It seems appropriate. On the weekend when Scotland beat England by 6 runs in a One-Day International, I learned from Antonia Fraser’s splendid new history of the struggle for Catholic Emancipation that John Nyren, a member of the famous Hambledon club and author of “The Young Cricketer’s Tutor”, was born in 1764 to a Scottish Catholic family which had removed to Hampshire after being implicated in the 1745 Jacobite Rising.
Of course there are still people in England who labour under the delusion that no cricket, or next to no cricket, is played in Scotland, and there are also a fair number of surly Scottish Nationalists who disapprove of it as an English game. Well, of course it is that, just as Rugby Union was first played in England and the Laws of Association Football were drawn up in England. Nevertheless, cricket has a long history in Scotland. A fair number of cricket clubs are older than the oldest Scottish football and rugby clubs, and there have been cricket leagues in Scotland since the tail-end of the nineteenth century. In Aberdeenshire, where I grew up, these leagues are called Grades, just as they are in Australia. I have always liked to say that the Australians copied us, but I expect it was really the other way round.
Sunday’s match will have seemed strange to many Scottish cricket fans, not because we won, but because there being no Scotland Test team, we have mostly grown up supporting England at cricket even while fiercely opposing England at football and rugby. Most of us have managed this without becoming dangerously schizophrenic. Buff Hardie of the “Scotland the What?” comedy revue team described himself as “a passionate and totally biased supporter of the Aberdeen football team, the Scotland rugby team and the England cricket team”. His case isn’t and wasn’t uncommon.
There has never been any first-class club cricket in Scotland and the national team has played few first-class matches, the old annual three-day game against Ireland being one of them. Yet because most of the Scottish leagues, like those in Lancashire, permitted clubs to field one professional player, amateur colleagues could learn from them while spectators had the chance to watch some of the best. So, for example, the great Wilfred Rhodes, when still in his teens, played two seasons as the club professional for Gala in the Border League at the end of the nineteenth century, and finished his career forty years on as professional for Perthshire in the Scottish County Championship; a somewhat vainglorious title for a league of only seven clubs.
Nowadays easy pickings from the various T20 competitions around the world mean that fewer past, present or future Test stars will play as professionals for Scottish clubs – or indeed for Lancashire League ones. The days when you might watch players such as Rohan Kanhai, Abdul Qadir, and Gordon Greenidge playing for a Scottish club are probably over and unlikely to return.
On the other hand, the 50-over and T20 formats have offered an excellent opportunity for the Associate Members of the ICC to develop – even if the restriction of next year’s ODI World Cup to 10 countries has blocked off an avenue, Scotland being one of the sufferers. Nevertheless, it’s unlikely that Ireland and Afghanistan would have achieved Test match status without having had the chance to make their mark and achieve success in white-ball cricket. But Ireland have now played a Test in Dublin against Pakistan and even as I write Afghanistan are playing their first-ever Test against India. Of course the Afghan story, cricket emerging from refugee camps and being played in defiance of the threat of terrorism, is utterly remarkable – so remarkable indeed that this week it was featured in the New York Times, not a paper noted for its cricket coverage; the writer, Sidharth Monga felt it necessary to explain that a Test Match was “a form of the game taking place over five seven-hour days – reserved for a select group of nations.”
Monga wrote that there were nine Test-playing countries, so that Ireland and Afghanistan have now become the tenth and eleventh members of that “select group” – actually he missed one out – perhaps Zimbabwe, whose Test membership was suspended for some years but has now been reinstated so that Ireland and Afghanistan are actually the eleventh and twelfth.
Even as late as a hundred years ago there were only three Test-playing countries: England, Australia and South Africa. West Indies, New Zealand and India were admitted to the select group between the wars, Pakistan in 1952, five years after the Partition of what had been our Indian Empire, then Sri Lanka (1982), Zimbabwe (1992) and Bangladesh (2000). The newcomers will no doubt lose more often than they win sometimes very heavily especially away from home.
That’s been the experience of other countries in their early Test cricket years. On the other hand there is reason to think that new entrants may come to Test cricket better prepared. When, for instance, New Zealand and the West Indies first played Test cricket, all their players were not only amateur, but far from mentally ready for the intensity of Test matches. Now, thanks to the popularity of white-ball cricket, the Afghan and Irish players are not only at least semi-professional, many indeed full-time pros, but all hardened in highly competitive international cricket.
At a time when there is some doubt about the continuing popularity and viability of Test cricket, when indeed its very future may be in doubt, the determination of countries like Ireland and Afghanistan to join the “select group” is surely a good sign. Almost everybody recognizes that Test cricket makes greater demands on players than the other forms of the game – this was something that Michael Atherton and Steve Waugh agreed on in a fascinating TV conversation screened on Wednesday.
At the same time, in too many countries Test match attendances are poor. It was depressing the other night to turn on the TV to watch the first Test of a series between the West Indies and Sri Lanka and discover that the cameras were finding it hard to focus on any spectators, dismal to see a stand named in honour of the great Brian Lara apparently empty.
This doesn’t necessarily betoken a lack of interest: the TV audience may be large likewise the radio one, but without a fair-sized crowd there may too often be a lack of intensity. This isn’t however always the case; the state of the match may determine the level of intensity. I was lucky enough to be at The Oval in 1968 when, after a thunderstorm the England captain Colin Cowdrey appealed to us spectators to help the ground-staff mop up the water standing on the outfield. I like to think I mopped up with the rest but fear I may have preferred to have a cup of tea or a beer. No matter, play resumed before only a couple of thousand spectators (many having left when the ground became a lake and further play seemed impossible) with Australia striving to draw the match, and England needing four, five or six wickets – I forget – to win it. Hardly a run was scored as Derek Underwood wheeled away from the Pavilion end, Australia defended doggedly close fielders crowding the batsman, until, eventually Underwood got the last wicket with, I think, only six minutes left. It was some of the most exciting and tense cricket I have ever seen, and never forgotten.
So Scotland too are now aspiring to join the “select club”. (I think they should let someone else in before them – who wants to be the thirteenth member?) Can they do it? Probably. The pavilion of The Grange ground in Edinburgh where Scotland beat England on Sunday dates from the last decade of the nineteenth century, evidence that the game has deep roots in Scotland. Go to Greenock in the West and you may still find old men who will tell you that their father saw the club’s greatest cricketer John Kerr score a magnificent century for Scotland against the great Australia side of 1921 with its terrifying fast bowlers Ted MacDonald and Jack Gregory.
If Scotland is granted Test status, those of us who have always supported England will experience strangely divided loyalties. We may, I suppose, reconcile them by continuing to offer England fervent support in an Ashes series, while hoping they lose to Scotland. Fortunately, cricket, even more than other games, doesn’t actually require intense partisanship on the part of the spectator – not even the young ones. As a boy Neville Cardus would offer up a compromise prayer: “Please, God, let Australia be all out for 150 with Victor Trumper 100 not out”. This seemed a reasonable request to me, not really too much to ask of the deity, and so I repeated it, substituting the brilliant left-hander Neil Harvey for Trumper. Cricket is a game you can have pleasure in watching without much caring who wins, and this is not the least of its charms.
