SPECTATOR SPORT
This knackering life
Simon Barnes
WASIM AICRAM, the Pakistan captain, sank to his knees in prayerful joy as he took the final England wicket, his 300th in Test match cricket. English cricket looked on With weariness, already on its knees — these days its natural posture.
England lost the series to Pakistan 2-0, not too bad until you remember that this was a three-match series. It was England's fifth series defeat in succession at the hands of Pakistan. They have lost the last four series against Australia and they last won a series against the West Indies in 1969.
It is customary at such times of national sporting mourning to wonder what has hap- pened to the youth of the country, to look back on the golden, glorious past and won- der how the young people of today can fail. So dismal a run must say something about the country, after all. But youth is willing. Youth may be unforgivably young, but it is trying its guts out. It is the gerontocrats that are letting the side down.
Consider this. England has the only sea- son-long professional cricket circuit in the world. It is now unarguably one of the Weakest of Test-playing nations. The state of Pakistan's first-class domestic cricket is a matter of despair to record-keepers, and the top men don't bother playing it. They Just play international cricket. Pakistan is one of the top cricket nations.
Coincidence? In the last Test, Pakistan bowled like men inspired. England bowled like men knackered. I know that many for- eign players have played county cricket, Wasim among them, but their selection for Pakistan does not depend on their participa- tion on this most wearisome of sporting treadmills. They can take it or leave it — a crucial difference.
The latest master-plan for England crick- et was laid before the counties last week, and it included the suggestion that England could order players to rest. A match off to husband the forces: useful for a batsman who wants to put in long hours of concen- tration, essential for a fast bowler who has one of the most demanding jobs in sport.
Inevitably, the counties refused. They need their England stars for the annual round of pot-hunting. County cricket is a rite conduct- ed in secret, an esoteric ritual of rivalries, a dangerous game played for scant reward before minute audiences.
Yet this odd structure, this Heath Robin- son construction of muddled sporting aspi- ration, controls, or at least has the last word over, the England team. It is the England team that wins the television income, the counties, with a quite different agenda, that have the whip hand. England, the team that most people who like the game talk about and watch above all others, is subservient to parochial self-interest.
The worst of the muddle is. the effect it has on the players. My old friend and spar- ring partner, Phil Edmonds, subject of my long-ago first book, hated the county circuit with a deep and bitter loathing. He wanted to play club cricket at the weekend and spend his week doing things that interested him. Buying gold mines', that sort of thing. And to play for England.
But no, unless you play county cricket you do not get picked for England. Unless you submit yourself to the knackering life, in which defeat is not so much disaster as quo- tidian irritation, in which the tone of life is not so much the pursuit of excellence as the search for sufficient competence to rub along until the begging-bowl of the benefit year comes along, you cannot play for England.
And so Dominic Cork, a man whose fires of competitive spirit, appetite for the fray and quite splendid cricket cheered us all up last year, was reduced in the last Test match to a shambling parody of petulance and incompetence. Cork sums up the state of English cricket: a razor used to cut grindstones. And people wonder why he is not as sharp as he was.
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