Annual Fixture
MY DEAR HENRY,
It is very kind of you to ask me to play cricket for you against your village on August Bank Holiday. I note that you have decided to make this match an annual fixture, and before giving you my answer I will, if I may, offer some remarks on the long-term implications of your decision.
You are, I think, some ten years younger than I am, and it is just ten years since I adopted the course on which you are now embarking. I see that you have already committed one but not both of the mistakes which I made in selecting a date for the match. A bank holiday has much to recommend it on paper, for you can have an all-day match instead of starting after luncheon. But I assume that some of your team will be coming to the game by road, perhaps from considerable distances. When making their plans these will forget, until the last moment, what driving on a bank holiday is like; they will arrive late, with frayed nerves, and their journey home after the match will be perilous and slow.
If you must play on a bank holiday, however, August is a better choice than Whitsun, when I annually challenge The Village. I take it that your scratch team will be largely selected from among your friends. Some of them will be your neigh- bours, some not; but very few—and fewer still as the years roll by—will have had any truck with King Willow for seven or eight months. Unlike their opponents, they will not be in practice; the broken laces in their cricket-boots will not have been replaced; and their Fiihrer will not have had the oppor- tunity, which generally presents itself in the course of the summer, of stiffening their ranks with some youthful demon- player seen performing in a similar match elsewhere. You were wise to settle for August.
It occurs to me (I know you will forgive me if I am wrong) that you may possibly not realise what the form is in village cricket today. A generation ago village cricket was a faVourite theme for humorists, and perhaps the legend still survives that the village team is made up of rude mechanicals (with a comic vicar thrown in for good measure) whose mastery of our national game is on a level with the acting ability of Bottom, Snug and Quince. This legend is misleading. Today The Vil- lage are always formidable. I issue this warning because I remember, soon after the last war, playing for someone who, like you, was taking on The Village for the first time. 'Now I don't want any nonsense,' this chap told us, after winning the toss and electing to bat. 'What The Village needs is self- confidence. I don't mind how fast you score, but don't stay there too long. That's what gets these fellows down.' Half an hour later we were all out for 14.
But perhaps you already play, or sometimes play, for The Village? In that case you know the form, and your local know- ledge will be of inestimable value to your team on bank holi- day. At first your fast bowler may cavil when, while Snug is taking guard, you transfer one of his three slips to deep mid- wicket; but if Snug is in form he will soon see the point. To connoisseurs of this minor English folkway (and that is what these annual fixtures really are) there is no prettier sight than the brief colloquy between the captain of the Scratch and his bowler as The Village's No. 6 leaves the pavilion. 'Isn't this the chap . . . ?' the bowler is saying. The captain nods, and the field, which had been set for Quince, is rearranged for Snug.
But this brings me. my dear Henry, to an important matter which will scarcely as yet have crossed your mind. You are embarking, not only on a minor folkway, but on a curious experiment with time. Half the point of these occasions is continuity. Your team, like mine and everybody else's, will be built around a hard core of agreeable companions, whose average cricketing ability is perhaps best described as 'useful.' This Old Guard, who will be drawn mainly from among your contemporaries, will be supplemented (if" you are wise) by what may be called hired assassins, in the shape of under- graduates, subalterns from your local regimental depot. and other auxiliaries whose prowess as cricketers is known, or anyhow widely believed, to be above the average. But these hired assassins are a floating population, here this year, gone the next. It is the Old Guard who will form the backbone of your team down the years.
But of course the trouble about the Old Guard is that they get older. If you, Henry, could look ten years forward, as I am able to look ten years back, you would see that the passage of a decade does not improve the utility of even the most useful cricketer who was nearly forty when the decade began. Some last better than others; but you would see what I mean if, by some magical process, you could hear the applause from the other fieldsmen when one of your side holds a catch on August Bank Holiday, 1966. It will have an ecstatic, surprised, slightly incredulous sound, very different from this year's perfunctory. pseudo-professional clapping.
I don't want you to let any of this worry you, Henry. I only' want you to understand the long-term nature of the pleasant enterprise to which you are committed. Every year the 01(1 Guard will contribute more and more to everybody's enjoy- ment of the match, and less and less to your chances of beating The Village—an object which, as time goes on, you will be- come increasingly anxious to achieve.
I see from your letter that you have got Mark playing for you, and I agree that he will make a useful opening bowler. But he is becoming rather stout. Will he, do you think, open the bowling five years hence? And in 1966 whiel will be the stronger—your desire not to hurt a founder-member's feelings, or your fear that if you give Mark a couple of overs (and you can hardly give him less) The Village's tail will suddenly wag and you will present them with a bonus of 30 or 40 runs whicb you cannot possibly afford to give away? I should be failing in my duty as a friend if I did not warn you of the sort (11 dilemmas which you will have, as time rolls on, to face.
Finally, I must pOint out that you have already made one quite serious mistake which you could easily have avoided; you have asked me to play. 1 was forty-nine last week, and you know that I was never even a useful cricketer. Assunii0 that you do the correct thing and put yourself in last, I shall bat at No. 10. It is virtually certain that I shall make nought. and more than possible that I shall run you out. But it will be —otherwise—an enjoyable occasion, and we are old friends. It will be 'difficult for you, when we are all having drinks on the lawn afterwards, to exclude me when you adjure the conr piny, 'You must all come and play for me next year'; but next summer, when you start sending out the invitations, you Will wish that you could think of some excuse for not sending one to me. If you do send one, and I accept, I shall be an estab' lished member of the Old Guard, almost impossible ID superannuate yet a dead loss as far as beating The Village i5 concerned.
So if you have taken my point, my dear Henry, you will forgive me for writing such a long letter and thank me for refusing, at the end of it, your very kind invitation. • Yours ever, sTRIX
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