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In praise of the bus-pass cricketer
There's a breed of player in club cricket without whom the English game would be much the poorer
David Dawkins
02-Jan-2015
There has always been a species of club cricketer to whom the saying "can't bat, can't bowl, can't field" applies. For some, the long-standing tradition of the codger-cricketer is confusing: imagine explaining snuff to the twentysomething smoker of an e-cigarette. Why would you carry someone who can't contribute? But as we move through the 21st century the very idea of the creaking-limbed bus-pass cricketer has changed, especially in London. To address the demands of the fast-paced and discombobulating nature of a city summer, these modern elder-statesman cricketers have become lynchpins in the organisation of, enthusiasm for, and continued development of the game in the capital.
Every team in London has a story, and with the recent news from the ECB that participation in cricket in the UK is in decline, it's worth looking at the tradition of the bus-pass cricketer.
James Clossick is a 64-year-old bowler of legspin, and a No. 10 batsman for the Bethnal Green Camel. Playing in the North East London League, James took six wickets last season and averaged around two with the bat. Reflecting on his batting he says, "I'm one of these batsmen. I know exactly what to do, I just can't do it." But James represents more than his lowly total of wickets and runs, and he's not alone. At many clubs dotted around the various southern leagues there seems to be at least one player who, despite back pain and various other ailments, throws himself vigorously into the nitty-gritty of lugging kit around and into creating a warm atmosphere for a game played by all sorts of people in a cold city like London.
Full postWhy the bouncer is not essential to cricket
Sure, it makes for thrilling viewing, but the tests of courage it provides can be achieved by other means
Pranay Sanklecha
17-Dec-2014
The death of Phillip Hughes was also the death of a certain kind of false, if sincere, innocence about the game. We are reminded that cricket balls can kill. So what should we do about bouncers?
The standard answer - unanimous, even, when it comes to the old pros who constitute the majority of those who write and talk about cricket, is: nothing. There is nothing to do. Keep calm and carry on. We must understand that what happened to Hughes was a tragic but freak accident (by the way, as Andy Bull wrote in the Guardian, such tragedies happen more often than we might unthinkingly assume). Be sad because it's a tragedy, but don't let it change anything because it was a freakish one.
Let one view stand for the rest. This is what Mark Richardson had to say:
Full postThe greatest rivalry never played
What if South Africa and West Indies had clashed with each other in the 1970s?
Colin Benjamin
12-Dec-2014
The fact that West Indies have actually taken a full-strength team to South Africa is both reassuring and confusing.
Coming off the events of the abandoned India tour, it seemed almost certain a repeat of the events of the 2009 home series versus Bangladesh would occur and a second-string team would be sent to South Africa. Also, despite intervention from the CARICOM political leaders, India's US$42 million threat loomed large, ready to cripple the West Indies board's finances catastrophically.
Talk of the West Indies team being disbanded like the former football nations of USSR and Yugoslavia was gaining serious traction from Jamaica in the north to Guyana in the south.
Full postThe forgotten centurion
Andrew Strauss was a key batsman in many of England's memorable wins (and draws), but it's unlikely you'll remember his contributions off hand
Daniel Brigham
03-Nov-2014
Many things could have stopped Andrew Strauss becoming a cricketer.
He broke no school records, was never tipped for greatness. A fiercely competitive nature - he cried whenever he lost a tennis match - was obscured by a reputation as a bit of a lovable dunce. Travelling to his first audition for Middlesex, he got his enormous cricket bag jammed in the barriers at Marylebone station during rush hour. In Strauss' first season at Middlesex, Don Bennett, the county's legendary coach, said he'd give him a few throwdowns in the nets. Off Strauss went to retrieve his kit from his crumbling Ford Fiesta, only to open the boot and realise he had left it outside his front door at home. Bennett's reaction was to call him a "useless public school ****". A county career, let alone an international one, seemed a long way off.
And yet, and yet.
Full postA village state of mind
There's something to be said for being unsure of cricket, its whims and unwritten rules, but wanting more, and playing on regardless
Vithushan Ehantharajah
02-Nov-2014
If you have walked out to bat with your thigh pad outside of tracksuit bottoms, you've looked it. If you have been at mid-off and let a routine defensive push pass through your legs for a single, you've acted it. If you regard the two above indiscretions as "no big deal", then you'd be considered it.
Village.
For the British cricketer, both amateur and professional, it is the ultimate slur; a slight on one's value, a dig at the class of a player. The word that provides the teeth for the saw that hacks at one's perch, often wielded by the same team-mate who lent you his black trainers. Never again will you forget to bring yours in from the garden after a week of airing them out. But it's too late by then, because you've already looked so village.
Full postThe bias of umpires
Understanding historical trends in decision-making might help you deal with the iffy calls you receive. Or maybe not
Scott Oliver
24-Oct-2014
The cricket season not long past was my first back in the arms of an old lover after a three-year break. The old pleasures I'd sought were still present, if less frequently found: the sublime thonk of a cover drive; the giddy relief of the unspilt dolly; the faux-nonchalant smile when a bowling change brought a key wicket. And so too were the old annoyances, primus inter pares being poor umpiring decisions (those of which I was the victim, at any rate) - decisions made with the emotions, or in attempting to right an earlier wrong, or with undue haste, or with too much relish in the raised finger (do these Koertzens practice this signal?).
While a longstanding and bone-deep respect for the admittedly nebulous spirit of cricket kept even the slightest flicker of dissent from my face, it did make me question a couple of assumptions.
Firstly, I had always thought that captains received the rub of the green with an umpire's decisions, particularly in club cricket, where the latter's marks and advancement depend on the captain's approbation. I hadn't ever really been one to ingratiate myself with the ice-cream men, despite seeing the pragmatic value of doing so, yet I had presumed the "fine-wine effect" of three years away - umpires getting sozzled and forgetting I used to be a fractious so-and-so - might afford me the benefit of the doubt with the iffy calls. Not the case.
Full postWhere does Pietersen stand among cricket's villains?
For all his transgressions, he still can't compete with cricket's long list of rogues and rascals. Does the level of abuse he receives fit his crimes?
Daniel Brigham
16-Oct-2014
Of the many peculiarly British habits - chasing cheese down a hill, putting pickle in sandwiches, avoiding eye contact - one of the most enduring is the pantomime season.
Every Christmas, marginal celebrities scramble over each other to don their tights at a 400-seat theatre in a weather-beaten provincial town straight from a Morrissey lyric book, and every Christmas the British public continues to suffer and, sometimes, enjoy it.
What explains this attraction to pantomimes which, like turkey and The Towering Inferno, are considered perfectly fine at Christmas but not at any other time of the year? Maybe it is the chance to see Les Dennis play an ugly stepsister. More likely, though, is that it gives the great British public the chance to have a good boo and hiss at a villain.
Full postWest Indies have the talent to challenge the top teams
With the batting and bowling talent they have, West Indies can be competitive against India, South Africa, England and Australia
Colin Benjamin
15-Oct-2014
Living in the era of West Indies cricket's decline has been a frustrating experience for me.
The sense of schadenfreude is always poignant when stories are related by people who saw the great Caribbean players in action from 1960 to 1995. Their pleasure at witnessing those legends is the misfortune of all contemporary West Indies fans. Watching Sir Garfield Sobers' all-round brilliance, Vivian Richards intimidating fast bowlers, Malcolm Marshall outfox batsmen, and Sir Frank Worrell, the first black West Indies captain and cricket statesman, leading the regional side would have completed my life.
Fast-forward to West Indies' World T20 triumph, which signified the first signs of real progress the team and fans have been searching for after 17 years of insipid performances.
Full postThe case against revoking ODI status
The ICC's decision to restrict the number of ODI teams deprives Associates of the ability to generate enough funds to survive, and to gain new fans
Tim Wigmore
20-Sep-2014
September 18 dawned as a historic date for cricket in Papua New Guinea. It was to be the date of their first one-day international. Yes, it was only against the UAE but it was still a symbol of the progress made by PNG.
Well, so much for that. Two one-day international sides, PNG and the UAE, played an international game according to ODI rules. But the plans to make the game an ODI were abandoned, through no fault of the two sides. The ground that the game was played on has not received the ICC's approval to be an ODI venue.
The incident embodies the ICC's obsession with the concept of status. When two national teams, no matter how weak, meet in any other sport, the game has full international status. Andorra against Luxembourg is a football international, in the same way that Germany against Brazil is.
Full postThe mathematician who loved cricket
GH Hardy loved watching cricket at Cambridge, and ranked mathematicians and physicists on the "Bradman class"
Haider Riaz Khan
18-Sep-2014
"If I knew that I was going to die today, I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores," GH Hardy is said to have remarked to his sister as he lay dying at the Evelyn Nursing Home in Cambridge in late 1947.
The name GH Hardy is synonymous with pure mathematics, a subject on which he wrote a most insightful book for the layperson, called A Mathematician's Apology, though he is perhaps more well known as the mentor of the Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. Not many are aware that Hardy, one of the predominant English mathematicians of the pre-war era, was also devoted to cricket. Maynard Keynes, the founder of Keynesian economics and a friend of Hardy's at Cambridge, observed that if Hardy had read the stock exchange for half an hour every day with as much interest and attention as he did the day's cricket scores, he would have become a rich man.
Hardy did not receive any form of cricket coaching during his formative years, which led to defects in technique later despite having a brilliant eye for the ball. After finishing school at Winchester, he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he began his ritual of watching cricket at Fenner's, Cambridge's picturesque cricket ground. Hardy would saunter to the ground after lunch and settle into his preferred place opposite the pavilion with an umbrella, some sweaters, and a PhD thesis, or a mathematics paper he was refereeing for the Royal Society. Hardy dubbed these items his "anti-God battery", bringing them along in case it rained.
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