Men
behaving
badly
P. J. Kavanagh
IT'S NOT CRICKET by Simon Rae Faber, £14.99, pp. 297, ISBN 05 71201814 BAT, BALL AND BOUNDARY compiled by Shelley Klein Michael O'Mara, £8.99. pp. 180, ISBN 1854795279 BOTHAM'S CENTURY by Ian Botham Collins Willow, £18.99, pp. 432, ISBN 0002189569 The match was played in the worst possible spirit ....' How often those words, or words like them, appear in Simon Rae's delectable and hilarious It's Not Cricket, which is subtitled 'A History of Skulduggery, Sharp Practice and Downright Cheating in a Noble Game'. Hilarious, because the first chapters read like the Sport section in the magazine of Narkover School, which was run by Beachcomber's Dr Smart-Allick. Every sort of malpractice, from assault and battery — W. G. Grace, unrepentant, 'the lad I know bears me no ill will, but I fancy he was kept in bed to make it look worse.,.' — to pitch-tampering, ball-tampering and pretending you are not out when everybody but the umpire knows that you are. This last can cause such fury that it sours a match, a series, and creates feuds between teams and nations that fester for years; all seething beneath the surface of this apparently decorous game. To those uninvolved it is a hoot, and it has always been like that.
Lord Harris, for the years between the wars a disciplinarian, the haughty model of how a cricketer and a gentleman should behave, writes in 1926:
I was caught twice in one season off the same bowler off exactly the same spot — viz, the extreme point of the thumb rubber ... and given Not Out by the same umpire .. . the batsman, though he knows he is out, has no business to retire from the wicket.
'Why?' asks Rae, in fury.
Harris simply advocates a shameless exploitation of fallible old pros with their fallen arches, dropped aitches and general predisposition to give Gentlemen (let alone Lords) the benefit of the doubt.
So class comes into it; so does race. The great (and gentlemanly) West Indian Frank Worrell had never seen — or heard — anything so violent and 'colourful' until he was given Not Out against Surrey, The Champions, in 1957: 'If we had behaved half as badly as Surrey we would have been dubbed a lot of savages — and deservedly so.' The next generation of West Indian fast bowlers amply made up for this, putting opposing batsmen in fear of their lives. That too had happened before, 1932-3, the 'Bodyline' series, England. v. Australia, The Australian Jack Fingleton played in that series and 'was conscious of a hurt, not from the pummelling but from a crashed ideal. The game was not the thing, but almost seemed to be the last thing.'
Oh dear, oh dear. This could all be dispiriting to read about, but for some reason it is wildly entertaining, a demonstration of 'sporting' human behaviour at its worst. Perhaps it entertains because here it is so well written about. Entertaining, that is, until we come to match-fixing, which is poisonous, and makes gloomy nonsense of the whole bitterly contested business. Nor it is new. Cricket began like that.
A gentler picture is presented by the compilation Bat, Ball and Boundary, which consists of extracts from cricket-writing down the ages, well chosen. That old spellbinder Bernard Darwin is there. I remember reading his accounts of ancient golf-tournaments between the likes of Harry Vardon and J. H. Taylor and being thrilled before I had even held a golf-club in my hands. It is, as they say, the way he tells them. Here he writes of W. G. Grace, 'who contained with all his limitations, his one-sidedness, his simplicity, some of the qualities of a great man.' He does however admit that 'perhaps there was an underlying tradition of hostility in the professional ranks.' As an 'amateur' he was paid 115 'expenses' (at least). The professionals were paid a fee of £10. Simon Rae revealed all. This small book is interspersed with photogravures of heavily moustached players, posing, pretending they are playing, which are delightful.
Botham's Century is made up of tales about people he has met, mostly cricketers, but Mick Jagger is there, and the doctor who prolonged his career. His accounts are laddish, but agreeably so; there are some revealing dressing-room stories. There are also casual remarks:
Carrying out the order of vice-captain Willis to run out skipper Boycott did more for my standing within the England camp than any runs or wickets.
These suggest that strife and hatred not only between teams, but inside teams too, are still alive and well, as Simon Rae describes in It's Not Cricket, which is a book for any (older) cricket-lover.
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