SPORTING ASPECT
Critics Cauterised
By C. B. FRY MEDIOCRITY ex vi termini is not permitted to first- class cricketers any more than to poets. Still less to Test match cricketers, who being the supermen of first-class cricket, are superfine mateilal for critical treatment. The cricket world consists of many categories: players. critics, readers, listeners, spectators and reporters; and all these categories are ' musty ' in the sense of being ideally subjected to all sorts of ' musts.' The batsman must keep his eye on the ball, the bowler must effect a good length, the fielder must expect a catch every time, the critic must be knowledgeable and fair, the reporter must be accurate in his narrative, the spectator must enjoy himself, the reader must be interested and the listener must be attentive.
Cricket indeed is a mint of ' musts ' which are mainly moral or intellectual. There is however another kind of ` must' derived from the erroneous behaviour of elephants under seasonal excitement—not only erroneous but frankly crazy. And under seasonal excitement, as when England is, contending with Australia for the fabulous (if not mythical) Ashes, all the categories in various degrees are likely to go musty in the elephantine sense. Some more than others; and curiously enough at such times this mustiness from being mildly endemic can become spitefully epidemic, Under Ashy excitement the players indeed are inflicted with an extra quantity of moral musts but are as good as exempt from the elephantine. Spectators, readers and listeners also are immune, except by influence and repercussion and so to say vicariously. Reporters arc by no means safe if they wander from narrative into analytic adventure's.
No, it is the critics and commentators, especially of the Columnist or stylite persuasion, who are liable to go the whole elephant. Some of them, indeed, go the whole gigantic hog— armed, too, with a dangerous snout to toot up trifles and with formidable bristles to tickle up opponents. Some of them, incidentally, are wide awake on the look out for crackling like Elia's sucking-pig and thus are on tiptoe for the full-sized crack, foolish or wise, English or American, genuine or shamelessly pseudo. It is the . critics, you will guess, that I am after. They duplicate the ' must' moral or intellectual with a triple dose of the `;must ' elephantine. Their calling shouts for selective common sense, for sobriety and for tact. The best of them observe 'these obligations and are nicely scrupulous. The naughty few, apart from being unobservant, rattle off at any convenient and oblique tangent--not to the circle but to the square. They do not observe square dealing. Anything that fosters prejudice, pleases ignorance and flatters their assumed Public is good enough for a cracking exploit, calculated to break any barrier sound or. unsound. Their public is supposititious or at least assumed. One day When 1 was an editor in walked my advertisement man to tell me that ` our public' wouldn't stand pictures like this month's cover-plate. Knowing his sort I sent Irtin to complain to our art-editor who later reported that Mr. Minn had met one man in the train who had asked whether it was a polar bear on an iceberg. Our public ! People should know that `the public' is only a Latin name for the people because the adjective only means ' of or belonging to the people or the state.' There is no proprietary Public; no actual ' our' public. That does not matter to the critic on the clank. His public has got to hear bow it (or someone) has been abused, outraged or otherwise maltreated. sinfulness by the critical pachyderms : favouritism, snobbery, old-school-tie mania, obtuseness to merit, anti-Huttonitis. pro-Tysonism and other imbecilities.
Now every schoolboy knows that the selectors command infinitely more sound information than anyone else, that they are quite impartial, that they are not a committee of privilege distributing knighthoods of cricket, but that they are a set of experienced experts with no object in view other than finding the best possible set of players to represent England. Every- body can take it for cznain that if they do something unexpected or even apperently foolish, they have a particularly good reason behind theittolicy or practice.
It is said that Selection Committees have made mistakes. But I ask whether of probability or of ex post facto. For remember that the selectors when selecting have nothing but probability to go on. Ex post facto fault-finding is wholly irrelevant. And, anyhow, suppose one or two men turn out failures; how does anybody know that alternative men would not also have been worse failures ?
Again the trumpeter bellows about why so-and-so has been' passed over. Surely X, Y and Z have claims to inclusion. What is a claim to inclusion ? And even an elephant cannot include twenty-four mahouts in a group limited to seventeen.
They cash in on the personal popularity of this or that player. They deluge us, these pachyderms, with the merits of some one of the monosyllabic eminencies: a Herb, an Ern, a. Ron or a Les.
Or take a salient instance. Mr. Trueman as a fast bowler has much to his credit. He sprang into public acceptance as the first really fast bowler we had seen for years. He bowled well in the fifth and fortunate Test match against the Austra- lians last season. He was an aid to our victory. He was a fine promise if he grew into accuracy and control to enhance his pace. Then on a sudden Mr. Tyson appears, of whom far less was known but who seems just as reliable, if not more so, and is appreciably faster. And as the merit of a fast bowler (given reasonable control) is speed, speed and always speed, why was it an iniquity to prefer Mr. Tyson ? Yet at least one critic, powerful by reason of a large circulation, thought proper to promulgate the victimisation of Mr. Trueman and to publish numerous letters from maiden aunts and other dwellers in outer London waving all sorts of little flags in favour of their fancy.
All that such a plan could substantiate was that there are a lot of kindly folk, entirely ignorant of first-class cricket, who are ready to back their ill-founded fancies by public utterance in print. None of them cot‘ld say why it was wrong to prefer Mr. Tyson to Mr. Tillman because, for one thing, they had heard a lot about the latter and knew nothing whatever about the former. Well, after all, a fan actually is a sub-species of ventilator. If a fan, why not ventilate ?.
This is an instance of outraging all the moral musts ' of criticism and displaying all the craziness of the pachydermic must.' Yet no doubt our genial critic knew all the time that his theme was merely a titivation of ' public ' interest. That is, he trumpeted with his trunk in his cheek. Who shall blame him ? Except me; and having once been a stylite my fellow-feeling makes me wondrous kind. In sum look at the ' musts ' the Ashes kick up--and the mustn'ts.'
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