The joys of dot cricket

“Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen / Nobody knows but Jesus”. These lines, especially as sung by Billie Holiday, may reverberate in these troubled days when we seem to be victims of the famous Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times”. Others, more optimistically, may recall the football headline: “Jesus saves.”

For us addicts deprived of live sport there are compensations other than religion, of a sort anyway. TV channels are now filled with replay after replay of classic matches and encounters. These offer much pleasure, but of course one essential element of sport is missing; and this is uncertainty. There is much to enjoy even when you know the outcome of a match or race, and seeing the heroes of one’s youth and middle-age in action may be, usually is, delightful. Nevertheless, if you want uncertainty, you have to create it for yourself. Doubtless there are video games which allow you to do this, but there are things you can contrive.

There was in my childhood a board game called Totopoly which, as the name suggests, enabled you to stage horse-races. It wasn’t, as I recall, very satisfactory. My sister and I devised our own steeple-chasing game with walls built of Mahjong tiles to represent the fences, and tiddlywinks as horses. No doubt there were rules which I’ve forgotten. I think you were perhaps required to make at least one flip between fences. No matter, this simple game gave us much pleasure on wet afternoons.

Then there was dot cricket to which I was addicted between the ages of ten and fourteen. Very simple. All you needed was a piece of paper on which you drew a grid with squares to determine the outcome of each ball bowled, and a score-book, preferably a real one. Some people liked to include themselves in a Test team, and it was remarkable how many centuries twelve year-old boys made in Test matches against the Australians and what impressive bowling figures they returned.

There was of course scope for cheating. Though you closed your eyes before stabbing your pencil at the grid, you retained a rough notion of the location of squares which would give you a boundary or result in a wicket. When a third-former scored a hundred against Lindwall and Miller or bowled Bradman for a duck, there was usually some dirty work at the crossroads.

One could be more imaginative. I recall some gripping Test series between the Greeks and the Romans, and even the characteristics I ascribed to individual players. I have forgotten some of them, but even now, more decades since than I care to number, recall a surprising lot.

Take the Romans first. Julius Caesar, a free-scoring batsman, might have seemed the obvious captain, but I rejected him as too domineering, unlikely to foster good team-spirit. There would be dressing-room rows which might end bloodily. So the captaincy went to his adopted son, Octavian (later the Emperor Augustus), who was also a very correct opening bat. I forget who partnered him – perhaps Brutus, a stodgy batsman who provoked slow hand-claps from my imaginary crowd.

The most exciting of the Roman batsmen was undoubtedly Mark Antony. I think he may have batted left-handed (as I did) and that I pictured him as playing rather like the young Australian Neil Harvey or perhaps the New Zealander Bert Sutcliffe who made more than 2000 runs in the English summer of 1949.

The dictator Sulla kept wicket – I’ve no idea why – while his great rival Marius was a hostile fast-medium bowler with a surprisingly quick and nasty bouncer in his armoury, also a useful tail-end hitter. He wasn’t as fast as Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Hannibal. Scipio also batted dashingly at seven; Sulla was at six.

In the Roman team the men of action, as you can see, were batsmen and quick bowlers. The spinning department was left to the poets. Horace bowled off-spin with – I like to think now – an engaging loop, and Ovid was an ingenious, if not particularly reliable, wrist-spinner. Like Kent’s Doug Wright he was quicker than most of the leg-spinning tribe, with a well-disguised googly.

The outstanding Roman bowler was Virgil, who bowled left-arm spin (like me again). He bowled a bit faster and flatter than most slow left-handers because my model for him was Yorkshire and England’s Hedley Verity. Like Verity he was well-nigh unplayable on a drying or sticky wicket. (See the Lord’s Test of 1934.) Verity had been killed in the Italian campaign, at Caserta in 1943. So all I knew of him came from reading and from the hero-worshipping description of how he bowled offered by a medical student who coached us for part of a summer term. Now I realise that my Virgil also anticipated the great Derek Underwood who, however, being born only in 1945, was probably too young to be playing even dot cricket when Virgil was bewildering the Greeks.

The Greek XI was more various than the Roman one, partly because some of the players like that terrifying fast bowler Achilles and that mighty hitter of sixes Heracles probably never existed except in poetry and myth.  Nor did Odysseus, canniest and most inventive of batsmen. Likewise their captain Theseus, wicket-keeper and dashing left-hand bat. I remember my characterisation of Theseus with pleasure and a little pride, since in the real world of Test cricket there was no one quite like him till Australia’s Adam Gilchrist came on the scene.  Perseus, the Gorgon-slayer, was a punishing batsman, but I forget what role I assigned to Jason.

One’s knowledge of Greece came, as the selection of the Greek XI indicates, more from mythology than history, though some historical figures forced their way in. Two Spartans, the general Brasidas and the defender of Thermopylae King Leonidas formed a resolute opening pair, and the Athenian general Themistocles made a lot of runs. Alcibiades should have played, but I don’t think he did. Perhaps I had never heard of him.

I think the Greeks were a bit short of slow bowlers, partly because Homer was omitted on account of being blind. Plato may have bowled off-spin, but I don’t think any of the great dramatists were selected. Sheer ignorance, of course. One writer who did squeeze into the team was Xenophon. He bowled medium-pace inswingers to a packed leg-side field, very boringly.  This was because we had been working our way through the First Book of the Anabasis with its infinitely tedious record of how many stades and parasangs the Army had marched each day.

There were many series and I think the Romans won more often than not. It was all good fun, and, even years after the first Greek and Roman series was played for some sacred urn, dot cricket was still a way of alleviating the boredom of General Science lessons in my first year at Glenalmond. Eventually one stopped playing, putting, like St Paul, childish things away. Still I would recommend the game to young boys and girls enduring lockdown, though I suppose some would prefer a series between Superheroes and Supervillains to one between Greeks and Romans. No matter: the game’s the thing.