned even I could have made a hundred, but still managing a five-fer not many. Brian Luckhurst squirting the ball to the square boundary time after time. Wayne Daniel at Lords, so quick the ball was quite invisible from side on. Kapil Dev hitting the ball with a smile into the top tier at Northampton’s County Ground. Massive, balding, Garth Le Roux hitting parked cars at the same venue. Wayne the larrikin Larkins belting Northants to an improbable victory against the clock with half a dozen sixes. Michael Holding whispering to the bowling crease from a run that started pretty much at the sight screen. A pretty much unknown Michael Hussey accumulating 329 runs with an efficiency that had one scratching the head. How come this guy couldn’t get in the Australian team? The results of the matches are rarely recalled, but a thousand individual images come back with clarity and gratitude just to have been there and captured them in the camera of the mind.

There is no cosmic significance in any of this, although if you view it with the eye of faith, you may think that a kindly God gave us these things for our comfort and relaxation. But there is shared ritual here, which needs the contrivance of the relevant authorities to nurture and support. The watcher on TV is on the fringes: he or she remains uninitiated into the true mysteries. All they will want is Big Bangs. The smell of fried onions (or until recently at Northampton Saints Rugby Club in a certain part of the main stand, ‘Deep Heat’ wafting up from the team changing rooms) is just as much a part of the action for the paying customer at the ground.

Get a new plan, Stan

I may be about to sound like the bloke you’d try hard to avoid at the party. This was the season when English cricket, even if it regained a pot, finally lost the plot.

There was a time long ago when the narrative of a season could be very easily followed – and, please bear with me, but here we have to go back to the nineteen fifties again. Then there were just two strands to the annual story. An overseas team would come to play England, arriving (by boat at first) in early May, warming up in leisurely fashion by playing a whole sequence of games against the English counties, the two universities and the M.C.C. The five Test matches would be played predictably in Birmingham, London (Lords), Leeds, Manchester or Nottingham and then London again (the Kennington Oval), the last one finishing well before the August Bank Holiday. If the visiting team were Australia, England would usually lose the series. If it was anyone else, they’d usually win. Parallel to this would be a County Championship in which each of (eventually) seventeen ‘first class’ counties would play each other at least once, often twice. A batsman could score as many as 3816 runs in a season (Denis Compton in 1947) or take as many as 304 wickets (Kent’s ‘Tich’ Freeman in 1928). Everything would be wrapped up nicely by the beginning of September at which point there’d be a nice little celebration up in Scarborough with one or two ‘festival’ matches where batsmen threw caution to the winds and bowlers went wearily through the motions. The rest of the time the bowling class (I don’t think it’s my imagination but generally they were of a lower social standing than the cravated batters) never suffered injury despite being entirely beer-fuelled while softy batsmen were sponsored by Brylcreem (Denis Compton again), drank G&T’s and were universally beautiful to watch, even though by modern standards they scored extremely slowly. No one was paid very much money. They played for the love (or the hell) of it. Indeed some of the best participants were truly ‘amateur’ (see ‘cravats’): their private income subsidised their play and the public’s enjoyment. This was truly another, though not a better age. After all, Herr Hitler and food rationing were still recent memories, and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was about to tell the nation of ‘winds of change’ in Africa and encourage them that in Britain they’d ‘never had it so good’.

Then, one day cricket was invented. Cricket became professional through and through. The one-day final became a climax to the county season, even if winning the ‘Gillette’ trophy was seen as a consolation prize vis-a vis the three day county programme. Telly was still black and white.

The sixties saw a big change: if cricket was to survive as a national sport it had to renew itself and become both more commercial and more attractive to watch. Two Test series a year became an occasional practice and eventually by the nineteen eighties a permanent one. More one day competitions flourished. Cricket on a Sunday became an early sign of the social acceptance that England was now a secular nation, at least after lunch on the first day of the week. 40 overs a side was born as a pro game. With improved world transport, and better communications, more foreign cricketers sought employment in the UK, and the individual cricket authorities here welcomed them with increasingly open arms, kidding themselves that their presence would automatically ‘improve standards’, but really more concerned to boost income at the gates of the grounds or get the jump on their rivals down the road. The presence of the imports changed the attitudes of indigenous English cricketers: it arguably made them more venal and work-shy. To be fair, more travelling was now required of them, if not more cricket. Less overs were being bowled in total, less runs scored, fewer wickets taken than in days of yore. But at least they had nice sponsored cars in which to make the journeys. Latterly, as the first contribution of the twenty-first century to the game’s history, 20-20 has been added to the repertoire of cricketing entertainment and next year we’re promised two domestic competitions for this shortest form of the game. Oh good.

Because do you know what? Here I am, an interested, even fanatical punter, and I have to look up the details of what’s supposed to be happening when in the season. I’m unmoved by the ‘Friends Provident Trophy’ with its mix of leagues and knock-out. The ‘Pro-40’ league seems entirely irrelevant. I couldn’t tell you which team is in which division of the emasculated county championship, except that Northants (inevitably) are in the second division, as (amazingly) are bottom-placed Surrey for all their glitter and London swagger. Poor Mark Ramprakash. The final seal on his absence from the England team was that, despite the weight of his run-getting in recent years, none of it should count for his eligibility in the view of the press, because it had been achieved in Division Two. It didn’t matter. In which case, why are we bothering with Division Two at all?

The fixture list is a patchwork quilt. The final of the FP Trophy was separated from the rest of the competition by 20-20 matches. The county championship was suspended in mid-summer to allow one-day matches to flourish. The crowded, unrelenting international programme allows no room for the cricket-follower to pay attention to domestic matters. Only the final round of four day inter-county matches peeks out at the end of September – so let’s hope there’s still some interest in it by then. A season begun with cold hands stuffed in pockets while handfuls of spectators huddled together for warmth will end the same way shortly before October’s inevitable good weather. Professional cricket in 2009 is an animal designed by a committee and it really should be put out of its misery quickly. The administrators have done the almost impossible by creating a ‘product’ which gets worse, season by season, with every ‘innovation’ of format. The men in suits care only about numbers of ‘bums on seats’, regardless of their identity. Even there they’re losing headway. Yesterday’s eventually exciting one day match against Australia failed to sell out, and the atmosphere seemed to be tepid and distracted for most of the day. Ask yourself why that was.

Perhaps we should let professional cricket in England die. It sometimes seems as if, to echo the Gospels, we need to lose our life in order to re-gain it. I propose a moratorium. No cricket except the strictly amateur for five years. Think of it as a lengthy break for rain. Then, fresh with enthusiasm, let’s greet the sun and see the way to go.