Good and bad at commentating

When I left the UK I said that I’d miss two things: Radio 4 and the cricket, especially county cricket. Thanks to the internet, Radio 4 is on tap (as I type I’m listening to the wonderful Dr Jonathan Miller reviewing archive recordings of his career), and ball-by-ball coverage and commentary of county and test cricket from the BBC and CricInfo means that cricket in England can be lived in every respect, except for the joy of eating Jaffa cakes and scotch eggs in the sun.

A far cry from my early visits to New Zealand, and the first two or three years of living here. Then, finding out the score was a question of locating a faint BBC World Service signal, or relying on two-day-old potted scores in the New Zealand Herald. I was even reduced to the weekly shame of skulking into McLeod’s Bookshop in Rotorua to buy a copy of the international edition of the Daily Express.

Now, it’s very different. Last weekend I watched the end of the third test at the Oval on television, listening to the Test Match Special commentary at the same time, while keeping in touch with Kent’s latest collapse, against Lancashire, on CricInfo.

Such reliance on the media means that the quality of the commentary is crucial. Fortunately, the BSkyB and Test Match Special teams have not let me down. On other occasions in the past few weeks I have not been so fortunate.

When BSkyB took over the exclusive contract for English cricket in 2006 some tough decisions were taken about the composition of the commentary team. Paul Allott and Bob Willis, both of whom had worked for BSkyB from its inception, were relegated to the highlights and county cricket. Allott is bland, and the absence of Willis takes the heat off the Samaritans, who would otherwise be stretched to breaking point with calls from the desperate, driven to the edge by Willis’ mournful commentary spells.

What remains is the strongest commentary line-up of any around the world, with Nasser Hussain and Mike Atherton outstanding. Atherton came to BSkyB after four successful years with Channel 4, and he is a historian, so it is no surprise that he is good. But as a player and captain, Hussain came across as intense, prickly and humourless, so it is a pleasant surprise that he is an incisive, interesting commentator with dry humour and the ability to make an Essex accent sound intelligent.

And there’s Bumble, David Lloyd, who is both shrewd and funny, qualities that many commentators think they possess (see below) but few do. He provided the commentary box moment of the match at the Oval when talking passionately about Alistair Cook’s footwork having forgotten to pick up his microphone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cygWze9RJMA

On the radio, Jonathan Agnew is completing twenty years as the BBC’s cricket correspondent. Agnew isn’t in the class of John Arlott or Alan Gibson as a wordsmith, but is good enough and gets the mix of analysis and humour just right. Though I’d stick with Arlott, Gibson and Mosey as my all-time line-up, I’d add Agnew as fourth commentator were I allowed one, just ahead of Brian Johnston.

Agnew’s pleasing line in self-depreciating anecdotes—there was a cracker at the Oval about how he hid in a cupboard on Test debut to avoid being sent out as night-watchman—probably leaves those who did not see him play with an unduly underwhelming idea of his ability as a player. In fact, he took more wickets than any other bowler in county cricket over several seasons in the 80s, and it is a minor scandal that he only played three Tests. In 1988 he took a stack of wickets early in the season, but was omitted from the first Test on the grounds that the pitches he had been bowling on were too bowler friendly, an argument undermined by the selection of his Leicestershire teammate Phil de Freitas instead. On the same pitches, de Freitas had taken half as many wickets as Agnew.

At the Oval, a listener emailed in a “Boycott bingo” card, consisting of a number of the great man’s most well-used phrases. Boycott was not a summariser for this match, so knew nothing about this when he arrived to record the daily podcast at the close of play. The idea had taken Agnew’s fancy, and he took the opportunity to extract as many of the phrases on the card as he could. Boycott fell for it every time, along these lines:

Agnew: Where should they bowled, Geoffrey?

Boycott: In the corridor of uncertainty...

Agnew: Different from the pitches in your day which were?

Boycott: Uncovered pitches...

Agnew: It was an easy chance. How would your Mum have caught it Geoffrey?

Boycott: In ‘er pinny...

And so it went on.

Unfortunately, Henry Blofeld has replaced the pleasant Bristolian Simon Mann in the radio team for the Lord’s Test. Blofeld would have us believe that he was created by PG Wodehouse, when really he is only one of Lord Snooty’s more irritating pals.

At the other end of the commentating spectrum, I give you Pete and Ed of Radio Bristol. I got up in time to hear last hour or so of the Radio 5 Live commentary on T20 finals day, but it cut off online a few overs from the end, so I found this pair instead. I know that T20 is supposed to attract people who have never been to the cricket before, but not to commentate, surely.

When I lived in Bristol, Radio Bristol’s cricket commentary often led me to put my head in my hands while muttering “please make it stop” and things have not improved. Neither Pete nor Ed appeared to be able to identify the type of shot played, were shaky on player identification, and didn’t know what the rule was to decide a tied game (which is how the final between Somerset and Hampshire ended). Worse, they didn’t have the vocabulary to sustain a cricket commentary. In the tense last over, the best Ed (or possibly Pete) could offer was “I shall need the toilet soon”.

And further down the food chain, there’s Danny Morrison, one of a five-man team covering the ODI tri-series between Sri Lanka, India and New Zealand in Sri Lanka. Morrison hung around the fringes of the commentary team in New Zealand for a decade or so, but was used for international games very rarely. Yet now he pops up all the time on international games from South Asia, and the IPL.

Employing a curious vocabulary of synonyms (the bat is the “willow” or “blade”, the stumps the “woodwork” and anybody over six feet is the “big fella”) and cliché, Morrison’s commentary consists of a disjointed stream of consciousness on which a Freudian analyst could base a career’s research if extracted from a patient under hypnosis. It never includes anything that is interesting, or not, in the immortal words of Basil Fawlty, “the bleeding obvious”. He pauses meaninglessly in mid-sentence, and plonks (to plonk: a verb coined by Clive James in his TV reviewing days, meaning to stress the most unimportant words in any sentence). His purpose here seems to be to make Tony Greig look literate.

He does not succeed.

At home at The Oval with Allen Hunt

Kent played a home T20 game against Essex at The Oval last month. They lost, as they usually have this season, but it was a decent contest, Essex passing Kent’s 171 for six with two balls to spare.

Playing a home game away like this has caused a good deal of grumbling among the faithful, and may not have been a success, with a crowd of only 7,000 attracted when many more were hoped for, though this is twice the average T20 crowd at Canterbury this season, apparently.

No doubt when the game was scheduled it was anticipated that Kent would be heading for the final stages of the competition for the fourth year in a row; instead, they began the match all but eliminated.

Playing a home game at The Oval is not a new idea. I recall it being mooted in the eighties. It made good sense then, and still does. With the disappearance from the county circuit of Blackheath, Dartford and Gravesend, a game a season near home for the county’s many London fringe supporters redresses the balance, and most train lines in Kent point to south London.

Anyway (and this will come as a surprise to most) Kent played a home game at The Oval in 1981, and I was there.

http://www.cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/41/41303.html

It was the Benson and Hedges quarter-final against Warwickshire, scheduled for Canterbury, but moved to the Oval on the morning of the scheduled third day after a deluge had prevented play on the first two days set aside for what was, in theory, a one-day game.

At 133 for two, Warwickshire appeared comfortable chasing Kent’s modest 193 from 50 overs. Then collapse, the remaining eight wickets falling for just 46 runs. My firmest memory of the play is of a splendid catch by Alan Ealham to dismiss “Yogi” Ferreira. I must write about Ealham, one of my favourite players.

As might be imagined in these circumstances, the crowd was sparse. Of the few present, only two were sufficiently intrepid, dedicated and lacking in perspective to watch from the top deck of the pavilion, a fine view, but grievously cold in the face of a scathing northerly. So it was that I made the acquaintance of Allen Hunt.

I was to spend a lot of time at the cricket with Allen over the years that followed, around Kent and, particularly, at away games. He cut a distinguished figure, slightly raffish even, with swept-back white hair and goatee beard; Allen would often sport a cravat, which made him stand out like a Zandra Rhodes model when compared with the sober suits favoured in the top deck of the pavilion at Canterbury. He would have been about seventy then, but could have passed for a man fifteen years younger. That remained the case for most of the time that I knew him.

Allen passed the CLR James test (“What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?”) easily. A civil servant in the Ministry of Education, he had acquired an MA from the London School of Economics in middle age, and continued to teach adult education classes at City University into his eighties. It was just that he thought cricket more interesting and rewarding than anything else.

In 1968 he won a Kent Messenger competition to pick a greatest-ever Kent XI. The prize–very exotic for those days–was a trip to South Africa to watch part of the Test series between South Africa and England. When the tour was cancelled as a result of the South African Government’s shameful refusal to accept the Cape Coloured Basil d’Oliveira as part of the touring party, Allen handed the holiday on to his niece. “No use to me with no cricket to watch”, was his view.

He divided his time between his flat in Leyton, east London and his house in Halling, north of Maidstone. I never went to either, but those that had described a somewhat chaotic existence, particularly when it came to meal times, which would consist of a fusion of whatever tinned food was available. Corned beef would share a plate with rice pudding, to save washing up.

Allen was a wonderful person to watch cricket with, drawing upon seven decades of cricket watching to analyse the game with intelligence and wit. He was my window on to cricket’s past, describing, among many other things, watching Les Ames score a century in the first Test played by New Zealand in England at Lord’s in 1931, Frank Woolley batting, and Tich Freeman bowling.

An entourage collected around him. There was “Budgie” Burgess, Brian Cheal, exiled like me in Bristol, the two Rays, and his most regular associate, George Murrell. George was a little younger than Allen, and also retired. Slim, dapper (readers of a certain age should think of the keyboard player from Sparks) and possessed of a tinderbox wit, George was also excellent company. I was sitting next to him at the Oval in 1985 when Graham Dilley took a hat-trick. He claimed, somewhat improbably, never to have seen a hat-trick before and said, rather wistfully, “I had intended to have the words ‘He never saw a hat-trick’ on my gravestone”.

Winter days were always brighter for the appearance of a letter from Allen. They would never contain small talk, but would arrow straight in on the main point. Had I heard that a particular player was thinking of leaving, or that we had signed a talented young player? Occasionally he would stray on to the subject of the fortunes of Gillingham FC (he rarely missed a home game, unless it clashed with the cricket, obviously).

I last saw Allen at the Kent v the Australians game in 1997, the week before I left for New Zealand. His health had started to go downhill, and he couldn’t manage the train any more, but had got a lift from a neighbour. So much to talk about, so little time.

The letters continued to arrive over the next couple of years, with increasingly unsteady handwriting. They became irregular, and stopped coming as the century approached its end. For me, it is still a sign that a day’s play has been interesting if I think, as I leave the ground, that I’d like to write to Allen to tell him about it.

I went to the Cricket Instead

Just as Americans a bit older than me can tell you where they were when Jack Kennedy was shot, so English people know where they were on the afternoon of 30 July 1966, the day England won the football World Cup (Scots also remember, but only because it is seared upon their soul).

Me too. I was at the cricket, the first day of Canterbury Week, Kent v Leicestershire, to be precise.

Had the World Cup started a month earlier, everything might have been very different. But by early July I was already entranced by the other great sporting event of the summer of ’66: the Test series between England and the West Indies. I watched the opening World Cup game, a monumentally dull nil-nil draw between England and Uruguay, and lost interest after that.

As far as I remember, the opportunity to go to the cricket with a family friend arose on the morning of the final. Displaying wisdom beyond my seven years, I unhesitatingly grabbed it rather than watch the biggest football match ever played in England, thus absenting myself from the most significant shared national experience between VE Day and Lady Di’s funeral.

It was an early lesson that cricket watching would require stoicism and fortitude; only 25 overs or so were possible, my hero Colin Cowdrey got a duck and the whole thing was finished by a hailstorm in mid-afternoon.

Good choice, nevertheless.

Later World Cups are also reminders of days at the cricket.

By Mexico 1970 I had developed more enthusiasm for football, but cricket still had priority whenever a choice was to be made. Hence I missed Alan Mullery’s goal that put England one-nil up against Germany in the quarter-final at Leon because I was on the way back to Herne Bay from a Sunday League game at the lovely Crabble Ground in Dover (Kent chased down Northamptonshire’s 239 in the last over). Martin Peters extended the lead, but the Germans began their long period of domination in finals games between the two countries, and came back to win three-two in extra time.

Failure to qualify in 1974 and 1978 meant that England’s next World Cup finals match did not take place until they played France on 16 June 1982, when I was watching Ian Botham reverse-sweep Somerset to victory in the Benson and Hedges quarter-final at Canterbury.

Four years later I listened to Peter Jones and Bryon Butler’s radio commentary on the “hand of God” game against Argentina on my way back to Bristol from a Sunday League game at Basingstoke.

As the years went on, other events vied with cricket for my time, and came off second best. In 1985, for example, I was offered tickets for, and transport to and from, a concert. Kent were playing Northamptonshire at Maidstone that day, so I turned it down. What was the concert? It was Live Aid, my friends, the greatest gathering together of popular musical talent in the history of the universe.

But at Mote Park, Roger Harper made a most entertaining run-a-ball century, so again, good decision.

Under duress, I might miss a match for events deemed significant, such as the marriages of friends of the family. When, some years later, the predictable news was delivered that the happy couples had separated, my reaction was always that they could have made more of an effort given that I had sacrificed a day’s cricket for their wedding.

World events occurring during the cricket season also remain indelibly associated with particular fixtures. President Nixon’s resignation, for example, occurred during the Canterbury Week of 1974, between the second and third days of the Warwickshire game. Surely others recall, as I do, the Royal Wedding of 1981 as the day Ken McEwan of Essex made an elegant hundred in John Shepherd’s last first-class game for Kent (plenty of people gave up a day’s play needlessly that day)?

On this theme, an old story. Stop me if you’ve heard it before.

A batsman pulls away just before the bowler’s delivery stride, removes his cap (I said it was an old story) and bows his head as a funeral cortege passes the ground. When it has gone, he replaces his cap and beckons the bowler to proceed. At the end of the over the wicket-keeper says “that was a nice gesture”.

“It was the least I could do”, replies the batsman. “I was married to her for thirty-five years.”

Letter to the editor

The July edition of the Wisden Cricketer arrived today, and is as entertaining and interesting as ever, particularly its list of the ten best cricket books ever published, of which more anon. However a more immediate concern was a piece by Mark Nicholas in the Expert Eye column:
http://wisdencricketer.com/item.php?parent_id=12&child_id=8&item_id=704

It postulates a reduction in the number of first-class counties to 14, or even 12. Now, I don't like this idea, but the day will probably come, and opposition based on dogged sentimentality is unrealistic. What made me dash off a letter to the editor was the assumptions that Nicholas makes about how the change would come about.

Here's the letter:

If there is to be a cull of first-class counties, it must not be driven by the assumptions made by Mark Nicholas (Expert Eye, July).
First, why should the Test-staging counties be guaranteed a place in the new structure? So that it can benefit from the financial and cricketing acumen that has taken Surrey from top to bottom in less than a decade? Or so that we don't miss the one player of true international class that Glamorgan produces every 30 years? How would we manage without Yorkshire's people skills?
English cricket would do better with more influence from counties that have used scarce resources to produce young players of true international potential, as, for example, Leicestershire are doing, and less from those whose grandiose dreams have lumbered the game with more international grounds than it needs.
A knowledge of geography wider than Mr Nicholas' would also be useful. The view that a merger between Gloucestershire and Somerset is "natural" is sustainable only if you believe that everybody south and west of Swindon wears smocks and sucks straw. A more natural alliance would be between Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, given that the cricketing heart of the former is in the north of the county, half an hour from New Road, but two hours from Taunton.
And why should the south-eastern counties be inviolate? As a lifelong Kent supporter I hope the day never dawns, but with the population of the county balanced towards London and the books in dire straits, amalgamation with Surrey is every bit as realistic as any of those suggested. Nor is Brighton to Southampton an arduous journey.

I like Mark Nicholas as a broadaster and journalist. At any rate, reading and listening to him is more entertaining than watching him play ever was. As an Englishman verging on the posh, his achievement in becoming the face of cricket on Channel Nine in Australia is remarkable, even if he has adopted the every-day-is-Australia-Day commentary style which only Messrs Benaud and Chappell resist.

But he's wrong about this.

The International Cavaliers

Kent v the International Cavaliers 1966: http://www.cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/104/104252.html

Kent v the International Cavaliers 1967: http://www.cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/104/104271.html

Kent v the International Cavaliers 1968: http://www.cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/104/104294.html

Up to the mid-sixties, the British Sunday was a grim matter, still constrained, in spirit at least, by the Sunday Observance Act of 1782, the whole population effectively under a form of house arrest. One of the best evocations of the traditional British Sunday remains the episode of Hancock’s Half Hour in which Tony Hancock, Bill Kerr and Sid James endure its tedium. There was certainly no top-class sport to watch, live or on television. The only pleasure available was the ironic one of reading in the News of the World about the indiscretions of the very vicars who insisted that Sunday be kept sacred.

Cricket, to be precise the International Cavaliers, changed all that.

The Cavaliers will mean nothing to anybody who began watching cricket after the sixties, but they were the IPL of their day, and are a vital, neglected part of cricket history, and to a lesser extent, of British social history. Without them the development of the game over the past forty years would have been very different, and we might have suffered many more years of agonisingly torpid British Sundays.

The International Cavaliers was an invitation side consisting of current and recently retired test players along with a selection of decent county cricketers and promising youngsters, the mix varying from season to season and match to match. An article by Ted Dexter from the International Cavaliers Annual 1970, exhumed on my recent visit to the frozen north, dates the foundation of the side to the summer of 1963.

However, Cricket Archive has scorecards of a tour of India and South Africa in February and March 1963 by an International Cavaliers team led by Richie Benaud, and consisting of Australians and a few county players (Phil Sharpe and Mickey Stewart among them). Another tour, to Jamaica, took place early the following year, this time comprising English players only. It seems inconceivable that these teams could not have been linked with the iteration that appeared in England, especially as they had a number of players (including Dexter) in common.

The touring side played first-class cricket, but it was as a pioneering one-day team that the International Cavaliers established itself in England. Limited-overs (List A as it is called by the statisticians) cricket began in England in 1963, with the Gillette Cup (65 overs a side at first). As I’ve discussed elsewhere, this early form of limited-overs cricket was not much different to a one-innings first-class game. Any score over 200 was likely to be a winning one. It was well-received, but only amounted at most to five days’ cricket a year for any one county. On its own, it would not have arrested the decline in public interest in cricket that had set in during the fifties.

The Cavaliers took the idea much further, devising a formula intended to produce entertaining cricket that would attract people back into the grounds, 40 overs a side, with a result in four-and-a-half hours on a Sunday afternoon, when people would be glad of the entertainment. There are clear parallels with the made-to measure T20 forty years later. However, the Cavaliers would have remained no more than a footnote in cricket history, had it not been for Huw Wheldon, Controller of Programmes, BBC Television.

A new TV channel, BBC 2, had appeared and there were broadcast hours to fill, with a gap on summer Sunday afternoons. For Wheldon the International Cavaliers was the answer.

But there was a problem. Sport was seen by some influential people as being an improper use of the medium on the Lord’s day. Wheldon was summoned before a suitably pious BBC Board of Governors to explain. He told the story of this meeting as part of his Richard Dimbleby Lecture in 1976.

Wheldon was asked who would be playing in these cricket matches, and trotted out names including Dexter, Colin Cowdrey, Garry Sobers, Denis Compton and Godfrey Evans. According to Wheldon, the Board reacted as if he had named the twelve apostles themselves. All objections to live cricket on the Sabbath were instantly removed.

So on most Sundays in the summer of 1965, and every Sunday for the following three summers, the International Cavaliers filled almost five hours of airtime on BBC 2 on Sunday afternoons.

The results were spectacular and far-reaching. Grounds up and down Britain filled to capacity every Sunday and viewing figures exceeded expectations. For a sport characterised as being run by the dead hand of the MCC at that time, cricket was surprisingly quick to learn the lessons offered.

Sunday play was trialled in the County Championship as early as 1966, the first time that a major sport had risked the vengeance of the Lord in such a manner, though play only began at 2 pm, so that people had time to go to church and have a roast lunch with the family before going to the game (a faint hope in Kent, where all the best seats were taken by noon).

This cautious precedent did not attract thunderbolts or pestilence and pushed ajar the locked door to sport on Sunday. Other sports followed in time. The Wimbledon authorities re-scheduled the washed-out 1972 Men’s Final between Stan Smith and Ilie Nastase on Sunday. Rugby league shifted to Sundays later in the seventies, and in 1981 the last day of the Open Golf (at Sandwich) was moved there too. Football, dense as ever, did not follow until the mid-eighties. Other forms of entertainment also started to open and be available on Sundays as well, all following the lead of the International Cavaliers. The British were liberated from Sunday, to the unconfined joy of all but a few.

Realising that the Cavaliers alone could not satiate the demand for instant cricket, the cricket authorities created the Sunday League, which began in 1969, with each county playing sixteen 40-over games, stealing the Cavaliers formula. It was wildly popular and probably saved county cricket. Other developments flowed from the same source. The first World Cup, in 1975, would have been delayed by a decade or more had the Cavaliers not been so successful, and Kerry Packer would never have seen the commercial potential in the game that he did.

It also began English cricket’s infatuation with the 40-overs formula that has lasted to the present day. This season the 50-over competition has been ditched in favour of 40-over cricket, and it is threatened that ODIs will go the same way too (connoisseurs believe that the shorter the game, the less interesting and more superficial it is, and we are right).

The success of what it started also did for the Cavaliers. The BBC was persuaded to cover the Sunday League instead of Cavaliers games. The Cavaliers struggled on for a couple of years, with desultory coverage by ITV, but with most of the star names playing for counties, interest wained, and at the end of the season the International Cavaliers faded away, to be quickly forgotten.

I was convinced of the need to restore the Cavaliers to cricket’s consciousness when I read in this year’s Wisden a feature by Tanya Aldred on the first season of the 40-over Sunday League in 1969. This, from the second paragraph:

The Rothman’s Cavaliers have been pottering around the country on Sunday afternoons for a few years. A sort of World XI consisting mainly of old players, they pull in full houses…wherever they go.

No credit at all, from a good writer, to the Cavaliers for starting it all. Nor is the description of the composition of the team spot-on. At no time did the Cavaliers consist of “mainly” old players.

The scorecards linked at the top of this post are of the matches the Cavaliers played against Kent in 1966, 1967 and 1968. I was present at all three, though don’t possess the scorecards to any of them.

The card for 1966 contains a couple of revelations. The Cavaliers team was a mixture of promising young players (Radley–a wonderful one-day player, by the way–and Smith, overseas players qualifying for counties (Boyce, Shepherd–so I first saw John Shepherd play against Kent) a couple of established international players (Pataudi and Dexter–though he was taking a break from first-class cricket at this point) and only three retired stars (Evans, Laker and Wright–I’d not realised that I’d seen DVP Wright play, but it turns out I did, which is quite something).

Sobers, Close (then England captain), Trueman and Boycott (how many balls he took for his nine is not recorded) featured in 1967.

In 1968 it was a stellar international line-up, including Bobby Simpson, Eddie Barlow, both Pollocks, Barry Richards, Wes Hall and Denis Lindsay (it was the rest day of a match between Kent and a Rest of the World XI, but that’s another story).

Again, it’s notable how small the scores are, and the 1966 result is curious (a win to the Cavaliers because the innings ran out of time after 39 overs, so the score was compared to what the Kent had after 39 overs– thank God for Duckworth and Lewis), but it was enough to make a small boy in Kent think that cricket was exciting, a good reason for me to remember the International Cavaliers, even if few others do.

Soul for Sale

St Lawrence Ground, Canterbury

The county cricket blog on The Guardian website has become one of the best sources of writing on county cricket, but a contribution from David Hopps on Friday was alarming:

Mention of Kent's parlous financial state – and the revisited theory that they might eventually move their HQ closer to London in search of Twenty20 riches – has brought a few emails from those in the know. A few Kent captains have observed over the years that the great error of Lord Harris, the second captain of England and a man who played for Kent for 40 years, was to choose a ground in Canterbury, which is somewhat out on a limb.

Jim Woodhouse, a former Kent chairman of cricket, suggested a move towards London 20 years ago and there was so much huffing and puffing from EW Swanton and the like that nothing was heard of it again. It could only ever happen if Kent went bankrupt and began again with a wholly different philosophy. Kent's entire ethos is based upon cricket played on beautiful, tree-lined grounds and for that perhaps cricket should be grateful.

What makes this apocalyptic vision scary is that the possibility of bankruptcy cannot be dismissed, such is the state of the county’s finances and the epic scale of the mismanagement over several decades that has brought this about (see previous post on the foray into the world of pop promotion).

However, David Hopps’ interpretation of the history is very wide of the mark. By the time of the modern county club’s formation in 1870 (when organisations centred on Canterbury and Maidstone merged) the St Lawrence Ground had been established as the county’s leading venue for several decades, through the success of Canterbury Cricket Week (which had not always included a county team). Lord Harris may be condemned for many reasons, but the choice of Canterbury as the county’s headquarters was obvious and, for more than a century, meant nothing in terms of where Kent played cricket.

As recently as the Championship season of 1970 Kent’s home championship fixtures were played on nine grounds around the county: Blackheath, Canterbury, Dartford, Dover, Folkestone, Gillingham, Gravesend, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells (with a Sunday League game at Beckenham bringing the overall total into double figures). Canterbury had only the two games of Canterbury week, one Sunday game, and one Gillette Cup fixture (incidentally, neither Hesketh Park, Dartford, nor the Garrison Ground, Gillingham could be described as “beautiful”, nor, fond of it as I was, could Cheriton Road, Folkestone).

Quality of pitches and facilities, and the cost of transporting increasing amounts of paraphernalia from ground to ground (especially after the dreaded advertising hoardings came into fashion in the mid-seventies) meant that that Blackheath, Dover, Gillingham and Gravesend had been lost by the end of the seventies, but Folkestone and Dartford (on and off) hung on into the nineties, and Maidstone until just a few seasons ago.

The Mote, Maidstone

There is an issue here; the majority of the Kent population (and the membership) lives in the west of the county, including the south-eastern suburbs of London. It is reasonable that more cricket should be played in this area, though whether investing heavily in the Beckenham ground is the way to bring this about is questionable. I support the decision to play a home T20 game at the Oval (not a new idea, incidentally, and I have seen Kent play a home game at the Oval – any guesses?).

However, the view that the county would necessarily be better off by shifting needs to be challenged before it gains hold. Firstly, the St Lawrence Ground is not in the middle of Romney Marsh, nor on the Goodwin Sands. Neither the fording of rivers nor the transfer of bags to a team of sure-footed yaks is necessary to get to it. It is about a mile off the A2, the main route out of London to the south and east, and is easily accessible from everywhere else in the county.

People managed to get there easily enough in the seventies, when Kent had a winning, attractive team. Attendances were consistently higher than they were at the Oval or Lord’s for county games (and probably still are). And as I can testify from two decades spent watching county games in the wasteland of the County Ground, Bristol, being located in a large population centre does not guarantee crowds. Come to think of it, Gloucestershire makes a relevant case study; more money is made from the Cheltenham festival (location comparable with Canterbury) than most of the rest of the season at Bristol.

But more than that, cricket is a game with a soul. The suits who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing must never be in a majority of those in charge. County cricket, if it is to remain in existence, must respect its history and its roots as it looks ahead. If it is not prepared to do that, then we may as well adopt a franchise system, and run a combined Kent/Surrey team (the Whitbread Flat Vowlers, perhaps).

In the meantime, I hope that it won’t only be the ghost of Jim Swanton who is huffing and puffing at the possibility of for-sale notices going up along the Old Dover Road.

Of Didcot and the Demon, the cricket journalism of Alan Gibson

Even before the jetlag had worn off on my recent trip to the frozen north, I was off to Waterstone’s to buy Of Didcot and the Demon. It’s a delight.

The bulk of the book is taken up with Gibson’s reports in The Times of county matches from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties. I’ve spent many days at the cricket that were less entertaining than Alan Gibson’s learned, funny, elegant, idiosyncratic reports on them in the following morning’s paper.

On-field events were not necessarily his main focus. Plenty of reports in this collection make no mention of the game until several paragraphs in. A Gibson report would often begin with an account of his journey to the ground, an often tortuous one at the hands of British Rail, leaving him stranded on the platform of Didcot station at about the time play was due to start.

He had a fondness for the game’s spear carriers, and seemed to prefer to write about what was going on near the wings than what was happening downstage centre. His favourites were identified by the names he chose for them, and their achievements would be assiduously recorded, however insignificant they might be. Chief among them was the eponymous Demon of Frome, Somerset’s medium-fast bowler Colin Dredge. A Dredge 34 not out against Surry in 1982 took up half the report, Viv Richards’ 181 not out a few lines.

The stirring deeds of tail-end batsmen generally were a pleasing weakness of Gibson’s. On Dredge again:

Dredge, looking every inch a Frome opening batsman, was bowled, although he had played one stylish stroke which staggered the infield and produced four byes.

He was good on boring batting too. PJK Gibbs, the Derbyshire opener, was a regular target:

The evening was enlivened by a characteristic innings from Fireman Gibbs, who had scored one in half an hour when I stopped counting.

As befits a man with a first (in history) from Oxford, he was not afraid of scattering literary and classical allusions around:

This morning was commandingly, but, as it turned out, delusively attractive, like a fairy woman of the Hebrides, or a call by Boycott.

But his writing was much more than a collection of one-liners. His profiles of cricketers past and present showed not only a deep understanding of cricket, but also the ability to discern the character of men through the way they approach the game. His piece on the Graveneys, Ken, Tom and David, is the best of these.

A Yorkshireman by birth, Gibson spent most of his adult life in the west, and places that I know well crop up throughout. At the start of the book we find him newly married to his second wife, a young woman from the BBC, and living in Queen’s Court, Clifton, the big, sweeping building that resembles an ocean liner aground on the Victoria Rooms.

In the late seventies the Gibsons moved to High Littleton in north Somerset, and the village pub, the Star, began to feature regularly in his reports:

I left High Littleton with some reluctance, for the Star were due to play the Butcher’s Arms in the final of the Chew Valley shove-halfpenny competition.

For seven years my route to work took me through High Littleton, past the Star. I would always think of Alan Gibson and fortify myself for the unequal daily struggle with the youth of north Somerset by recalling some of his best lines.

Alan Gibson was also a radio commentator, one of the best. My ideal line-up of Test Match Special commentators would be Gibson, John Arlott and Don Mosey, troubled men all. His radio career came to an abrupt end at the Headingley test of 1975, when he turned up worse for wear for a late afternoon commentary stint.

And there’s the problem. The impression you get of Gibson from his writing would be that of a genial, contented man, and that could not be more misleading. He was an alcoholic, prone to serious depression. His eldest son Anthony Gibson, who put this collection together, writes a narrative at the start of each year’s selection. It is an affectionate, honest catalogue of his father’s decline, which by 1985 found him back at Queen’s Court, but now alone and living on whisky and tinned corned beef.

I last saw him either that year or the next. He was in his early sixties, but looked twenty years older as he shuffled on the arm of the catering manager from the Hammond Room at the County Ground, Bristol (he preferred writing in bars to press boxes) to his taxi. The business of reporting was almost beyond him (and the exasperated sub-editors of The Times) at that stage, but he could still turn out a memorable line, such as this about one of his regular cast members, Rev Andrew Wingfield Digby, bowling for Dorset against Somerset in the 60-over knock-out competition:

Wingfield Digby looked much the same, with those long legs consorting so oddly with his short strides in the run-up, like an evangelical curate approaching a session with the Bishop of London.

The beauty of the writing is matched by the book’s presentation, 315 large-format pages on high-quality paper, superbly designed with a fine selection of photographs. This is the work of Stephen Chalke’s Fairfield Books. Chalke has done more than anybody to maintain cricket’s literary tradition in the face of the digital revolution, and deserves thanks and admiration for returning the words of Alan Gibson to print.

One Lynne Truss, there’s only one Lynne Truss...

...For you might be forgiven for thinking that there were several. There’s Lynne Truss the TV reviewer (in The Times in the nineties). Also Lynne Truss the novelist (I’ve just finished Tennyson’s Gift, a novel predicated on the concurrent presence on the Isle of Wight in the summer 1864 of Lewis Carroll, the young Ellen Terry, her husband GF Watts (the artist) and the eponymous Poet Laureate, among others). Not forgetting Lynne Truss the radio playwright. Obviously, there’s Lynne Truss, preserver of the apostrophe for the nations (Eats, Shoots and Leaves), not to mention the Lynne Trusses the broadcaster and the award-winning columnist.

And then there’s Lynne Truss the sportswriter.

I remember being surprised when Lynne Truss started to turn up on the sports pages in 1996. Not as surprised as she was, apparently. In May 1996 the sports editor of The Times invited Truss to join the team covering Euro ’96, the biggest feast of international football held in England since the 1966 World Cup, and an event the existence of which she was, at that point, unaware.

Truss speculates that she was seen as “a trundling wooden horse freighting a few new readers into the sports section”. No doubt the expectation was for nothing more than for a few columns of light relief among pages of serious football analysis. If so, it was a considerable underestimate of a writer who, a few short years later, would have the intelligentsia of the English-speaking world whooping with joy over semi-colons and parentheses. Compared to that, getting a few laughs out of blokes in lurid shirts chasing a ball about was like asking Michelangelo to distemper the ceiling.

The result was so pleasing that her foray into the sports pages was extended into the following domestic football season, and from there her range spread, embracing everything from world heavyweight title fights at Madison Square Garden to the Ryder Cup and (her favourite) the World Darts Championship. She recalls her experiences in Get Her Off the Pitch!, her memoir of her press box years, which I have just finished.
Her presence was not always welcomed by the hacks of the sports pages, though she took to cricket writers more easily than many of the others:

cricket writers are generally quite tall, very amusing [I recognise myself already], a bit Aspergers [ah...], and well informed on highbrow topics like art and music [well, up to a point].

She puts the hostility she encountered down to simple misogyny, but I think that it was because they’d read her stuff and were annoyed that, though she might know about 1% of what they did about their sport, she could still write about it better than they could.

Take her account of the Cricket World Cup semi-final between South Africa and Australia at Edgbaston in 1999 (the one where Allan Donald forgets to run so handing the match to Aussie). She describes the events of the day perfectly adequately. But she also captures the increasing tension as only a very few could, still in her deceptively conversational style:

Six balls left in this semi-final. Nine runs required. The contents of our brains are starting to dribble out of our noses. I am pressing wads of tissue to all the orifices of my head. Fleming bowls to Klusener, and he smashes it as if he were playing baseball. It’s a four. A four! All one can do is whimper, watch it fly, absorb the cheering, and keep trusting the Kleenex.

Truss admits her ignorance about cricket freely. When she took her place in the Headingley press box for the Ashes test of 1997 she had to ask what all the talk of “Headingley 1981” was about.* She may not understand cricket (she is heavily dependent on the radio commentary to make any sense of what she witnesses), but she gets it completely:

But the main reason I could never feel comfortable about cricket is that there is clearly no substitute for a lifetime of enthusiasm. It can’t be faked or mugged up, no matter how many times you pick up CLR James or Neville Cardus...This stuff has to go deep, you see.

And:

One of the attractions of cricket, surely, is that it requires a lot of thinking about afterwards. In fact it’s a sport that largely takes place after it’s finished, in the splendid and reassuring comfort of the inside of one’s head.

I don’t think it could be put better than that.

Lynne Truss gave up sport for punctuation when she concluded that she had no capacity for the massive recall of obscure facts that sports journalists and fans have, and that her emotional memory (“the sturdy means by which I navigate my life”) got in the way.

It’s touchingly simple. One week you are a Spurs Fan so devoted to Dimitar Berbatov that you get the Bulgarian national flag tattooed across your face; and the next week, when he’s signed to Manchester United, you go out and buy a balaclava. You don’t dwell on it, that’s the main thing. You might shout "Judas!" at him on his first re-visit, but then you let it go. I suppose you are too happily occupied recollecting every Leicester-Liverpool score since the dawn of football. Or maybe you are too busy studying a straggly frond in your goldfish bowl for the hundredth time today and saying "Blimey, that’s attractive. Is it new?”.

If you get the chance to read anything by Lynne Truss, take it, even if it means ransacking her dustbin for old shopping lists.

*England’s most famous test victory against Australia. Australians who saw it have “Headingley ’81” engraved on their hearts as Mary Tudor did "Calais".

Why I can’t take Sunil Gavaskar seriously as a T20 commentator

Sunil Gavaskar was a great player. In my team of test players who I have enjoyed watching the most, he would open the batting with Gordon Greenidge. His 221, chasing 438 to win at the Oval in 1979, was one of the finest innings I have seen (saw it on TV, having attended the third day of the game):

http://www.cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/39/39662.html

But when I listen to him commentating on the T20 World Cup, in the West Indies currently, I can’t take him seriously, and here’s why:

http://www.cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/35/35184.html

It was opening day of the first World Cup. England played India at Lord’s, batted first and racked up 334 for four , an immense score at the time, quite the equivalent of 400-plus in a 50-over ODI today. They were 60-over matches, but there were no fielding restrictions, no powerplays, and as I’ve explained before, one-day cricket remained a stately affair in those days, first-class cricket with a slightly fast pulse.

The innings was built around a Denis Amiss century, and Chris Old scored 51 at the end of the innings at a timewarp strike rate of 170.00.

So how would India, with the great Gavaskar opening, go about the chase? Would they risk all from the start, or would they build towards an all-out onslaught in the second half of the innings? What a wonderful start to the World Cup it would be if they got even close.

He batted throughout the 60 overs for 36 not out.

I shall repeat that for effect.

Thirty-six not out.

It was as if Sir Edmund Hillary had looked up at Mount Everest, decided it was a bit steep, and gone for a cup of tea instead. Unwilling to compromise his dignity by essaying unorthodox strokes, Gavaskar opted for practice instead, no matter that 25,000 people had paid in expectation of something wonderful.

His teammates tried to lay the blame solely on Gavaskar, but the total of 132 for three does not suggest that all caution was thrown to the four winds (and did it occur to nobody to run him out?). Only Gundappa Vishwanath, a batsman incapable of truly dull play, scored at more than three an over.

India, more than any of the cricketing nations, did not take one-day cricket seriously in those days, when 90,000 would fill Eden Gardens in Calcutta for the most irretrievably dull test match. That changed, literally overnight, when India surprised everybody, but most of all themselves, by winning the 1983 World Cup, a victory that initiated a chain of events culminating in the Mardi gras that is the IPL (S Gavaskar commentating).

You can tell, even now, that his heart isn’t in it. Today, there were two games that imitated the pattern of that match at Lord’s, the teams batting first scoring a very high total that almost immediately became beyond the teams batting second. He kept talking about the need to keep the scoring rate up, and to take risks, when what he really wanted to say was “Keep your bat straight, play yourself in, give nothing away and improve your average. Like I did.”

And that is why I can’t take Sunil Gavaskar seriously as a T20 commentator.

Brightly Fades the Don by Jack Fingleton

I’ve just finished reading Brightly Fades the Don, Jack Fingleton’s account of the Australian tour of England in 1948, Don Bradman’s last appearances in test cricket as captain of a team that crushed the hosts four-nil in the tests.

Fingleton was a test batsman himself, and a good one, with an average of 42 from 18 Tests, three of which were in the Bodyline series of 1932/3. He was also a trained journalist who covered national politics when not at the cricket, and the reporter’s eye that he casts over post-war Britain makes the book much more than just an account of cricket matches.

Inevitably, Bradman is the book’s central character. It is known that Bradman did not get on with Fingleton when they were teammates (or with Bill O’Reilly, the great leg-spinner who was also reporting on the ’48 tour). Religious differences were thought by some (probably including Bradman) to be behind this, but it might be that their different denominations merely signposted contrasts of character that were at the heart of the matter: Bradman was of work-ethic Presbyterian stock, while Fingleton and O’Reilly were feisty Irish Catholics. Bradman’s experiences with the press had led him to distrust journalists, which wouldn’t have helped.

A notorious incident during the Bodyline series compounded matters. Australian captain Bill Woodfull entered the England dressing room at the end of a fraught day on which he and several teammates had endured painful blows, the worst of which was an agonizing strike to wicketkeeper Oldfield’s face (the British newsreel commentator said “Larwood was the unlucky bowler”). He famously told the hapless England manager Pelham Warner “there are two teams out there, but only one is playing cricket”.

We know this because someone told the press. Fingleton, the journalist, was the prime suspect but always denied it (he repeats the denial here). He thought it the reason for his omission from the 1934 English tour. But if not Fingleton, then who? The writer and cricket historian David Frith, who knew Fingleton well in his later years, has concluded that it was Bradman, a view that Fingleton almost certainly shared.

The depth of the animosity between the two is not evident in Fingleton’s comments about Bradman here, which are scrupulously fair and moderately expressed. Bradman the batsman is praised almost unconditionally, Bradman the captain only slightly less so, though there is criticism that his determination to go through the tour unbeaten caused him to deny the fringe players fair opportunity.

It is Bradman the man about whom Fingleton holds the strongest reservations, for his “somewhat indifferent, cold and unfriendly attitude towards most of those with whom he played”. Several anecdotes that support this view are spread through the book, though Fingleton concedes that this singlemindedness may have been part of what made Bradman cricket’s greatest batsman.

Bradman’s team became known as “the Invincibles”, and feature early in any discussion of the greatest-ever team. Do they justify that title?

Not according to Fingleton, who selects a combined XI from the 1921 and 1948 sides that includes only four members of the latter. He explains that part of the reason for this is the weakness of the England team in 1948, with a poor standard of domestic cricket combining with inconsistent and eccentric selection (themes repeated many times since) to produce a side that had was not a proper test for Lindwall, Miller and the rest, so their worth was not truly tested.

There are numerous unexpected delights. Fingleton, proving himself to be a man of taste and discrimination, liked Bristol.

Not even London, I thought, had more character about it than this hilly city of churches and types.

It came as a shock to read that the rather bleak stone building at the far end of the Bristol ground was still an orphanage.

There is gay but sad colour in the uniformed orphans who cram the walls along the side of the ground and their huge home.

When I first started watching at Bristol, in the late seventies, that far end of the ground was still sometimes referred to as the Orphanage End, a usage now, I think, obsolete. The function of the buildings as a refuge for waifs, strays and the listless remains; it is now part of Bristol Polytechnic aka the University of the West of England.

While in the north, Fingleton leads an expedition to track down his old Bodyline adversary Harold Larwood, who he found running a sweetshop in the back streets of Blackpool. Fingleton, using that reporter’s eye again, notes that Larwood does not have his name on the shop, odd for a famous sportsman, even in those commercially unsophisticated days.

He finds Larwood welcoming, but bitter, not at the Australians, but at the English cricketing establishment, which shunned him when it became expedient to place distance between itself and the events of 1932/3. The meeting had unexpected consequences. Fingleton was surprised to hear Larwood contemplating emigration to Australia, “the country which once flamed from end to end over his bowling”. The encouragement that they received from Fingleton helped the Larwoods and their five daughters to take the momentous decision to emigrate. He lived happily in Sydney for another 45 years.

At various points Fingleton rails against the disruption and intrusiveness of the new-fangled loudspeakers that were a feature of the English grounds. This might appear to date him hopelessly, but I reckon he was onto something. There’s nothing an announcer can say that the spectator cannot tell by looking at an efficiently operated scoreboard, or by consulting the small reference library that should accompany him or her to the game. And it’s led to the cacophony that is an ODI at the Cake Tin, and elsewhere.

They should have paid heed to Fingleton, over that, and much else.

Kent v Loughborough University, St Lawrence Ground, Canterbury, 10, 11 and 12 April 2010

http://www.cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/262/262586.html

I’m just back from a quick visit to the UK which, surprisingly for early-to-mid-April, offered a first opportunity for eight years to watch cricket at Canterbury, even if only for a (slightly) glorified practice match.

I was apprehensive as I drove onto the St Lawrence Ground. It was like meeting an old girlfriend, many years later. Would the years have been kind to her? Had she forgiven me for leaving? Would it be awkward? Obviously, the concomitant dangers of such an encounter were absent. A cricket ground could not remark on how much weight I had put on, or ask if that wasn’t the same sweater that I used to wear in 1984.

There was no need for concern. The ground was comfortingly familiar, though the lime tree that had stood on the boundary’s edge for as long as the ground has existed is gone, its absence less obvious than could have been imagined when it was there. A replacement is in place, no more than ten feet high yet.

Neither was St Lawrence in quite the rundown state that some reports had led me to expect. The club is in dire financial straits, made worse by a disastrous foray into pop concert promotion. James Morrison broke even, but the Sugababes went down as well as a county championship game at a Metallica concert. The club chairman, apparently with a straight face, reproved members for not supporting the event, which conjured a  image of an audience consisting of stonyfaced people in jackets and club ties, eating sandwiches from Tupperware boxes during Get Sexy*.

The cricket was pleasing, but untaxing. In other circumstances I would be exercised about the granting of first-class status to a match against a university side but it was so nice watching cricket at Canterbury that I didn’t care. Remarkably for the time of year it was a nice day, as long as you stayed in the sun.

Kent won the toss and batted. I was hoping for big scores from Joe Denly and Sam Northeast, neither of whom I had seen before, but Denly went in the first over, and Northeast managed only a painstaking ten. It was Rob Key and Geraint Jones who scored the runs in the first half of the day, both completing centuries by early afternoon. Jones (to whom I was well-disposed from the start, having enjoyed an excellent bacon roll before play in the bar he runs in the indoor school; the pigs are his own, I understand) looked particularly good from the first ball he received, which he cover drove for four.

Key reached 140 before retiring, without pretending to be injured or ill, so being recorded “retired out” on the scorecard, the first time my Blean correspondent or myself had seen such a thing. It brought the first-class status of the proceedings into further disrepute, of course. This is not to say that the students did not look and act like a first-class side in many respects; there was much clapping of hands and mutual encouragement (Rose being particularly vocal from fine leg), and they could no doubt have talked about “areas” and “zones” all day, given the opportunity. It was only in that brief but crucial period that starts with the ball leaving the bowler’s hand and ends with it reaching the batsman that they looked several days’ walk away from living up to their description as a “centre of cricketing excellence”. But they did have a Tavaré, William, a nephew of the great CJ.

One thing was odd. Loughborough’s slow left-armer, Welsh, came on at the Nackington Road End, from where such bowlers rarely bowl in my experience, because of the significant slope from the hospital to the Old Dover Road sides of the ground. I doubt that I saw Derek Underwood bowl half a dozen overs from that end in twenty years. I thought that this was no more than youthful inexperience (though Graham Dilley, the Loughborough coach, should know better). However, on my brief visit to the ground on the second day, James Tredwell was bowling his off spin from the Pavilion End. A short boundary on the legside (I have never seen cricket on a pitch so far towards the southern side of the ground) made this all the more mysterious.

There was a brief glimpse of Martin van Jaarsveld later in the afternoon, enough to understand why he has scored so heavily in recent years. He has an efficient technique, and hits the bad ball where it deserves to go. He reached his century towards the end of the day, but by that time my Blean correspondent and myself had retired to the Pheonix (happily reopened after a period of closure) where we put bad records on the juke box, just as we did when we were young.

I paid a brief visit on the second day, but the sun had gone in, the nor’easter had got up and it was most unpleasant. Some of the Kent players were wearing beanies to keep warm and went about their task with all the enthusiasm of a meeting of the Kent branch of the Geoffrey Boycott Appreciation Society. Meanwhile, Loughborough were grinding away at about two an over. After a trudge around the ground I left, to return who knows when.

*I had to look that up on Wikipedia, obviously.