So, this is a post about cricket and writing. Imaginative.
Probably the most relaxing day I have had this year, if we ignore anything that involves walking along the beach and listening to the sound of the sea, has been spent at Lords, watching an inconsequential County Championship game. The third day of Middlesex vs Leicestershire, despite featuring Hoggard and Shah (and a fine century from a young batsman named James Taylor, who I reckon will play for England one day) was not exactly a crowd-puller. And yet it was glorious. Its very lack of consequence was its beauty. Being able to sit in a mostly empty Lords, and watch the cycle of overs - drinks, lunch, tea, close of play - and the cycle of wickets and batting milestones within them - I cannot imagine anything more genuinely meditative.
To be honest, if I had my way and could do any job, at any time, I would be hard-pressed to resist being a cricket writer. Not a cricket journalist as of today (though I'd settle for that at a pinch) but a real cricket writer, given the licence and authority to describe the game for people who, before the advent of TV, could only see it by attending themselves. Sure, there would be much more worthy things to do - but trying to capture what it is about cricket that speaks to my soul is not an unworthy task for a life. JM Kilburn certainly didn't think so, whose collected works I am currently reading. And what a writer he was!
Describing Tom Graveney: "Whenever Graveney was out of the England side England cricket was not necessarily weakened but it seemed slightly unrepresentative, as a June garden without roses or a banquet without wine."
Or Walter Hammond's walk to the wicket in 1938, before he had even made a stroke: "Hammond's walk was the most handsome in all cricket, smooth in the evenness of stride, precise in balance. It was a flow of movement linking stillness to stillness."
Today's cricket journalism is full of statistics, gossip, news about the oligarchs who run the ICC and debate about the IPL. What I wouldn't give for just one person to have the licence to follow the England team around and really describe Pietersen's hitting in full flow, or Swann's cunning in tricking batsman out of their wickets. Maybe that era is gone. I hope not.
Meanwhile, any aspiring cricket writers in search of a silky batting technique and flawless bowling action to describe could do worse than turn up to the Hands Off The People Of Iran 2010 fundraising cricket match on Sunday 29th August, Victoria Park, and watch in awe as I attempt to better last year's glorious effort...
P.S.
The title, of course, comes from Francis Thompson's poem "At Lords", written shortly before his death of tuberculosis in 1907.
For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro:
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago !
4 comments:
You just made me very nearly want to watch some cricket. Which is a pretty high compliment.
Shall have to try harder and get rid of the 'nearly'. :)
I'm with Pete on that. I used to play cricket when I was small but it scared and bored the hell out of me at the same time. Every hour or so someone would try and kill me - I paid attention so I wouldn't die. While waiting to bat I was shown how to fool worms into thinking it was raining - drum your fingers on the earth like you're typing - they would surface and be fed to a particular team mate (admittedly this only happened once but it is my main cricket memory). I think I empathised with the worm. Some thing must have changed if I'm even reading this piece - let alone commenting and tempted to watch any of it. I might have to come down and watch the reds in whites on the 29th - I never imagined it being a sport loved by the left though.
Good stuff, they have a cricket team in The Gambia, perhaps you could come over and write about that? Not necessarily poetic though!
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