CRICKET ON THE HEART

Apr 27, 2009 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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Dennis Norden spoke for all cricket fans when he said, “It’s a funny kind of month, October.  For the really keen cricket fan it’s when you discover that your wife left you in May.”  It is not May yet and I believe that my wife already feels deserted and is what in the old days would be called a “straw” or “grass” widow meaning a woman whose husband is temporary absent.
In this case, there is no vegetation whether dried or fresh involved, no widow’s weeds so to speak.  I maintain that it is not my fault she married a sports freak and that while at the secondary level of enjoyment the English Premier League and the European Champions’ Trophy are now climaxing, a moving feast of cricket and more cricket occupies the primary or pole position.
I know that she might devoutly wish a conclusion, or even a rare and occasional consummation, but I am into consumption of continuous cricket brought from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England and beyond by the almighty and all nightly box.  Television might be a medium but it does sports well and it is the only box that beckons when the Umpire calls play.
I suppose at this point one can make a passing reference to the often quoted statement by playwright Harold Pinter when he was interviewed by the Observer on October 5, 1980, “I tend to believe that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth…certainly greater than sex, although sex is not too bad either.”
Pinter, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, died on December 24 (Christmas Eve), 2008.  It was cancer and not cricket (which in the end he still loved wisely and too well) to which he finally succumbed.
The London Daily Telegraph revealed that in a final interview conducted in at his North London home in late October, and published just a day after his death was announced, Pinter revealed his passion for cricket.  He stood by his statement about the joy of cricket.  He told the Guardian, “Drama happens in big cricket matches. But also in small matches.  When we play, my club, each thing that happens is dramatic: the gasps that follow a miss at slip, the anger of an lbw (leg before wicket) decision that is turned down. It is the same thing wherever you play, really.”
This passion for cricket is shared by many of us throughout the world.  While some Americans think it is “baseball on Valium”, the true cricket fan realises that each cricket match has its own tempo and cadence, its own special appeal.  To the insider, cricket is indeed drama.
Pinter was not the only dramatist who was passionate about cricket.  Ben McIntyre in The Times (March 24, 2009) revealed, “Terence Rattigan was a cricket lover, as was Samuel Beckett, an accomplished left-hand opening bat and seam bowler. But it was Tom Stoppard who caught most enduringly the link between written drama and the drama of cricket.
In Stoppard’s play The Real Thing, the playwright Henry holds up a cricket bat: ‘This thing here,’ he says, ‘which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor.  It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel 200 yards in four seconds and all you’ve done is give it a knock like taking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly.
‘What we’re trying to do is write cricket bats. So that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock it might travel.’
My favourite humourist, P.G. Wodehouse, who was also a playwright and novelist, was also a very serious cricket fan.  While he is known as the creator of Jeeves, the incomparable valet to Bertie Wooster, few of us know that the name was a tribute to Percy Jeeves, the Warwickshire bowler, who was killed in the First World War.  Wodehouse’s nickname was “Plum” and he later said, “”I rather liked it, particularly after I learned during my boyhood that a famous Middlesex cricketer, Pelham Warner, was called Plum.”
Suresh Menon, in a review of “Wodehouse At The Wicket”, a collection of Wodehouse cricket articles edited by Murray Hedgcock, recalled this piece in Reginald At The Wicket, one of the short stories in the collection: “His adult cricket career was on the one-match one-ball principle. Whether it was that Reginald hit too soon at them or did not hit soon enough, whether it was that his bat deviated from the dotted line which joined the two points A and B in the illustrated plate of the man making the forward stroke in the Hints on Cricket book, or whether it was that each ball swerved both ways at once and broke a yard and a quarter, I do not know. Reginald rather favoured the last theory.”
While I devoured his books about Mike Jackson, the cricketer, and his friend Smith, the Wodehouse piece that best captured my own cricketing career was a poem called“Missed”.  It starts:  “The sun in the heavens was beaming,/ The breeze bore an odour of hay,/ My flannels were spotless and gleaming,/ My heart was unclouded and gay;/ The ladies, all gaily apparelled,/ Sat round looking on at the match,/ In the tree-tops the dicky-birds carolled,/ All was peace — till I bungled that catch.”
A later stanza clarified the situation, “I heard in a stupor the bowler / Emit a self-satisfied ‘Ah!’/ The small boys who sat on the roller/ Set up an expectant ‘Hurrah!’/ The batsman with grief from the wicket/ Himself had begun to detach –/ And I uttered a groan and turned sick. It/ Was over. I’d buttered the catch.”
The final stanza talks about giving up cricket for golf so I’ll leave it out and use the penultimate paragraph which recounts an emotion (and experience) that every cricketer, regardless of prowess, has experienced many times in his career, “O, ne’er, if I live to a million,/ Shall I feel such a terrible pang./ From the seats on the far-off pavilion/loud yell of ecstasy rang./ By the handful my hair (which is auburn)/ I tore with a wrench from my thatch,/ And my heart was seared deep with a raw burn/ At the thought that I’d foozled that catch.”
*Tony Deyal was last seen quoting PG Wodehouse to some of his media colleagues, “That is why it is, on the whole, preferable to be a cricket spectator rather than a cricket player. No game affords the spectator such unique opportunities of exerting his critical talents. You may have noticed that it is always the reporter who knows most about the game.”

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