Last innings in Jamaica
Neville Cardus Testing Time Christopher Martin-Jenkins (Macdonald and Janes £2.95) Testing Time is an account of the tour of the MCC cricket team in the West Indies, 1974. It is the first book written by Christopher MartinJenkins, some twenty-nine years old, and already known as a BBC 'commentator'. The book is blessed by a characteristically benevolent foreword from E. W. Swanton, who writes: "It is a privilege to be asked to roll the wicket before a young author takes his first innings." 'rhe heavy roller, too. Martin-Jenkins observes closely, keeps his eye on the ball and the score-board, and the Pitch. Like most cricket reporters nowadays he depends for statistical details on Mr Bill Frindall, the kindly, reliable Press Box computer. When I first reported cricket matches in 1919, the Pl'ess had to work out their own statistics. The reporters made a ball-by-ball analysis, by pen or pencil, noting every run scored, in which direction the stroke went, and from which batsman or bowler. At the age of twenty-six 1 faithfully followed this clerical fashion, until I began to get absorbed in the players as men, as 'characters.' Martin-Jenkins, summing-up the MCC team in the West Indies, refers to it as a "team short of 'characters' if not of character." Only Greig inspires him to a pen-portrait: They [the West Indies crowd] laughed when first they saw his eccentric high stance, and again when ball after ball he would throw his arms high in the air as if it was only an act of God which had enabled the batsman to play the ball with the middle of the bat . In short, Greig was an entertainer, and though he sometimes became the abused villain of the crowd With his occasional tendency to excessive and overt gamesmanship, he was much more an appreciated Clown.
'Characters,' no doubt, are missing from contemporary English county cricket. The Present England XI is constantly praised by the 'Iriedia' for its efficiency: "they do a good job of work." Maybe. But the plumber who comes to ‘rriY flat to put my bath tap right also does a 'good job of work." None the less, I don't want to pay to watch him doing it.
In his closing assessment of the MCC's performances in the Test matches against the West Indies, Martin-Jenkins is rather baffled that a company of players generally mediocre Should, at the pinch, salvage a rubber nearly sunk with all hands, against a team extremely gifted individually: "But their brave and honourable finish to the tour, and their win on merit in the final Test, did not alter the belief that to have earned a half-share in a series dominated by the West Indies was something like daylight robbery." I sympathise with Martin-Jenkins in his searchings for characters in our first-class cricket at the moment. Frankly, I think they are there, present embryonically. Emmott Robinson, Rhodes and Herbert Sutcliffe, were not actually the rounded 'characters' looming large in my accounts of Lancashire v Yorkshire Matches. They provided me with merely the raw material, so to say; my histrionic pen Provided the rest.1 have often told, in print, of a
wet morning at Leeds, a Yorkshire v Lancashire match. Then the sun came forth hot and sumptuous. At half-past two Rhodes and Robinson went out to inspect the wicket, I with them. Rhodes pressed a finger into the soft turf, saying "Emmott, it'll be 'sticky' at four o'clock." Emmott simply replied "Aye, Wilfrid," which was not good enough for me, not good enough for Robinson. So I, in my report, made him reply to Rhodes's "It'll be 'sticky' at four o'clock," "No, Wilfrid, half past." I put words into his mouth that God intended him to utter.
Martin-Jenkins deals fairly and comprehensively with the notorious occasion when Greig apparently ran out Kallicharran:
Both batsmen, most of the crowd, And all of the fielders, knew well that when Derek Underwood moved in to bowl the sixth ball of his oven to Julien, it was the last ball of the day. Julien played a forward defensive stroke past Tony Greig, who was fielding very close at 'silly' point. As Greig ran after the ball with his back to the striker's end, Knott, as is his regular habit, picked off the bails and uprooted the stumps. Meanwhile, at the non-striker's end, Kallicharran had hesitated only a moment, having backed-up some three yards and then, without returning to his crease, walked on towards the pavilion. Greig by now had collected the ball. He ran a yard or so, took aim and hurled down the nonstriker's wicket. Throwing his arms in the air, he appealed, and umpire Sang Hue, who had not yet called 'time' for the day, had no option but to give the batsman out.
The incident caused a great hullabulloo. Officials of the West Indian Board, and Mr Donald Carr, representing the MCC, held solemn conclave, at last" issuing a statement as momentous as any from the United Nations . . "Whilst appreciating that this is not strictly within the laws or cricket, England's manager, Donald Carr, and Mike Denness, captain, have in the interests of cricket as a whole, and the future of this tour in particular, requested that the appeal against the batsman be withdrawn ..." I cannot help feeling that such a mix-up in the cricket field would once on a time (and not too long ago), have been settled on the spot with some sense of humour and proportion. During the 'thirties the turf and pitches at Old Trafford, Manchester, were so perfectly moulded for batsmen, that a Lancashire and Yorkshire match was seldom brought to a decisive conclusion in three days. Each team played mainly with intent not to lose. "We've won toss, lads," Harry Makepeace would say to his professional colleagues in the dressingroom --" and he was the power behind the throne occupied by the amateur captain — "We've won toss, lads. Now, no fours before lunch." •
I one day protested to Maurice Leyland, great Yorkshire batsman and representative Yorkshireman, that this sort of cricket was "killing the game." "It's all reight," he assured me, "but what we need in Yorkshire-Lancashire matches is no umpires — and fair cheatin' all round." Lancashire and Yorkshire batsmen, on being struck on the pads by the bowler, immediately withdrew legs away from the stumps, so that the umpire would be hard put to it to deliver a leg-before-wicket decision. No truly-born and bred cricketer of Lancashire and Yorkshire would have dreamed of "walking," of leaving his crease way back to the pavilion in advance of an umpire's decision. Yet, wonderful to relate, it was in a Lancashire and Yorkshire match, at Old Trafford, that burly Dick Tyldesley so far forgot the rigour of the game that after making a sharp catch at short-leg announced to the umpire, who was about to raise his hand for dismissal, that the ball just touched the ground before the apparent catch had been accomplished. I congratulated Tyldesley, at the end of the day's play, on his sportmanship. "Thanks very much," he replied, in broad Lancashire accent, "Westhaughton Sunday School, tha know's." (Did he really say it, or did I ...?)
Martin-Jenkins is able to appreciate the difference between competence and individual style. Despite a young man's natural patriotism, he was not really happy that the West Indies did not win this rubber. "At the crunch," he writes, "England's icy professionalism had overcome the more fitful talents of the West Indies." Obviously he shared the mystification of the small West Indies boy, who, after England's rather kleptomanic victory in the Fifth Test, asked him "Mister, how could West Indies lose that game?" And Martin-Jenkins admits "I did not know how to answer him."
Sometimes there should be two ways by which honours in a cricket match are awarded — by competitive and aesthetic valuation. Of all games cricket at the top level is the most appealing to the aesthetic sense (this is why it has inspired a literature such as no other outdoor sport has inspired). Bloggs of Blankshire has scored more runs in a Test match series than were ever scored in a series by Victor Trumper, Denis Compton or Tom Graveney. And Stockhausen has written more notes in a single composition than Mozart. So what?
I am often told that I live my cricket in the past, enchantment of distance glorifying disproportionately cricketers in action decades ago. But let me see, today, Barry Richards at the wicket, or Kanhai, or Sobers, or Clive Lloyd or Kallicharran, to pick on a few un-English names, and I know I am watching cricketers as gifted in skills, as fascinating and personal as any exhibited by my heroes of the past. Martin-Jenkins, while doing justice to the hard uphill work of the England players, writes at his mOst spontaneous and engrossing when he describes the West Indies in the field or at the wicket. In four words he presents to our imagination the image of Clive Lloyd at coverpoint: "Those long, devouring strides . . ."
Martin-Jenkins will add to ,the permanent library of cricket books worth reading years "after the event" if he keeps his eye not so much on the score-board as on the players, looking for the style that is the man himself. Emmott Robinson once said to me, "Tha writes some funny stuff about us, flowery-like; but only this mornin' my missus said to me 'but there's summat in what he says — and me and mi mother 'as been tellin' thi same thing these many years ..
Neville Cardus was for many years the distinguished writer on cricket and music for the Guardian
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