Jonathan Wilson
Any bats for sale in Malabo?
You've got to practise your cricket, but it's not worth the risk of taking your own bat through customs in a non-cricket playing country
Jonathan Wilson
19-Jan-2015
When you leave the airport in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, they x-ray your bags and then conduct a physical search. The woman in front of me, who was short, slight and, I think, French, was carrying what appeared to be a hard plastic guitar case. When she opened it, though, she revealed a set of about a dozen arrows, as well as a bow. The customs official was nonplussed.
"What are they?" he asked in Spanish.
"Arrows," she said, although that was perfectly obvious.
Full postWhat we often miss in World Cups
It's impossible as adults to watch sport as we did in childhood, when we remembered only the great moments and filtered out the drabness in between
Jonathan Wilson
05-Jan-2015
I spent a fair bit of the football World Cup in Brazil last summer eating Japanese food with Barney Ronay, so the tone of his review of the tournament in the Guardian amid all the end-of-year retrospectives didn't come as a great surprise. He spoke of the excitement of the early rounds, the tremendous flair and skill and unpredictability of the group stage, and of the sense of disappointment as a more familiar, more cautious football took over (with the glorious exception of Germany's 7-1 win over Brazil in the semi-final).
I broadly agreed with his sense of weariness, with the feeling that there was something anti-climactic about the final fortnight. The below-the-line commenters, those unacknowledged arbiters of rectitude, though, were even more apoplectic than usual. Somebody, apparently, had decided that this was a great World Cup - it was, comfortably, the best since 1998 - and that meant that criticising it was anathema.
The vast majority of the bile - and there is something quite distressing about the levels of vitriol people reach for because somebody didn't enjoy something as much as they had - was ludicrous, but I did wonder whether journalists who cover tournaments like the World Cup end up conditioned to frustration because of the sheer exhaustion inherent in covering them.
Full postThe charm of the Boxing Day Test
This annual fixture is special not just for the cricket, but also because it satisfies one of the tenets of Christmas - bringing people together
Jonathan Wilson
21-Dec-2014
The living room is stuffy. There's a vague fug of alcohol in the air. The smell of turkey fat lingers, as it will for another week or two. Everybody's feeling a little bloated, a little fractious. Eventually somebody breaks the silence and decides it's time to go home. There's a general sense of relief. I wish, back then, when Christmas Day meant all the relatives came round, that we had had the capacity to watch the Boxing Day Test from Melbourne.
It still comes, these days, as a welcome coda to the day, but time has thinned out the relatives and so there's not the same sense of release when the day is over. But even now, when you've washed up and done your best to get rid of the turkey stench from the kitchen, when you've piled the leftovers into plastic boxes so you can eat them for every meal for the following week, when your mam's gone to bed and you're left alone downstairs, able fully to relax for the first time in hours, there's something glorious about sitting there in the dark, just the one table lamp on, the window open to let some air in, even though the North Sea wind is howling down the street outside, watching the green rectangle in the corner of the room, knowing it's all over for another year.
I don't think administrators quite realise how important sport is over Christmas, how essential it has become. Every year, Premier League managers moan about the Christmas programme, about time spent away from family and the intensity of playing four games in a little less than two weeks. Every year there's talk of a winter break, as though that would be a panacea for the problems that bedevil English football. But the Christmas fixtures are part of the tradition and a necessary escape from the stresses of family.
Full postWhy do we remember what we remember?
Reflections on memories of a certain summer Saturday in 1983
Jonathan Wilson
07-Dec-2014
Memory works in strange, discomforting ways. When I was younger, I remembered everything, or at least everything that vaguely interested me. Last week, for instance, when challenged unexpectedly, I rattled off every Grand National winner from 1980 to 1994. I have absolutely no idea if I ever deliberately learned them off by heart or why the run should stop in the year I finished school (does booze really damage you that badly?), but they're there, seemingly indelible, in a place that could much more usefully be occupied by, say, the birthdays of friends and family.
I used to remember the details of every football match I'd ever been to and get annoyed with my dad because he couldn't. I assumed memory was cumulative, maybe not for remembering to turn on the washing machine for my mam, but certainly for remembering Sunderland goalscorers. Now, though, I've become one of the old gits in the press room whose response to pretty much any question about a game last season is to stare into the middle distance and ask, "Was I there?" before going through old files on the laptop to check.
For a time I had a theory that forgetfulness was a useful filter: your brain just got rid of what wasn't relevant, that process of natural wastage went on and was generally useful. Nobody, after all, wants to end up like Funes the Memorious, the character in the Borges short story who could remember everything, taking 24 hours to reconstruct in precise detail the memory of a day; dealing only in details, he was incapable of generalities, and thus, Borges suggested, of deduction or induction.
Full postHow much can you love a franchise?
Yes, money is important, and so is the quality of the contest, but there's also something to be said for soul, and meaning
Jonathan Wilson
24-Nov-2014
In what was, even by my standards, an unusually grumpy mood a few weeks ago, I settled down to watch Manchester City play Tottenham in the Premier League. Tottenham were wearing black. This makes no sense.
Usually Tottenham wear white. Manchester City wear sky blue. White and sky blue are colours that are easily distinguishable, and have been since the sides first met in the first round of the FA Cup in 1909. City v Spurs is in no sense a special rivalry, but it is one of the great old fixtures of English football, one that had been played 147 times before, the most notable two being their meeting in the 1981 FA Cup final and its replay. It's a game that oozes history, and a tradition of which English football ought to be so proud. And Tottenham wore black.
Doing so was a rejection of over a century of history in order to try to increase sales of replica shirts. Spurs are far from the only team doing it (City, in fact, wore an execrable dark blue away kit for no good reason at West Ham this season) but this, it seemed to me, said everything you need to know about modern English football: tradition defiled to flog a few more shirts. Given the obsession with the transfer market and the extraordinary throughput of players, how long would it be, I asked angrily on Twitter, before football became just a random assortment of few dozen of the world's best players wearing randomly assigned shirts?
Full postHow will future historians judge modern numbers?
Will they think there's something odd about a bowler getting a batsman out one too many times?
Jonathan Wilson
09-Nov-2014
Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, was one of the best jousters in the court of Henry VIII - except when he was fighting the king himself. Emma Levitt, a PhD student at the University of Huddersfield, has speculated that Brandon let Henry win and, by doing so won preferment, rising from modest beginnings to become one of Henry's most powerful courtiers.
"The only thing he is any use at is jousting," Levitt told the Times after examining the scorecards held at the College of Arms in London. "This is something that has been completely overlooked. I have used the score cheques to look at him and they show that he is the best jouster in Henry's court and he often jousts against the king. However, it seems that he manipulates the scores. When he jousts against everybody else, he will win. When he jousts against the king, he will lose. In a way, he has done all the hard work for the king - Brandon has beaten everybody else, but Henry has beaten Brandon."
Perhaps she's right, but you wonder if that's how jousting correspondents of the time saw it. (After all, if joust-fixing was all it took to rise at court, surely everybody would have been doing it?)
Full postThe power that books hold
We may not be strangers to what players say, but we still tend to accord their words greater respect when they're on paper and between two covers
Jonathan Wilson
28-Oct-2014
Slowly, attitudes are changing. There was a time, not so long ago, when it was assumed that the internet was somehow less reliable than print. Anything sourced online was regarded as inherently suspicious, while such was the sneeriness about online journalism that in Britain the National Union of Journalists used to charge higher fees to its members working for websites.
Reliability, though, comes not from the medium but from the organ, something that seems to be coming to be accepted: there are wildly untrustworthy bloggers just as there are wildly untrustworthy writers for newspapers and magazines, while some websites - and the one you're reading now may be the best example - have become among the most authoritative voices in their field.
It's natural, in a world of such technological change, when so much reading is now done on laptops, tablets and phones, and when so many newspapers have taken to describing themselves as "digital first" to wonder whether there is any place any more for print. In time, as e-readers become ever more friendly on the eyes, perhaps there won't be, but what has become clear in the past few weeks is just what power the notion of a book still has.
Full postThe thankless job of fielding
In sport, bloopers by fielders and defenders tend to register more than the positives, such as goals or great bowling spells
Jonathan Wilson
13-Oct-2014
At the 2011 Under-20 football World Cup in Colombia, England were dour and dogged and made it through to the second round by drawing all three of their group games 0-0, for which they were generally hammered by people back home.
I was one of two English print journalists in Colombia for the tournament. There's always a danger when you're close to a story that you come to sympathise with the protagonists, but here I think the sympathy was justified. Fully, 36 players had been denied to the coach Brian Eastick by the clubs and a further injury crisis had him scrabbling to get any kind of coherent tactical system together. Add in the unfamiliar conditions - most notably the extreme humidity in Cartagena - and those three draws came to seem vaguely heroic.
Writing a piece explaining that led to a general discussion of what football should be and whether teams have a duty to entertain. For the record, I think not: they have a duty to try to get the best result they can within the laws of the game (and whatever their interpretation is of the spirit of those laws) and it is in that that the intrigue of sport lies. But more intriguing was what it revealed to me of why I like football and why the instant gratification of basketball, say, leaves me cold.
Full postFollowing Durham's fortunes from Upton Park
Tuning in to a cricket final while on Premier League duty
Jonathan Wilson
29-Sep-2014
The three blocks of flats, one picked out with red trim, one with blue and one with green stand like stumps beyond the stand on the far side of the ground. I tried to find an omen in that, some remote symbolism to restore my flagging hopes, but all I could think was that there were no bails. What did that mean? Did that mean that the batsmen were doomed, or did it mean they couldn't be out? But the flats were the only sign of cricket, so I gazed at them, pale brown against a filthy sky. There may be worse places to endure your side's run chase in a Lord's final than the press box at Upton Park, but there are few so prosaic.
Part of the problem was that it was all so unexpected. For a long time this looked like being a grim season for Durham. I kept telling myself that they weren't playing badly but kept being unfortunate and were drawing too many games as a result, but anybody who has ever cared about a lower-half-of-the-table football team knows that's as sure a sign of imminent relegation as any.
In retrospect, the season turned on the desperately tight Championship defeat to Lancashire in August, when Durham almost defended a fourth-innings target of 107, reducing Lancashire first to 36 for 5 and then, after they had recovered to 79 for 5, taking a further four wickets for 11 runs. In the end, Tom Smith and Simon Kerrigan saw Lancashire home, but in that fightback was forged a mighty spirit. In the month that followed, they won three straight Championship matches to move clear of relegation, and three straight 50-over games to win the Royal
London Cup.
Full postIt's about anecdotes, not numbers
Runs and wickets matter little in games involving authors, seminarians and the like. It pays to keep your ears open
Jonathan Wilson
15-Sep-2014
"Will you get a column out of that?" Charlie asks, again.
It's become a regular refrain, thanks to the tendency of amateur cricket sides to sledge each other rather than the opposition. Every boundary (few), every dropped catch (some), every misfield (many): will you get a column out of that? Well, here's your answer, Charlie: "I'll get a column out of you asking me repeatedly if I'll get a column out of stuff."
Cricket can be a terrible game. Three weeks ago, I had one of those innings when you're glad to get out. You know your team needs to up the rate, but you can't lay bat on ball, and when you do, it goes straight to the fielders. I'd scored 3 off nine or ten balls - a top-edged pull that fell short of deep fine leg, a firm prod dropped at gully, and a mistimed drive that plopped over the bowler's head and between mid-off and mid-on. When the bowler finally gave me a full toss, I looked gleefully to club it straight back past him but mistimed and hoicked it over mid-on, who took a very good catch over his shoulder running backwards.
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