Cricket has finally become a truly global game
The Times, Scottish edition at least, had a piece in it this week about a young Scottish cricketer, Ollie Davidson, who first played for his father’s club Stirling County — well, for its third — when he was only eight. Now, aged seventeen, he is in the Scotland squad about to play four ODIs against the USA and the United Arab Emirates in, of all places, Texas. Cricket in Texas. Well, that’s global cricket today.
There are people who think cricket of little account in Scotland. At least one ignorant SNP politician has denounced it as “an English game”. Well, cricket everywhere stems from England, but its roots in Scotland are deep. My local club, Selkirk, is celebrating its 150th anniversary this summer. Selkirk is better known for rugby players, such as John Rutherford — that sublime fly-half — Iain Paxton and Iwan Tukalo, all having been Grand Slam winners for Scotland in either 1984 or 1990. But the rugby club is more than thirty years younger than the cricket one.
The Selkirk club is indeed older than several English county clubs, or at least has a longer unbroken history. Great players have appeared at Selkirk’s ground, Philiphaugh. The first, perhaps, was Wilfred Rhodes — farmed out by Yorkshire while not yet twenty, to serve an apprenticeship as a professional with Selkirk’s rival, Gala. That was in 1897 or so. Remarkably, Rhodes would also end his playing career in Scotland, as Perthshire’s professional in 1937, almost 60 and still taking wickets cheaply.
Cricket was as popular as football in the small Aberdeenshire burgh, Kintore, where I spent much of my childhood. The local club fielded two XIs playing in the Aberdeenshire leagues, known as Grades, as in Sydney and Melbourne. The Aberdeenshire club played in the Scottish County Championship and attracted so much interest that placards were fixed to the front of trams promising they would take you “to and from the cricket match.” It was in Aberdeen that Don Bradman made his last playing appearance in Britain — scoring a century, of course.
Two Scots, Douglas Jardine and Mike Denness have captained England in Ashes tours of Australia. Both series were dominated by fast bowling, happily for England — Larwood and Voce — in Jardine’s tour, unhappily — Lillee and Thomson — in Denness’.
According to our school pro, Frank Matthews, a lovely old man who had bowled fast for Nottinghamshire in the 1920s, Larwood might well have played some of his pre-Test cricket in Scotland. A couple of committee men from Perthshire went down to Nottingham hoping to get a young fast-bowling pro. They were offered a choice of two. One was Larwood, the other Bert Marshall. They chose Marshall, who, indeed for several seasons, bowled very successfully for them, but they might have chosen Larwood.
Because cricket was an amateur game in Scotland, with only some leagues permitting clubs to employ one professional, it long ago ceased to attract spectators in any considerable number. But this has of course been the fate also, if more recently, of lower league football and amateur club rugby pretty well everywhere. Moreover, because Scotland played no Test cricket, Scottish cricket fans have mostly supported England, finding no incompatibility in hoping that England win at Lord’s, and lose, even heavily, at Twickenham and Wembley.
An old friend of mine, Buff Hardie, of the much-loved “Scotland the What?” cabaret trio, described himself as “a passionate and biased supporter of the Aberdeen football club, the Scotland rugby team and the England Test team,” and a good many of us could echo his sentiments, with an appropriate change of football club.
Now, with the proliferation of ODIs and T/20 cricket, there is a professional Scotland team with aspirations to attain Test status just as Ireland has. This may put some strain on loyalties, weakening any allegiance to the England Test side, even though many of us are, I suppose, too old and stuck in our ways to shift. Nevertheless, when Scotland played and defeated England in an ODI in Edinburgh a few years ago, Scottish patriotism surged even in diehard supporters of England’s Test team.
It’s a truly global game now — international cricket matches in Texas for heaven’s sake! — one in which T/20 is enthusiastically played in what, not long ago, would have seemed improbable places. But essentially, the amateur game is much as it was when the Selkirk club first took the field in 1872, when W G Grace, not yet qualified as a doctor, was still a slim young man.
As for 17-year-old Ollie Davidson, I doubt if he will play much of his cricket in Scotland, certainly not for Stirling County. Still at school in Bromsgrove, and attached to Worcestershire — where, as a spin bowler (left-arm) and aspiring opening batsman, he hopes to learn from Moeen Ali. He will, if all goes well, find himself playing all over the world.
Another slow left-arm bowler and old friend, Jimmy Allan, began his first-class career for Oxford University in 1953. His first ten overs were maidens, spread, on account of rain, over two matches: one against Yorkshire, the other against the touring Australians. Not any chance of young Davidson matching that. Maiden overs in white ball cricket are a species as out-of-date as maiden aunts.