It was a few hours after David Warner had taken a swing at Joe Root in a Birmingham bar, and Jeff Thomson was standing in a marquee full of people with a microphone in his hand. We were there to play six a side cricket, but the rain was coming down and the buffet was excellent, so Thommo had a full house.
He was wearing the hooray uniform of red jeans and a blue blazer; set upon his broad shoulders and pipecleaner legs it made him look like the kind of guy who joins a soap opera and makes off with the unsuspecting widow's money.
Next to Thommo was David Steele, the bank clerk who went to war and spent consecutive summers defying the pace attacks of Australia and West Indies. They fell quickly into type. Thommo stood with one hand in the pocket of his red jeans looking out across the room, while Steele managed to turn off two microphones as he was talking; interrupting his own gentle anecdotes about getting lost in the Lord's Pavilion, and being paid in lamb chops for every run he scored by a local butcher.
Thommo by contrast told a single story ('I haven't done this one for a while...' ) which was about the dismissal of Keith Fletcher at Sydney in 1975.
'Me and Dennis had a plan,' he began, 'which was to kill the pricks. A couple of them had already gone to the hospital. A wicket goes down and out comes this little prick Fletcher ('prick', it quickly became apparent, was a term of some endearment to Thommo, and he used it gently, almost with fondness). 'Now the Pavilion at Sydney is at square leg and Dennis is fielding at third man. I'm at the end of my run and I'm ready to kill the prick you know. But Dennis comes running over from third man all the way to square leg and starts abusing Fletcher. I'm getting mad with Dennis because I'm ready you know. I'm warm and it's coming out well....'
'Then Dennis comes running over to me. 'I'm like, yeah Dennis, I know the plan. Kill him...'
'Yeah,' says Dennis. 'But I really want you to kill this little prick...' Then he ran back down to third man. Anyway, first ball, too high. Next ball, adjust the radar... bang... hits him right in the middle of the forehead. Absolutely smack in the middle. I go down to have a look at him and he's got the most perfect six stitch-marks...'
Thommo pointed to the spot on his own forehead, and paused for a second, a faraway look in his eyes. He was transporting himself. 'The physio comes on, Bernie Thomas he was called. Fletcher's staggering all over the place, he can't see straight. Someone says, 'He'll have to go off...' and Bernie says, 'he can't we've already got two in the hospital...' So Bernie pushes him back to the crease...'
He mimed Bernie Thomas positioning Fletcher into his stance. By now, Thommo was wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. Everyone in the tent was enjoying the story, and more than that, they were enjoying Thommo's enjoyment of it. He paused.
'So I go back...' He wiped his eyes again. 'I go back and you know next ball, BLAM, stumps all over the place. 'Off you go you little prick...' I'm saying, and then, here comes Dennis, all the way back up from third man, just to abuse him again as he goes off...'
By now, Thommo was rocking back on his heels and dabbing at his eyes. 'Ah bloody hell...' he said. 'That's what happened, straight up. I haven't told that one for a while, I really haven't.'
He and Steele were applauded warmly as they returned to their seats, and Thommo was an equitable presence for the rest of the afternoon. Once the rain had blown through, he stood on the boundary holding a bottle of beer, talking to his mates and having his picture taken. During the talk, David Steele had said: 'I liked facing fast bowling, I liked the challenge of it. Let me tell you, I faced them all, and this man Jeff Thomson was the quickest.'
I thought about that as I watched Thommo. He represented something: a game and a country now gone but sweet in the memory. Had the incident with Fletcher happened that day on the ground right in front of us, it would have been impossible to describe it as he had done. It was only funny now, all of this time later, when the blood and the battle had receded. By coincidence, while I was driving home, Andrew Flintoff was interviewing Geoffrey Boycott on the radio about his Ashes memories. Flintoff asked him about the fastest bowlers he'd faced and Boycott said immediately, 'Thomson and Holding. For pure pace, they were the quickest.'
I wanted to find out how true Thommo's story was, so I looked up the game on cricinfo. There it was, Test match number 751, Australia versus England at the SCG, fourth Test, 4-9 January 1975. Australia won by 175 runs, JR Thomson 4-74 and then, coincidentally, 2-74 in the second innings.
The Almanack reported: 'On the last day the demoralising effect of Thomson and Lillee was
never more apparent. From 68 for no wicket in the 16th over, the score
became 74 for three in the 22nd with Edrich on his way to hospital after
being hit below the rib-cage first ball by a Lillee skidder...'
Yet the pitch was slow, and batting easy enough for Bob Willis to survive for 88 minutes, and Geoff Arnold 35; the Almanack left its readers in no doubt that more application was required from England's batsmen.
Then there was this: 'Only Amiss, caught off his gloves off a bouncer that cut back, and
Fletcher, shaken by a deflection on to his forehead two balls before his
dismissal by Thomson, were exempt from blame.'
Fletcher had made 11, and rather than being bowled, he'd been caught be Ian Redpath. Maybe Thommo had forgotten that detail, and maybe he hadn't. He remembered the story, though, and he knew how he should tell it: as it was in his head rather than in the record books.
Thommo exists in both places, as cricketer and as myth. His era has settled in the collective mind as a raw and unforgiving time when the game was wild, on and off the field. David Warner's half-hearted swing at Joe Root and the endless round of media statements and public apologies later, confirmed the distance between here and there. Maybe one day Warner will be telling the story and everyone will be laughing and living and thinking of the years that have passed.
Friday, 14 June 2013
Sunday, 26 May 2013
Letting go
Prompted by a request from my friend Tom, a cricketer whose threats of retirement come as frequently as Ronnie O'Sullivan's urges to quit the baize, I read over the chapter in Leo Mckinstry's Boycs that deals with Boycott's final day of cricket on 12 September 1986, and its aftermath.
Geoffrey was playing at Scarborough for Yorkshire against Northants. I've blogged before about his last few minutes as a professional. He'd needed to score eight more runs for his thousand for the season, something he'd achieved every year since 1962. A follow-on prevented him from returning to the crease, much to the distress of the crowd.
'Something had come to an end, something wonderful,' he said. 'I just thought, this is it then. I waited for the ground to clear. then I wondered around on my own among all the newspapers and food wrappers and tin cans.'
Thirteen years afterwards, Boycott wrote in an autobiography: 'Even now... I miss playing to such an extent that I can honestly say I'd exchange the rest of my life for five more years of playing for England at the peak of my form'. He kept one of his bats at home but tried not to pick it up because 'it stirs the memories'. His wife Rachel talked about him 'welling up' when those memories became overwhelming.
To an outsider, there might appear to be a simple solution: some club cricket, some charity games, a few knocks to ease those feelings of loss. That wasn't possible for Boycott because the love was too great. A pale reminder would serve only to reinforce the fact that it was gone.
It's a fascinating dichotomy. Tom's question was about sportsmen who had never played again in any capacity since retiring. It's not really a choice a boxer has to make: no-one fancies having their face caved in when they don't have to. An F1 driver can't really enter a local Grand Prix. Footballers and rugby players might be inhibited by injury or lack of fitness. Golfers don't have to worry about the question; theirs is a golden twilight of monied senior tours and ceremonial glory.
Playing cricket is perhaps more nuanced psychologically as well as physically. Mike Hussey, whose childlike enthusiasm bestowed the 'Mr Cricket' nickname, spoke of the overwhelming relief he felt at giving up the international game. Boycott played his entire career with a terror of failure, and according to Mckinstry, 'any bowler who dismissed him cheaply [in a charity match] would be able to dine out on that story for the rest of his life. Once again he would sense the eyes of his critics, watching for any error...'
Then there were the almost impossible standards he set for himself. When he was bowled by the final delivery of Michael Holding's famous over in Barbados in 1981, Boycott wrote in his tour diary: 'for the first time in my life, I can look at a scoreboard with duck against my name and not feel a profound sense of failure'. He was almost 40 years old, and made a century in the next Test.
When a friend asked him to appear in a charity XI, he wrote a letter explaining his reasons for declining. 'I have played with the best, for the best, against the best. Only the best will do'.
As ever with Geoffrey, it was complex and self-involved, but it's easy to see his point. Few men have loved the game more, or given more of themselves to it. It wasn't until his bout of throat cancer that he found a different perspective.
A while ago, I heard a radio discussion on the retirement theme. Darren Gough, who plays a lot of charity cricket in the same good-hearted way he did for England, said that if Alec Stewart ever accepted an invitation to play again, 'he'd probably have to have an all-day net before it'. Stewie, like Boycott, was a man of method who set himself the highest standards.
On the other side, I remember seeing Viv Richards play in a legends game in Australia. He barely hit the ball off the square, but the entire crowd rose to applaud him in and back out again, and the noble head was held as high as ever. His great pal Botham headed for the first tee and the salmon river without a second thought.
In cricket and after, each man must be an island.
Geoffrey was playing at Scarborough for Yorkshire against Northants. I've blogged before about his last few minutes as a professional. He'd needed to score eight more runs for his thousand for the season, something he'd achieved every year since 1962. A follow-on prevented him from returning to the crease, much to the distress of the crowd.
'Something had come to an end, something wonderful,' he said. 'I just thought, this is it then. I waited for the ground to clear. then I wondered around on my own among all the newspapers and food wrappers and tin cans.'
Thirteen years afterwards, Boycott wrote in an autobiography: 'Even now... I miss playing to such an extent that I can honestly say I'd exchange the rest of my life for five more years of playing for England at the peak of my form'. He kept one of his bats at home but tried not to pick it up because 'it stirs the memories'. His wife Rachel talked about him 'welling up' when those memories became overwhelming.
To an outsider, there might appear to be a simple solution: some club cricket, some charity games, a few knocks to ease those feelings of loss. That wasn't possible for Boycott because the love was too great. A pale reminder would serve only to reinforce the fact that it was gone.
It's a fascinating dichotomy. Tom's question was about sportsmen who had never played again in any capacity since retiring. It's not really a choice a boxer has to make: no-one fancies having their face caved in when they don't have to. An F1 driver can't really enter a local Grand Prix. Footballers and rugby players might be inhibited by injury or lack of fitness. Golfers don't have to worry about the question; theirs is a golden twilight of monied senior tours and ceremonial glory.
Playing cricket is perhaps more nuanced psychologically as well as physically. Mike Hussey, whose childlike enthusiasm bestowed the 'Mr Cricket' nickname, spoke of the overwhelming relief he felt at giving up the international game. Boycott played his entire career with a terror of failure, and according to Mckinstry, 'any bowler who dismissed him cheaply [in a charity match] would be able to dine out on that story for the rest of his life. Once again he would sense the eyes of his critics, watching for any error...'
Then there were the almost impossible standards he set for himself. When he was bowled by the final delivery of Michael Holding's famous over in Barbados in 1981, Boycott wrote in his tour diary: 'for the first time in my life, I can look at a scoreboard with duck against my name and not feel a profound sense of failure'. He was almost 40 years old, and made a century in the next Test.
When a friend asked him to appear in a charity XI, he wrote a letter explaining his reasons for declining. 'I have played with the best, for the best, against the best. Only the best will do'.
As ever with Geoffrey, it was complex and self-involved, but it's easy to see his point. Few men have loved the game more, or given more of themselves to it. It wasn't until his bout of throat cancer that he found a different perspective.
A while ago, I heard a radio discussion on the retirement theme. Darren Gough, who plays a lot of charity cricket in the same good-hearted way he did for England, said that if Alec Stewart ever accepted an invitation to play again, 'he'd probably have to have an all-day net before it'. Stewie, like Boycott, was a man of method who set himself the highest standards.
On the other side, I remember seeing Viv Richards play in a legends game in Australia. He barely hit the ball off the square, but the entire crowd rose to applaud him in and back out again, and the noble head was held as high as ever. His great pal Botham headed for the first tee and the salmon river without a second thought.
In cricket and after, each man must be an island.
Monday, 6 May 2013
Cricket and sadness
Somewhere within it, cricket has a deep, maybe unending, payload of sadness. It's there in its history, in its psychology and perhaps more than that, it's part of what the game acually is.
By sadness, I don't mean melancholy or unhappiness: they are something different. It's not about tragedy, although the game has had its share of those. Rather, it's an emotion that cricket in some way seems designed to evoke.
The late Jonathan Rendall captured something like it when in one of his books he described a man he'd seen sitting in a bar on his own, a drink in his hand and a tear running down his face. "He just needed to let something pass through him," he wrote. Having done so, he drank up and left. That's sadness.
As a writer, Rendall had that exquisite sadness to him and in Twelve Grand he has some wonderful passages about cricket matches at school. The game attracts many people of this character; they see something they need reflected in it. There's a German word, sehnsucht, which is hard to translate exactly. It means hunger but also longing, and describes an emotion both positive and negative. It's there in the first lines of John Arlott's poem about Jack Hobbs:
There falls across this one December day,
The light, remembered from those suns of June,
That you reflected, in the summer play,
Of perfect strokes across the afternoon.
Arlott knew the sadness of the game as well as anyone, and how closely it was linked to the joy and fleeting moments in time, too. At the end of his career, he was visited at his home on Alderney by Mike Brearley for a TV interview, and there are passages of great tenderness and poignancy. Arlott is at times wordless in it.
There's something about the vastness of cricket's interior landscape that can absorb emotions as ineffable as this. In Bret Easton's Ellis' novel Imperial Bedrooms he writes: 'sadness - it's everywhere'. He's right, sometimes it is.
By sadness, I don't mean melancholy or unhappiness: they are something different. It's not about tragedy, although the game has had its share of those. Rather, it's an emotion that cricket in some way seems designed to evoke.
The late Jonathan Rendall captured something like it when in one of his books he described a man he'd seen sitting in a bar on his own, a drink in his hand and a tear running down his face. "He just needed to let something pass through him," he wrote. Having done so, he drank up and left. That's sadness.
As a writer, Rendall had that exquisite sadness to him and in Twelve Grand he has some wonderful passages about cricket matches at school. The game attracts many people of this character; they see something they need reflected in it. There's a German word, sehnsucht, which is hard to translate exactly. It means hunger but also longing, and describes an emotion both positive and negative. It's there in the first lines of John Arlott's poem about Jack Hobbs:
There falls across this one December day,
The light, remembered from those suns of June,
That you reflected, in the summer play,
Of perfect strokes across the afternoon.
Arlott knew the sadness of the game as well as anyone, and how closely it was linked to the joy and fleeting moments in time, too. At the end of his career, he was visited at his home on Alderney by Mike Brearley for a TV interview, and there are passages of great tenderness and poignancy. Arlott is at times wordless in it.
There's something about the vastness of cricket's interior landscape that can absorb emotions as ineffable as this. In Bret Easton's Ellis' novel Imperial Bedrooms he writes: 'sadness - it's everywhere'. He's right, sometimes it is.
Playing Japan at cricket
They say that international cricket is no place for the forty-something player, but then Sachin's taking no notice of that. Forty is the new thirty, anyway. So what about the semi-international game?
Having been ignored by the England selectors for my entire career despite repeatedly stressing my availability, I've played for the last season for the Authors XI, a team that once featured Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle and PG Wodehouse, but that fell into inactivity until its revival in 2012 by the captain, Charlie Campbell and novelist Nicholas Hogg. results are best described as patchy, so the news that Hogg had somehow arranged a fixture against Japan, the 37th ranked team in the ICC international list, had been met be equal amounts of incredulity, excitement and fear.
The venue was Chiswick House, the match the first that Japan would play on a tour to mark the 150th anniversary of cricket in their country. While the Authors arrived in Chiswick via the usual combination of scrounged lifts, delayed trains and reluctant WAGs, Japan came on a coach. They looked chillingly young and they immediately embarked on proper fielding drills with those flexible plastic stumps and tiny traffic cones, apparently oblivious to the lumps and bumps of the early season outfield.
Japan Cricket's 150th anniversary only came to light last summer. Until then, they'd thought it was next year, but a historian had chanced upon a line in the Wisden obituary of Admiral Sir Harry Rawson that referred to him taking part in 'the first game of cricket ever played in Japan', between The Royal Navy and a team of civilians in Yokohama in June of 1863.
A trail that led to the Harrow school archive and the British Library, and then the MCC Library at Lord's produced sepia images of both teams and papers that told the story of the game, surely the only match in the history of cricket in which both sides were armed.
This is the first part of a post for Cricinfo's new blogger's section the Cordon. You can read the rest of it here.
Having been ignored by the England selectors for my entire career despite repeatedly stressing my availability, I've played for the last season for the Authors XI, a team that once featured Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle and PG Wodehouse, but that fell into inactivity until its revival in 2012 by the captain, Charlie Campbell and novelist Nicholas Hogg. results are best described as patchy, so the news that Hogg had somehow arranged a fixture against Japan, the 37th ranked team in the ICC international list, had been met be equal amounts of incredulity, excitement and fear.
The venue was Chiswick House, the match the first that Japan would play on a tour to mark the 150th anniversary of cricket in their country. While the Authors arrived in Chiswick via the usual combination of scrounged lifts, delayed trains and reluctant WAGs, Japan came on a coach. They looked chillingly young and they immediately embarked on proper fielding drills with those flexible plastic stumps and tiny traffic cones, apparently oblivious to the lumps and bumps of the early season outfield.
Japan Cricket's 150th anniversary only came to light last summer. Until then, they'd thought it was next year, but a historian had chanced upon a line in the Wisden obituary of Admiral Sir Harry Rawson that referred to him taking part in 'the first game of cricket ever played in Japan', between The Royal Navy and a team of civilians in Yokohama in June of 1863.
A trail that led to the Harrow school archive and the British Library, and then the MCC Library at Lord's produced sepia images of both teams and papers that told the story of the game, surely the only match in the history of cricket in which both sides were armed.
This is the first part of a post for Cricinfo's new blogger's section the Cordon. You can read the rest of it here.
Saturday, 20 April 2013
England's blue moments
Writing about the 1986 world championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, Martin Amis said of chess: '[They are playing] the foremost game of pure skill yet devised by the human mind, a game that is in fact beyond the scope of the human mind, well beyond it, an unmasterable game'.
Eleven years later, Kasparov was defeated by a computer called Deep Blue. The match and its aftermath were conducted in an atmosphere of paranoia and intrigue, of fear and loathing. Kasparov claimed to have detected a 'deep intelligence and creativity' in the machine, his suggestion being that there had been some human intervention in its play. By 2006, a software programme called Deep Fritz was beating another world champ, Vladimir Kramnik, and now the various machines even play each other and gain their own rankings.
Ultimately, the machines beat the humans through sheer grunt: they could calculate more outcomes more quickly. They never got tired or paranoid, they didn't suffer from the anxiety that Kasparov felt while representing the entire human race against them. The only achievement ahead of the machines is whether they can actually 'solve' chess; that is, calculate the perfect outcome of any game from any position.
There is no element of 'chaos' in chess: there are no bad bounces or freak weather, the board and the pieces don't change. Its variables are perhaps finite. It might be a leap to suggest that sport is as vulnerable to computing power as a game, but there is no doubt that it will shape its future.
Some sports will be more resistant to numbers than others. Football generates a haze of meaningless TV stats because it exists in chaos, statistically speaking. It's a fluid, random game that lacks the rigidity to support really conclusive analysis. Gridiron exists towards the other end of the 'scale' in that it's quite rigorously positioned and patterned.
Michael Lewis, who wrote Moneyball, the book that represents a kind of year zero moment for modern sporting stattos, also wrote about Gridiron. Blindside was in part the story of the importance of a certain extremely rare physique playing in a particular position. Here, where biomechanics meet statistics, are the threads of cricket's future.
At Loughborough University, where the ECB has its Performance Centre, almost every ball bowled in any form of international cricket is logged, its outcome added to an already vast database. It becomes a kind of anatomical chart of everyone playing the game. Broad and specific patterns in each format emerge, and from those come not just tactics, but the types of player needed to implement them.
You could call this the 'known half' of stats research, in that it's open to anyone with the resources to do it. It's also in its way unmediated and random. It's produced by a wide base of playing skills, from guys that grew up playing tape-ball to players coached systematically from their early teens.
The other half, lesser known, comes where biomechanics meets with statistical analysis. England's coaching teams believe that they have identified five common factors that all international fast bowlers have, and similarly, five possessed by all top-level spinners. There is specific work on six hitting, on revolutions on the ball in spin bowling and lots more.
This work creates paradigms into which suitable players are fitted and then driven up the elite coaching 'pathways' devised to produce players for the England team. There's some brilliant and revelatory work going on, but it is in a way reminiscent of the way that Deep Blue began to 'solve' chess. It strips away mystery, and to a degree individuality.
England are a very good side, but they did not come up with reverse swing, they have never produced a mystery spinner. Their two really innovative players, Kevin Pietersen and Eoin Morgan, come from outside of their systems. What they do very well is refine technique in a ruthless way to produce the fine margins needed to win at the highest level. 'Executing their skills' as they call it. As such, they are already becoming the product of the research work done.
Martin Amis thought chess was an unmasterable game, but the machines are proving him wrong. Cricket, with all of its variations and oddities, its geographical sweep, its luck and its superstitions, its weather and its deadly psychology, actually might be. But some of its deeper mysteries are being revealed, and new kinds of machines are emerging to play it.
Eleven years later, Kasparov was defeated by a computer called Deep Blue. The match and its aftermath were conducted in an atmosphere of paranoia and intrigue, of fear and loathing. Kasparov claimed to have detected a 'deep intelligence and creativity' in the machine, his suggestion being that there had been some human intervention in its play. By 2006, a software programme called Deep Fritz was beating another world champ, Vladimir Kramnik, and now the various machines even play each other and gain their own rankings.
Ultimately, the machines beat the humans through sheer grunt: they could calculate more outcomes more quickly. They never got tired or paranoid, they didn't suffer from the anxiety that Kasparov felt while representing the entire human race against them. The only achievement ahead of the machines is whether they can actually 'solve' chess; that is, calculate the perfect outcome of any game from any position.
There is no element of 'chaos' in chess: there are no bad bounces or freak weather, the board and the pieces don't change. Its variables are perhaps finite. It might be a leap to suggest that sport is as vulnerable to computing power as a game, but there is no doubt that it will shape its future.
Some sports will be more resistant to numbers than others. Football generates a haze of meaningless TV stats because it exists in chaos, statistically speaking. It's a fluid, random game that lacks the rigidity to support really conclusive analysis. Gridiron exists towards the other end of the 'scale' in that it's quite rigorously positioned and patterned.
Michael Lewis, who wrote Moneyball, the book that represents a kind of year zero moment for modern sporting stattos, also wrote about Gridiron. Blindside was in part the story of the importance of a certain extremely rare physique playing in a particular position. Here, where biomechanics meet statistics, are the threads of cricket's future.
At Loughborough University, where the ECB has its Performance Centre, almost every ball bowled in any form of international cricket is logged, its outcome added to an already vast database. It becomes a kind of anatomical chart of everyone playing the game. Broad and specific patterns in each format emerge, and from those come not just tactics, but the types of player needed to implement them.
You could call this the 'known half' of stats research, in that it's open to anyone with the resources to do it. It's also in its way unmediated and random. It's produced by a wide base of playing skills, from guys that grew up playing tape-ball to players coached systematically from their early teens.
The other half, lesser known, comes where biomechanics meets with statistical analysis. England's coaching teams believe that they have identified five common factors that all international fast bowlers have, and similarly, five possessed by all top-level spinners. There is specific work on six hitting, on revolutions on the ball in spin bowling and lots more.
This work creates paradigms into which suitable players are fitted and then driven up the elite coaching 'pathways' devised to produce players for the England team. There's some brilliant and revelatory work going on, but it is in a way reminiscent of the way that Deep Blue began to 'solve' chess. It strips away mystery, and to a degree individuality.
England are a very good side, but they did not come up with reverse swing, they have never produced a mystery spinner. Their two really innovative players, Kevin Pietersen and Eoin Morgan, come from outside of their systems. What they do very well is refine technique in a ruthless way to produce the fine margins needed to win at the highest level. 'Executing their skills' as they call it. As such, they are already becoming the product of the research work done.
Martin Amis thought chess was an unmasterable game, but the machines are proving him wrong. Cricket, with all of its variations and oddities, its geographical sweep, its luck and its superstitions, its weather and its deadly psychology, actually might be. But some of its deeper mysteries are being revealed, and new kinds of machines are emerging to play it.
Thursday, 11 April 2013
Pondulkar, the IPL and nostalgia
Something strange happens to our old enemies as they prepare the leave the field. Age strips them of their armour, and as it does, they become something else, something different. Their power fades, and from underneath it comes the fuller man.
The blindness has been ours rather than theirs of course. Cricket is a game built on nostalgia of one kind or another: for what was, and for what might have been.
The IPL's fusion of high commerce and eye-melting spectacle may be designed for the future, yet corners of it are filled by the past. It's a happy by-product of the competition's need of fame to power its expansion that it has become a benign and accepting old folks home, an annual reunion for semi-retired warriors. There's Adam Gilchrist, chin a little sharper now and some grey in his stubble; Here comes Brett Lee, bowling an unplayable leg-cutter to a kid who was six years old when he made his Test debut; Over there is Murali, that weary arm looking ever more slender and tortured after many thousands of overs. Big Jake Oram's arrived, patched up and wobbling in to bowl. There are more, too: the noble and eternal Dravid, bristling Brad Hodge, those Hussey brothers...
Till now, they have been small pools eddying in the river, hidden by the flow, but this year they have a headline act in Pondulkar, that irresistible pairing at the top of the Mumbai batting order. It doesn't matter that they haven't yet got many runs, or that one half of the duo is still a fully engaged international cricketer. Instead, it's just enough to see them together in an arena with some meaning. Ten years ago, they might have done some serious damage, too, but the IPL didn't exist then, and anyhow there's something uplifting about watching Ponting in particular searching for method in a format that, in his orthodoxy, he initially disdained.
Two men who will have a combined age of 78 before the tournament closes have given it exactly the kind of widescreen, technicolor glow that softens the bellowed commentary, that leavens the sponsored inanities, that connects thrusting modernity to its past.
And if that weren't service enough, they give it heart. Their epic careers trail behind them, and we all have our memories vested in those. They are champions brought back to the pack by age, old men in a young man's game, the last light of the comet's tail. It's almost impossible to watch them walk out and imagine that once, there were hundreds of thousands of people urging them to fail, because nothing befits them more than success.
That's the pull of nostalgia, and in the IPL, it pulls harder than anywhere else.
The blindness has been ours rather than theirs of course. Cricket is a game built on nostalgia of one kind or another: for what was, and for what might have been.
The IPL's fusion of high commerce and eye-melting spectacle may be designed for the future, yet corners of it are filled by the past. It's a happy by-product of the competition's need of fame to power its expansion that it has become a benign and accepting old folks home, an annual reunion for semi-retired warriors. There's Adam Gilchrist, chin a little sharper now and some grey in his stubble; Here comes Brett Lee, bowling an unplayable leg-cutter to a kid who was six years old when he made his Test debut; Over there is Murali, that weary arm looking ever more slender and tortured after many thousands of overs. Big Jake Oram's arrived, patched up and wobbling in to bowl. There are more, too: the noble and eternal Dravid, bristling Brad Hodge, those Hussey brothers...
Till now, they have been small pools eddying in the river, hidden by the flow, but this year they have a headline act in Pondulkar, that irresistible pairing at the top of the Mumbai batting order. It doesn't matter that they haven't yet got many runs, or that one half of the duo is still a fully engaged international cricketer. Instead, it's just enough to see them together in an arena with some meaning. Ten years ago, they might have done some serious damage, too, but the IPL didn't exist then, and anyhow there's something uplifting about watching Ponting in particular searching for method in a format that, in his orthodoxy, he initially disdained.
Two men who will have a combined age of 78 before the tournament closes have given it exactly the kind of widescreen, technicolor glow that softens the bellowed commentary, that leavens the sponsored inanities, that connects thrusting modernity to its past.
And if that weren't service enough, they give it heart. Their epic careers trail behind them, and we all have our memories vested in those. They are champions brought back to the pack by age, old men in a young man's game, the last light of the comet's tail. It's almost impossible to watch them walk out and imagine that once, there were hundreds of thousands of people urging them to fail, because nothing befits them more than success.
That's the pull of nostalgia, and in the IPL, it pulls harder than anywhere else.
Sunday, 31 March 2013
Nine words from Steve Waugh
He can still do it, can't he. He can still induce that vivid chill that blows back in from the early years of the century, when the things that Steve Waugh said came true (and some of the things he didn't say came true as well - 'you just dropped the world cup, son' being a case in point).
It wasn't just what he said but the way he said it, which was bluntly through thin lips, the baggy green pulled down almost to the top of his eyeline. Those eyes too, almost closed in a permanent squint, brought on, it seemed, by batting for so long on bone-white pitches from which the sun glared back at him.
Waugh is an indistinct presence in the game now, not in the media, not a coach, instead working on a couple of committees and keeping the kind of profile that preserves his mystique. He speaks rarely, so when he does, it retains impact.
'England aren't as good as they think they are,' he said at the New South Wales end of season awards, and if there's an England cricket fan that didn't feel that gentle tremor of truth to those nine words as they travelled halfway across the world, then they have probably come recently to the game.
It's a perfect piece of Steve Waugh theatre, brilliant in its understatement. It's no blithe McGrath prediction, not a lengthy piece of pre-series hype. Instead it's subtly undermining, it's suggestive, and it's also realistic. If there is a sensitive point to touch for England at the moment, then this is it. They bristle at any accusation of hubris.
Steve Waugh has not lost his sense of the fine margins that dictate the course of the game at the highest level. A stone-hard realist like him will understand why England are heavy favourites, and why they will most likely win. But he also understands what it takes to construct the psychology of a team, of how a myth is built up around it and how that myth can be reduced in the minds of those that must confront it.
They're a small thing, those nine words, but they're a start, as SR Waugh well knows.
It wasn't just what he said but the way he said it, which was bluntly through thin lips, the baggy green pulled down almost to the top of his eyeline. Those eyes too, almost closed in a permanent squint, brought on, it seemed, by batting for so long on bone-white pitches from which the sun glared back at him.
Waugh is an indistinct presence in the game now, not in the media, not a coach, instead working on a couple of committees and keeping the kind of profile that preserves his mystique. He speaks rarely, so when he does, it retains impact.
'England aren't as good as they think they are,' he said at the New South Wales end of season awards, and if there's an England cricket fan that didn't feel that gentle tremor of truth to those nine words as they travelled halfway across the world, then they have probably come recently to the game.
It's a perfect piece of Steve Waugh theatre, brilliant in its understatement. It's no blithe McGrath prediction, not a lengthy piece of pre-series hype. Instead it's subtly undermining, it's suggestive, and it's also realistic. If there is a sensitive point to touch for England at the moment, then this is it. They bristle at any accusation of hubris.
Steve Waugh has not lost his sense of the fine margins that dictate the course of the game at the highest level. A stone-hard realist like him will understand why England are heavy favourites, and why they will most likely win. But he also understands what it takes to construct the psychology of a team, of how a myth is built up around it and how that myth can be reduced in the minds of those that must confront it.
They're a small thing, those nine words, but they're a start, as SR Waugh well knows.
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