Who of us hasn’t driven past a cricket match glimpsed momentarily through a hedge, unable for some good reason to stop? Who of us hasn’t caught a train, the inter-city 9:15 to somewhere, and seen cricket thin-sliced through a speeding carriage window?
Circumstances and countries might differ, but this is the cricket match we cannot, for whatever reason, stop for. It is the match that goes on without us and, because of this, it makes us momentarily sad.
Were we to somehow stop the car we were in, or get out at the next station and find the match, we would soon be sucked into what we were watching. Cricket is, in this sense, magnetic. It draws you hither.
Donate to The Luke Alfred Show on Patreon.
Get my book: Vuvuzela Dawn: 25 Sporting Stories that Shaped a New Nation.
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Who of us hasn’t driven past a cricket match glimpsed momentarily through a hedge, unable for some good reason to stop? Who of us hasn’t caught a train, the inter-city 9:15 to somewhere, and seen cricket thin-sliced through a speeding carriage window?
Circumstances and countries might differ, but this is the cricket match we cannot, for whatever reason, stop for. It is the match that goes on without us and, because of this, it makes us momentarily sad.
Were we to somehow stop the car we were in, or get out at the next station and find the match, we would soon be sucked into what we were watching. Cricket is, in this sense, magnetic. It draws you hither.
Donate to The Luke Alfred Show on Patreon.
Get my book: Vuvuzela Dawn: 25 Sporting Stories that Shaped a New Nation.
Get full written episodes of the show a day early on Substack.
Check out The Luke Alfred Show on YouTube and Facebook.
Who of us hasn’t driven past a cricket match glimpsed momentarily through a hedge, unable for some good reason to stop? Who of us hasn’t caught a train, the inter-city 9:15 to somewhere, and seen cricket thin-sliced through a speeding carriage window?
Circumstances and countries might differ, but this is the cricket match we cannot, for whatever reason, stop for. It is the match that goes on without us and, because of this, it makes us momentarily sad.
Were we to somehow stop the car we were in, or get out at the next station and find the match, we would soon be sucked into what we were watching. Cricket is, in this sense, magnetic. It draws you hither.
And it draws you hither regardless of whether it is a country game played by duffers, whose jolly noise invariably exceeds their talent, or a match played by lithe young men who pat each other’s backsides and wear sunglasses on their hats instead of their faces.
Whether our illustrative cricket match draws us hither through the scoreboard, or character, or banter on the field, isn’t important. It is enough to recognise that cricket, in this sense, is a world within in a world.
To take an example pretty much at random: Why do old village or out-ground scoreboards always have a preponderance of one number? And why do the parson’s trousers not reach his ankles? What is it about the stout umpire that makes him a stranger to the leg before? These are questions to which there are no answers, there never have been any answers and there never will be any answers. For all its stiff formalities and accountant-like balancing of the books, it is a sport which treasures a category marked “inconclusive”, and those who love the sport love this category, too
It is a world of ritual and custom, yes, of James Joyce’s famous “pock-pock-pock” from Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, but it is also a world of language, and a language of beautiful figuration.
Who of us hasn’t exclaimed inwardly at the phrase “fielders in the deep”? Who of us hasn’t stopped to think about short runs, fly slips and boundary riders? Who hasn’t paused to consider that balls can be various and multi-faceted. They can be both dead balls and no-balls, although the two cannot be both simultaneously.
Cricket is a sport of spells. Who of us hasn’t fallen under cricket’s languid spell interrupted by a sudden flurry of sometimes violent action? I ask this question, and mentioned the mythical game earlier, because for me, cricket no longer casts the spell it once did. It has lost some of its magic. It is a little like a game glimpsed through a hedge that can’t be stopped for. Here is a sport speeding out of reach.
There is too much of it, for one thing, and this means that it is out of kilter with the seasons. Both genders now play it to a high level and there are three main forms of the game.
Last year there was a World Cup. This year there is one, too. Can you have two World Cups in consecutive years in two allied but different formats of the game? You can, of course you can, it’s ridiculous to suggest otherwise, but there are consequences to this superfluity and, if I might be bold enough to suggest, this greed?
One of these consequences is a haemorrhaging of meaning. When meaning is at stake it is a very short step to asking: “This is all fine – but what are the various forms of the game now worth?” Is a T20 hundred scored in seventy minutes on a field which has been shrunken by moving the boundaries, worth a Test hundred scored over four-and-a-half hours on a Bunsen Burner in Chennai in which you might be stranded on the same score for minutes on end?
What happens when meaning leaks from a sport? First, there is confusion, although maybe bewilderment is a more accurate description than confusion because confusion has a tint of the absolute. After bewilderment there is either re-engagement or withdrawal.
Sometimes, given that we are all fickle about such things, there is a bit of both. If withdrawal is an option, it comes with a consequent drawing of battle lines.
So a re-branded version of the grumpy purist comes into being. The grumpy purist finds Test cricket the most meaningful form of the game. Test cricket is defended like a castle. Draw-bridges are hauled up, battlements manned. An argument is wheeled out, dusted off, spruced up.
To some extent the grumpy purist’s defence of Test cricket is predicated on a caricature of what isn’t Test cricket. T20 cricket is fast-paced rubbish, a realm in which mis-hits can go for six and the sound-track that accompanies them is always too loud and intrusive. The punters are barbarians and the ham on the artisanal ciabatta is invariably a week old.
The converse is equally true. The T20 evangelist also relies on caricature. Test cricket is long and boring and might end in a draw et cetera. Neither of these two positions – themselves caricatures – are helpful because they contribute to the parties talking not with each other but past one another.
But they also serve to demonstrate what happens when there’s too much of that sport in a sport and when that sport – I think in an unsporting way – grows without taking any notice of where it is growing to.
When this happens, the sport you love is in the midst of a prolonged existential crisis. What should be meaningful is meaningful no longer. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is only intermittently meaningful, meaningful on some days and not others.
Such crisis is deepened by the fact that people in positions of power and authority privately recognise that it’s in crisis, but won’t publically admit this. Worse still, nothing gets done, because to do something would be, 1.) To admit to the crisis and, 2.) To threaten the very functioning of the International Cricket Council (ICC) as something more than an organisation in which, to borrow from George Orwell, some members are more equal than others.
And there’s a third point, which is perhaps more important than the first two. To talk about cricket’s “existential crisis” and its “lack of meaning” is to talk in unquantifiable abstracts. The world of cricket, with its massive broadcast rights deals and humungous budgets is, more than ever before, about hard cash and sober quiddities. It is about forward programmes, finals days and the fine print of player contracts.
The system functions very well for the powerful in terms they understand. To argue for the lyricism of cricket’s language, its charming world within a world, is like reading a Phillip Larkin poem to the chief executive officer of Google or Sony or Netflix.
They might be respectful enough to listen to your little poem, but when it is done they will laugh in your face. That laughter will be dark with contempt because you – and in our heart of hearts we know this, don’t we – are living in a house with paper walls in a capitalist or post-capitalist gale where the small things count for nothing. Why? Because they can’t be converted into cash.
So cricket grows, unfettered, one Indian Premier League (IPL) or Big Bash or SA20 looking very much like the next. India and England play five-Test series’, while South Africa plays her series’ over two Tests. All play in a competition called the World Test Championship, a competition to lend meaning in an environment in which meaning is in short supply.
In their terminal wisdom, however, Cricket South Africa (CSA) made a choice as far as the two away Tests against New Zealand last month were concerned. Their choice was to send a provincial team to a Test, an inversion of cricket’s natural order.
Yes, the Kiwis were intransigent, in that they didn’t budge when they were asked if they could move the Tests to another date. Yet why did CSA double-book in the first place, playing the second edition of the SA20 at the same time?
CSA’s decision has probably meant that the last vestiges of goodwill towards her from the ICC have now evaporated. CSA would argue that for many years the love wasn’t exactly forthcoming as the big three sliced the pie in ways which suited them, so there was nothing to lose.
Wherever the truth lies, the point remains: cricket is a sport of no headline act and no main stage. Teams and countries may play against each other but really it is just every man for himself. I mean that literally. After playing for MI Cape Town in the SA20 six weeks ago, Sam Curran was off to another tournament in Dubai when his franchise didn’t make the play-offs. Where there is money to be made loyalty is just another old-fashioned notion.
But cricket is more than back-to-back T20 assignments, surely. It is wrong to generalise too casually but former cricketers talk as willingly about feats as they do about the camaraderie of the game. Were they talking about Mike Procter’s feats after his funeral? They weren’t. They were talking about the jokes, anecdotes and friendships that comes after the game.
What chance do such things, with their slightly ingenuous, secular-humanist, possibly romantic bent, have against the shock and awe of post-modern capital as exemplified by the branding on an IPL shirt? Or the entirely false and specious bonhomie as pedalled by TV commentator hell-bent on breathing some life into a match of no consequent in a tournament that is spluttering to its death?
And what chance do the smaller countries have when compared to the juggernaut that is the big three? Is it a fat chance? It is not. Zimbabwe hobbles along. The West Indies are a shadow of their former swaggering selves, a couple of T20 World Cup victories seven or eight years ago notwithstanding.
Sri Lanka jump from boardroom crisis to board-room crisis. Their team is as weak now as it was when they first started out on their international journey in 1982. And all this from a World Cup winner only 14 years after that.
And South Africa? CSA cannot read their diaries correctly. It’s a trend with precedent. Twenty-one years ago, in the rain against Sri Lanka at Kingsmead, they couldn’t read what was then the Duckworth-Lewis table, and add one run to the score they were chasing down.
There is much collateral damage done when a sport finds itself becalmed without leadership in the midst of a rampant existential crisis. Memory, for one. Too much cricket impacts on your capacity to remember things, which has the disturbing and slightly sinister corollary that, after a while, you remember nothing.
What do I remember from the cricket season that is in its final throes at the moment, for instance? I remember Quinton de Kock’s and Gerald Coetzee’s stellar World Cups. I remember David Miller’s superlative 101 in a losing cause against Australia in the World Cup semi-final in Kolkata, with no other South African batsman being able to score even a half-century.
I also remember Heinrich Klaasen’s 109 against England in Mumbai, an innings that had all the hallmarks of a T20 innings in that it took only 67 balls. With cross-pollination across formats, what we’ve witnessed in recent years in white-ball cricket is a trick of the light or, to put it slightly more succinctly, a warping of perspective.
Klaasen’s innings took a T20 approach on a small field in Mumbai to 50-over batsmanship. It felt, indeed, very much like a T20 innings, so lodges in the memory like one. That it took place within the context of 50-overs seems largely beside the point. Here was a T20 innings if ever there was one.
Again memory is the victim, although, as they like to say, cricket might yet be the winner.
Like Jos Buttler, Klaasen the cricketer lodges uncomfortably in the mind. Buttler scored two hundreds in his 100 Test innings, with an average of just under 32, while Klaasen has played only four Tests with a highest score of 35 and an average of 13.
Both made their mark as white ball cricketers, true. Wouldn’t it have been fascinating, however, to see Klaasen progress as a Test cricketer, as I sure he would have? Alas, we will only see the four Tests because when he was dropped for the home series against India over the New Year, Klaasen promptly called it a day on the five day stuff. There was a whiff of cutting your nose off to spite your face about the decision but, still, is Kyle Verreynne, the player who replaced him, the player “Klaasie” is? I don’t think so.
What else do I remember from the season that’s in the midst of coming to an end now we’re in March and heading slap-bang into April? Well, Dean Elgar’s 185 against India in the first Test at Centurion stands out. Not only was it an innings of most un-Elgar-like carefree brilliance, but it was an innings from the skipper.
Elgar, remember, had just had the captaincy taken away from him by Test coach, Shukri Conrad, who appointed Temba Bavuma in Elgar’s place. Not for the first time, Bavuma was injured, and the side against India needed captaining, so Elgar became captain of the side he was no longer captain of. You didn’t need to be Sigmund Freud to realise that in scoring the 185 Elgar was giving the middle finger – and the fingers around it – to Conrad.
South African cricket is a special place, so everything gets ratcheted up a notch or two more here in the beloved country. All that I’ve already said applies here, but the recipe is added to by healthy dollops of race, a soupcon of social engineering, an association that cannot read its diary correctly and a sport that seems to be heading off in three or four different directions simultaneously.
This is what’s happening everywhere else, so no fingers should be pointed at CSA, except that here’s an organisation who have no apparent plan for the future, other than to rake in the millions that come from India tours and see that next year’s SA20 is commercially successful.
Maybe a strong and active memory is just a distant memory but that’s about it as far as memories of the season are concerned. Perhaps your memories are similarly hazy?
Come to think of it, I do have a memory. I remember Klaasen telling the world in his farewell that he’d had “a few sleepless” nights making the decision to retire from Test cricket. We all have sleepless nights, lying awake trying to remember what we’ve forgotten, so Heinrich isn’t alone there.
What did strike me as illuminating at the time, however, was his admission that he loves Test cricket, and was sorry to see it go. Such admissions are surprisingly widespread in an age where the status of Test cricket is diminishing by the year because it is competing with so much of other forms of the game.
It’s the same with Kagiso Rabada. The money’s so good in the IPL that he and Klaasen just can’t refuse it, particularly as it’s denominated in dollars and the South African Rand is weak against the dollar, but Test cricket, the name of the game CSA neglect, remains greatly respected by all those who play it.
Memory-loss is, of course, exacerbated by TV, because TV just can’t get enough of anything. This leads to too much of everything. Very soon too much of everything means nothing, or very close to nothing, because you can’t remember anything, so the promise of too much is – in point of fact – a strange, inverted version of nothing.
Television has brought us many things. Ex-players as commentators for one thing, a mixed blessing at the best of times. It has bought us replays and the Decision Review System (DRS) and Kevin Pietersen master-classes in which he talks compellingly about the pros and cons of the reverse sweep against Nathan Lyon. It has also blown like a gale through the gentle meadows of the language, flattening everything, including the words and phrases of cricket that bring it to life and somehow nurture and cherish it.
Think of the simple things. Overs bowled, balls faced, extras conceded. Some extras – or, as they call them elsewhere, sundries – will be conceded by wicket-keepers, in which case they are termed byes. Others will be conceded by bowlers in the form of a no-ball. The no-ball is the ball that wasn’t, the ball that turns back time, the ball that gets taken back from the bowler and has to be bowled again.
This description, however, is not entirely accurate. Although taken from the bowler by the game itself, the no-ball is given to the batting side, in the form of a run. Yet it is a run given to nobody. Instead, it is given to the batting team in the form of extras.
All of this makes cricket unique, a sport of balls which are not balls, of runs that can be accrued, although they are given to nobody. It is a complicated, fidgety, arcane game, full of rules, themselves full of damning exceptions.
It is, in fact, a little like the English language itself. Sometimes, for this reason, and sometimes for other reasons, and sometimes for this and other reasons, is why we love it.
But generally we don’t love it for the way that it is brought into life by commentators on TV. They bring something else, yes. This something else has to do with the trustworthiness of their opinions. It might be termed their authority. It isn’t, as a general rule, their facility with language. That is left to our memories. And those old geezers who commentated on the radio.
So where do we find ourselves? Does cricket have to be the sport fleetingly glimpsed from the speeding car or train? There is a great deal of good cricket around, irrespective of the format, you only have to look at Alex Carey fighting 98 not out to win Australia the second Test against New Zealand.
There’s also a great deal of suppleness of mind and technique around. Some of the shots played casually nowadays beggar belief. Standards of fitness have improved. Fielding and catching is top-notch, witness Aiden Markram’s catch in the final of the SA20 to dismiss […] check on this.
Yet the game also seems to be becalmed in a kind of relativism, in which, like in contemporary art, hierarchies of taste and worth have been abandoned. As we’ve said before, this is the relativism of too much cricket and not enough meaning, although it might also be the relativism of too much cricket and too much meaning.
This meaning isn’t being very well interpreted anymore. Once cricket writers (and commentators) were on hand to sift and judge, but that doesn’t happen very much nowadays. What happens at the moment is that we get a vast breathlessness, which is what TV, who often own or partly own the product they describe – this certainly pertains in the SA20 with SuperSport – is very good at doing.
The IPL is another very good example of this, a vast black hole of cricket that sucks everything, including criticism, towards it. The only thing that it doesn’t appear to be able to do very well is open its door to Pakistanis.
Perhaps the drift (and absence of meaning) will continue because the rich have something to gain and the middle-class get enough of the pie not to complain too loudly. Soon the ICC’s role will be strictly ceremonial, to be wheeled out for a hand-shake or trophy tour in the threadbare choreography of sport in the 21st century. Some might say this has already happened, as cricket becomes wall-to-wall, as those meant to govern can’t govern and those meant to be governed do their own thing.