On the back cover of “Arlott, Swanton And The Soul Of English Cricket”, the fascinating study of two of the game’s most respected and admired journalists by Stephen Fay and David Kynaston, there’s this quote from Swanton: “It’s going to be a great struggle to keep cricket anything like the game that we’ve known and loved because now television has got ti by the throat”.
Well, yes, one might agree with that. You can’t read the comments section on any website without finding angry laments for the ECB’s readiness to sell coverage of the game to SKY, thus removing it from free-on-air TV. Moreover, apart from Test cricket, TV will broadcast the 50-over white ball game and, of course, T20, ignoring the first-class county championship. And next of course we are to have the ECB’s own instant delight – the hundred ball innings game promoted to attract people who don’t like cricket.
All reason for doom and gloom and for believing that the “Soul of English Cricket” – whatever that may be – is irremediably tarnished. “O tempora, O mores!” and all that.
Still, let’s not be too gloomy. The game has been in trouble often enough before, and has come through. Reading this book, one finds the novelist and cricket-lover Simon Raven, grumbling about cricketers’ apparent indifference to the public and lack of “heart” in their play, without which “the game will die. Indeed it is a commonplace that first-class cricket is already dying”. That was more than half a century ago, 1960 indeed.
Standards of behaviour? Swanton – Arlott too, I think – deplored displays of emotion. Such displays have grown more blatant since. He would have loathed the excessive excitement, hugs and embraces, with which the fielding side greets a wicket. Fair enough, but the stiff upper lip has been way out of fashion for years now. Cricket reflects society, not society cricket. Likewise, both men disapproved of “intimidatory” short-pitched fast bowling, especially when aimed at lower-order players. Certainly, it’s often overdone, but I think the players who all have helmets and protective armour now accept it. Some of them show their apprehension a bit more than others, and thus attract still more of the short and nasty stuff.
Be that as it may, “Bodyline”, devised by Douglas Jardine and the Nottinghamshire captain Arthur Carr and executed by Harold Larwood, was practised more than eighty years ago, and there was lots of intimidatory fast bowling in the 40s, 50s and 60s when Swanton and Arlott flourished.
Near the end of the Fay and Kynaston book comes a story which suggests that in some respects the game is in a better – more moral-condition now. At Edgbaston in 1957, the West Indies dismissed England for 186, Sonny Ramadhin taking 7 for 49. As a raw 19-year old Ram had bamboozled the English batsmen seven years previously. He bowled mostly off-breaks, but mixed them with a leg-break with no easily discernible change of action. In 1950 the West Indies wicket-keeper, Clyde Walcott, had greeted Len Hutton in friendly fashion: “I don’t know what you’ll make of this boy, Len. I’ve been keeping to him for weeks now and I still don’t read him…”
So at Edgbaston it looked as if Ram was exercising the same magic. West Indies made 474, leaving England with an uphill job to save the match. Peter May and Colin Cowdrey, two of the public-school, university amateurs Swanton so approved of, set out to do just that in the most cynical manner possible. Exploiting the lbw law which then permitted a batsman to use his pads with impunity outside the off-stump even when not pretending to play a stroke, and relying on the unwillingness of umpires then to give a lbw decision if the batsman had played well forward and was struck on the front pad, May and Cowdrey were able to pad and bat on and on, their partnership eventually a record 411. Ramadhin bowled 98 overs and took 2 for 173, both before Cowdrey joined May.
Over now to Yorkshire’s Johnny Wardle, outstanding spin bowler himself, who was England’s twelfth man: “I could have wept for him. If he appealed 50 times, at least 30 were plumb lbw even from the pavilion. It was a great partnership in its way, but an utter scandal really”. I’m rather ashamed to remember that I listened to the radio commentary on this “great partnership” with admiring approval. Now, brooding on the “soul of cricket”, I wonder if Arlott in his commentary or Swanton in The Daily Telegraph, criticized the young English amateurs for what the Yorkshire professional thought “an utter scandal really”.
As to the present series, here the soul of cricket seems in a healthy enough condition, for we have had three absorbing Test matches, played apparently in a good and sporting spirit, without controversy or ill-temper. This must owe something to the demeanour of the two captains, Joe Root and Virat Kohli. England’s batting in their first innings at Trent Bridge was lamentable, nevertheless not unwelcome. Their failure kept the series open and there have been too many recently in which the home team established an early dominance and won in a canter.
Kohli has batted magnificently, and must now rank as one of the half-dozen greatest Indian batsmen. Anyone whose love of the game is greater than his partisanship must have delighted in watching him and his duel with Jimmy Anderson has been fascinating. The scoreboard shows Kohli the winner, but the scoreboard doesn’t record dropped catches, balls that just miss the edge, or edged shots that don’t quite go to hand. England’s close fielding has been dreadful, and you have the feeling that the slips are silently praying, “please God, don’t let a catch come my way”. For Jos Buttler Jonny Bairstow’s injury which allows him to get out of the slips and behind the stumps with the gloves on can’t be exactly unwelcome.
As to the batting, England’s problems may well be a fair reflection of the state of the game here. They have an abundance of all-rounders: Stokes, Woakes, Curran, Moeen Ali, Rashid (who has scored 10 first-class centuries) and the wicketkeeper-batsmen Bairstow and Buttler, but a sad shortage of batsmen – by which, I mean specialist batsmen. There are fewer of them than at any time I can think of. By specialist batsmen, I mean ones capable of having a first-class average of around 50 and a Test match one over 40. The cupboard looks very bare. Stokes and Buttler batted well in the second innings at Trent Bridge, but their batting average is the all-rounder’s mid-30s. Buttler’s century was his first in 23 Tests. Michael Vaughan’s 2005 Ashes-winning team had a top 5 of Marcus Trescothick, Andrew Strauss, Vaughan himself, Kevin Pieterson and young Ian Bell, with all-rounders Flintoff and the wicket-keeper Geraint Jones at 6 and 7. In Australia in 2010-11 the top order was Strauss, Alastair Cook, Jonathan Trott, Pieterson, Bell. You could always hope to get a couple of big hundreds from that group. Not so, today; not so, this season anyway, especially with Root, our best batsman, himself looking out of form…
As for Cook’s opening partners, the pattern seems set. A player makes runs for his county, has a good or goodish couple of Tests, has weaknesses which are spotted and exploited, fails more often than he succeeds, fails too often, returns to county cricket and fails to recapture whatever it was that led the selectors to pick him in the first place.
And that’s that. The soul of English cricket looks in fair shape, despite the ECB’s efforts to corrupt it; it’s the brain and body that are more worrying.
