The Picador Book of Cricket Read online

  THE PICADOR BOOK OF

  CRICKET

  Edited by Ramachandra Guha

  PICADOR

  for Rukun

  Contents

  Ramachandra Guha – Introduction

  John Arlott – Cricket at Worcester: 1938

  FROM GRACE TO HUTTON

  Alan Gibson – Great Men Before Agamemnon

  C. B. Fry – The Founder of Modern Batsmanship

  Bernard Darwin – Genial Giant

  Ray Robinson – The Second Most Famous Beard in Cricket

  J. H. Fingleton – Never Another Like Victor

  Bernard Hollowood – The Greatest of Bowlers

  Ian Peebles – The Colossus of Rhodes

  Ralph Barker – The American Lillee

  Neville Cardus – The Millionaire of Spin

  R. C. Robertson-Glasgow – Three English Batsmen

  Ronald Mason – Imperial Hammond

  W. J. O’Reilly – Young Don Bradman

  J. H. Fingleton – Brightly Fades the Don

  C. L. R. James – The Black Bradman

  J. H. Fingleton – My Friend, the Enemy

  E. W. Swanton – Compton Arrives

  Alan Ross – Hutton Departs

  ‘Evoe’ – Can Nothing Be Done?

  FROM MILLER TO TENDULKAR

  Ray Robinson – Touch of a Hero

  Ray Robinson – Much in a Name

  Ray Robinson – The Original Little Master

  C. L. R. James – A Representative Man

  John Arlott – In His Pomp

  Ray Robinson – Southern Southpaws

  Frank Keating – Down Under and Out

  Scyld Berry – Gavaskar Equals Bradman

  John Woodcock – Kapil’s Devil

  Donald Woods – Twist Again

  Martin Johnson – A Man with a Secret

  Scyld Berry – Botham’s Fastest Hundred

  Hugh McIlvanney – Black Is Bountiful

  Frank Keating – Marshall Arts

  Martin Johnson – King of the Willow

  B. C. Pires – Emperor of Trinidad

  Frank Keating – Final Fling for the Fizzer

  Mike Selvey – Sachin of Mumbai

  Suresh Menon – Tendulkar of the World

  Alan Ross – Watching Benaud Bowl

  LITTLE HEROES

  A. A. Thomson – Bat, Ball and Boomerang

  John Arlott – Rough Diamond

  Neville Cardus – Robinson of Yorkshire

  David Foot – Character in the Counties

  Rowland Ryder – The Unplayable Jeeves

  C. L. R. James – The Most Unkindest Cut

  Matthew Engel – A Great Fat Man

  Dale Slater – Abed and Apartheid

  Philip Snow – The Fijian Botham

  Sujit Mukherjee – A Jesuit in Patna

  Neville Cardus – A Shastbury Character

  Alan Gibson – The Unmasking of a Dashing Oriental Star

  N. S. Ramaswami – Iverson and the Lesser Arts

  Richard Cashman – The Celebrated Yabba

  Hubert Phillips – An Englishman’s Crease

  MATCHES

  Ralph Barker – The Demon Against England

  Neville Cardus – The Ideal Cricket Match

  C. L. R. James – Barnes v. Constantine

  J. H. Fingleton – The Best Test I Have Known

  Richie Benaud – The Last Day at Brisbane

  Mike Marqusee – David Slays Goliath

  R. C. Robertson-Glasgow – The One-Way Critic

  STYLES AND THEMES

  J. H. Fingleton – The Brilliance of Left-Handers

  John Arlott – Fast and Furious

  Ian Peebles – Opening Batsmen

  John Arlott – Not One to Cover

  Gerald Brodribb – The Big Hit

  Ian Peebles – Ballooners

  Neville Cardus – The Umpire

  J. H. Fingleton – Cricket Farewells

  Tunku Varadarajan – To Lord’s with Love – and a Hamper

  Alan Ross – The Presence of Ranji

  Gideon Haigh – Sir Donald Brandname

  B. C. Pires – Coping with Defeat

  Ian Wooldridge – Ashes Dream Teams

  John Arlott – Australianism

  V. S. Naipaul – The Caribbean Flavour

  J. B. Priestley – The Lesson of Garfield Sobers

  Neville Cardus – The Spirit of Summer

  A. A. Thomson – Winter Made Glorious

  Neville Cardus – What’s in a Name?

  Rowland Ryder – The Pleasures of Reading Wisden

  Ramachandra Guha – Epilogue: An Addict’s Archive

  R. C. Robertson-Glasgow – The Bowler’s Epitaph

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  The Picador Book of Cricket is both homage and epitaph, a tribute to the finest writers on the game and an acknowledgement that the great days of cricket literature are behind us. ‘Show me the Tolstoy of the Zulus,’ said Saul Bellow once, bringing the wrath of the politically correct upon his head. Far less contentious would be the remark, ‘Show me the Neville Cardus of one-day cricket.’ Watching a one-day match is like smoking a good cigar – fine while it lasts, but difficult to write about afterwards. One limited-overs game is much like the next: played to a strict script, limited in its variations, lacking the long-drawn-out intensity and drama of the Test match. Meanwhile, live television and the greater frequency of international matches have also dealt a body blow to cricket writing as literature. When one has just watched England play Australia on the box, or at any rate is preparing to watch England play South Africa on the morrow, why bother to read an account, however evocative, of a tour through the Caribbean last winter?

  The cricket-book market nowadays is cornered by ghosted autobiographies and statistical compendiums. The essayist, the biographer, the traveller and the roving correspondent: there is scarcely any space for these kinds of writers any more. There was a time when major English novelists or poets – P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, Francis Thomson, Alec Waugh and numerous others – took time off to play and write about cricket. Now they are more likely to celebrate football (as with Nick Hornby and Ian Hamilton), or accept commissions to report on Wimbledon (like Martin Amis).

  Modern cricket writing was founded, more or less, by Neville Cardus. The son of a Manchester prostitute, his father unknown to him, Cardus educated himself in the streets, libraries and sports grounds of the city. He was a fair player himself, and for a time was assistant cricket coach at a minor public school. He found a job on the Manchester Guardian, where, remarkably, he was asked to fill in for the cricket correspondent, who had fallen ill. He stayed for twenty years. In his writing, the portrayal of character and the evocation of context take precedence over the analysis of technique. He dramatized the great team rivalries of the day, investing Lancashire v. Yorkshire or England v. Australia with a cosmic significance that his readers came to share. He humanized the players, finding distinctions of character in each, whether great international star or humdrum county professional. His hallmark was the capsule biography, the 2,000-word essay on how a cricketer bowled, batted, walked and talked. His taste for verbal embroidery, though deplored by the academic-minded, made him immensely more readable than those who had come before him.

  When Neville Cardus died, in 1975, Alan Gibson remarked at his memorial service that ‘all cricket writers of the last half century have been influenced by Cardus, whether they admit it or not, whether they have wished it or not, whether they have tried to copy him or tried to avoid copying him’. This is certainly true of the English writers who followed him, the best of whom have included R. C. Robertson-Glasgow, John Arlot
t, Alan Ross and Gibson himself. These men were all writers first and cricket writers second. It was Cardus who showed them that cricket could be a vehicle for literature. Without him, they might instead have made a career writing poetry or plays. They knew and loved the game, and brought to their writing a range of reading and experience denied to the workaday journalist.

  The Cardus style has had less influence abroad. He stands above all English writers, true, but two Australian contemporaries also made major contributions to the literature of cricket. These were Ray Robinson and J. H. Fingleton – the latter a former Test player himself. In their writings there are few literary flourishes, no quoting of poets or evocations of the colour and fragrance of summer. The strength lies rather in the command of the game’s technique, in the careful reconstruction of an innings or a spell or an entire match. Their books are marked by economy of expression and precision of analysis, based on a first-hand knowledge of the game. Cardus was also read, but not copied or avoided, by the Trinidadian historian and revolutionary C. L. R. James. His Beyond a Boundary – commonly acknowledged to be the most influential of all cricket books – mixes close knowledge of the game with an awesome command of colonial history and metropolitan literature.

  Cardus, Robinson, Fingleton, James – all are richly represented in this anthology. So are numerous other writers. The first two sections of the book profile the truly great, from W. G. Grace to Sachin Tendulkar; the third honours those who have excited a more parochial passion (often the source of the finest writing); the fourth remembers some epic matches; and the fifth collects reflections on styles, themes and attitudes. In my selections I have preferred the classic to the kitsch, exposition to exclamation, the out of print to the readily accessible, the style of the broadsheet to that of the tabloid, and literature to journalism.

  Wherever possible, I have chosen celebrations by a writer from one country of a cricketer from another. In a more general sense, The Picador Book of Cricket aims to challenge the self-centred chauvinism of previous collections of cricket literature. These have tended to under-represent writers as well as players from lands other than England. However, as sport and spectacle, cricket is now vastly more important in the erstwhile colonies than in the Mother Country. Indeed, an obscure town in the Arabian Gulf, Sharjah, hosts matches viewed by millions more people than would view an Ashes Test at Lord’s. Moreover, for some time now the England team has been one of the weaker sides in world cricket. Other anthologists, usually English themselves, have shown a magisterial disregard of this decline. By contrast, this collection seeks to be truly international, its writers and subjects being chosen from across the great and growing territory of the game.

  Ramachandra Guha

  Cricket at Worcester: 1938

  Dozing in deckchair’s gentle curve,

  Through half-closed eyes I watched the cricket,

  Knowing the sporting press would say

  ‘Perks bowled well on a perfect wicket.’

  Fierce midday sun upon the ground;

  Through heat haze came the hollow sound

  Of wary bat on ball, to pound

  The devil out of it, quell its bound.

  Sunburned fieldsmen, flannelled cream,

  Seemed, though urgent, scarce alive,

  Swooped, like swallows of a dream,

  On skimming fly, the hard-hit drive.

  Beyond the scorebox, through the trees

  Gleamed Severn, blue and wide,

  Where oarsmen ‘feathered’ with polished ease

  And passed in gentle glide.

  The backcloth, setting off the setting,

  Peter’s cathedral soared,

  Rich of shade and fine of fretting

  Like cut and painted board.

  To the cathedral, close for shelter

  Huddled houses, bent and slim,

  Some tall, some short, all helter-skelter,

  Like a skyline drawn for Grimm.

  This the fanciful engraver might

  In his creative dream have seen,

  Here, framed by summer’s glaring light,

  Grey stone, majestic over green.

  Closer, the bowler’s arm swept down,

  The ball swung, swerved and darted,

  Stump and bail flashed and flew;

  The batsman pensively departed.

  Like rattle of dry seeds in pods

  The warm crowd faintly clapped,

  The boys who came to watch their gods,

  The tired old men who napped.

  The members sat in their strong deckchairs

  And sometimes glanced at the play,

  They smoked, and talked of stocks and shares,

  And the bar stayed open all day.

  JOHN ARLOTT

  FROM

  GRACE

  TO

  HUTTON

  Our first extract honours the first cricket travellers – the intrepid Englishmen who ranged far and wide in search of competition, heroes masquerading as mercenaries. Alan Gibson’s account of the early tours reminds me of what an old Oxford historian (Cecil Headlam) once said: ‘First the hunter, the missionary and the merchant, next the soldier and the politician, and then the cricketer – that is the history of British colonization. And of these civilizing influences the last may, perhaps, be said to do least harm.’

  ALAN GIBSON

  Great Men Before Agamemnon (1975)

  Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona

  Multi; sed omnes illacrimabiles

  Urgentur ignotique longa

  Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.

  – Horace

  which may be roughly translated and abbreviated to ‘There were great men before Agamemnon, but the press hadn’t got round to it.’

  The first English sporting team to tour abroad (or so I imagine) left our shores in 1586, under the captaincy of John Davis. Its destination was the Arctic Circle, where it took part in a series of athletic contests against the Eskimo. Like most touring teams, it won some and it lost some, though no detailed results survive. There were newspapers of a kind then, but they did not run to sports correspondents, and in any case there might have been a shortage of volunteers: intrepidly though our pressmen may now venture to Australia or America, Greenland in the sixteenth century might have daunted the bravest. The expenses would no doubt have been good, but you could not be sure of surviving to claim them, and an occasional whale steak did not represent much in the way of free-loading.

  This is not just a little joke. Davis, one of the most courageous and selfless of the great Elizabethan sailors, had visited the Arctic before, and had tried to establish friendly relations with the Eskimo, without much success. He had taken out some musicians, who played old English folk tunes, while the seamen danced to them. The Eskimo were only mildly interested, and did not seek to compete with these early Cloggies.

  But Davis had noticed they were an active people, who enjoyed wrestling, jumping and other sports; so on his second trip he took some athletes with him. This did establish some kind of bond with the natives. ‘Our men did overleape them, but we found them strong and nimble, and to have skil in wrestling, for they cast some of our men that were good wrestlers.’ As many of Davis’s men came from Devon and Cornwall, famous wrestling counties, we may take it that the Eskimo standard was high. They were not, however, so good at football, of which they already had a version. ‘Divers times did they weave us on shore to play with them at the foot-ball, and some of our company went on shore to play with them, and our men did cast them downe as soon as they did come to strike the ball.’ Clearly the Eskimo had not learnt to tackle.

  This tour is worth remembering, as an illustration (there are many to the contrary) of the hopeful belief that if different peoples can be brought to play games together, they will understand each other better, and grow fonder of each other. But there is no record of anything like cricket being played. It is not quite impossible, because cricket and similar bat-and-ball games were known in England at the
time, but the records are scanty, and mostly refer to the south-east of the country. So, reluctantly, I cannot grant John Davis the honour of being our first touring captain.

  That distinction would have gone to the third Duke of Dorset, J. F. Sackville, at the end of the eighteenth century, but for an unhappy misadventure. He was one of the many nobility and gentry who were enthusiasts for the game, and used to gather at Hambledon: a great backer of sides, and a considerable player himself. At one time he was Ambassador in Paris, and in 1789 he asked the Foreign Secretary, the Duke of Leeds (another cricketer), for a token of goodwill towards the French. Between them they planned a tour of English cricketers to Paris. It seems odd, because there was nobody obvious for them to play, but that is what they did. Unfortunately the French Revolution broke out, and the first the Duke of Dorset saw of his team was at Dover, they wondering whether to embark and he flying homewards. As Major Rowland Bowen has pointed out, this was the first cricket tour to be cancelled because of political events, though not the last.

  By this time, plenty of matches were being played at home by sides called ‘England v. Kent’, ‘England v. Hambledon’ and so on; but if we started taking these into account we should soon be in trouble, as in many cases we do not know the detailed scores or the teams. We may, however, moving on to the nineteenth century, pause on the name of William Clarke. Clarke was born in 1798. He was a Nottingham bricklayer. He played for his county at the age of eighteen but he was nearly fifty when he was first employed as a practice bowler at Lord’s, where he soon made a reputation as one of the best in the country. In 1847, he and William Lillywhite took all twenty wickets for the Players against the Gentlemen. He spun the ball from leg, bowling at about the height of the hip, and there are many tales of his cunning. He was the founder of ‘The All-England XI’, which played its first match in 1846, against Twenty of Sheffield. The idea was that the best cricketers in the country should tour together, playing against local sides. It was a business enterprise, though occasionally a leading amateur, such as Mynn or Felix, would play.

  In order to make an even game of it, All-England customarily played against odds, usually twenty-two. If the local sides still did not feel strong enough, they would engage a spare professional or two to play for them. One or two professionals, perhaps those who did not fit easily into the disciplines of a touring side, specialized in taking engagements for the opposition. Of one of these, William Caffyn tells a story in his capital book, 77 Not Out. (Caffyn was a member of Clarke’s team, and later had much to do with the advance of the game in Australia, where he coached.) The player concerned, he recalls, was about to be arrested for debt. The sum was only £12, and so he arranged with his creditor to be seized just before the start of play, on the ground of the club for whom he was playing. As both debtor and creditor had calculated, the club was so alarmed at the prospect of playing without their star guest that a whip-round raised the money.