‘Where’s the ball?’ ‘Out of the ground, sir.’
This time of year my ancient love of cricket stirs in my blood. A vivid memory of my father saying to me unexpectedly one bright crystal morning when I was six, ‘Not a cloud in the sky. Right, my boy, we’re off to Old Trafford to see them re-enact the Wars of the Roses.’ My mother hastily prepared the little wicker picnic basket: ham and lettuce sandwiches in brown Hovis, a few gherkins, a brightly polished apple each, and a slice of Fuller’s walnut cake. (We got locally made lemonade at the ground, in a bottle opened by pressing down a glass ball with your thumb.) The LMS to Lancashire, the walk to the ground as part of a purposeful army of men and boys; and then, the intense silence of that vast, partisan but fair-minded crowd — not so much as a whisper while the ball was in play, but a burst of genuine if grudging applause when Maurice Leyland, the great Yorkshire left-hander, cut the spinner for a thumping four on the pavilion rails. ‘It’s a soft-hearted crowd here,’ my father said. ‘You wouldn’t get a Headingly crowd do that in a Roses match.’ Later, with Lancashire in, Eddie Paynter, a fine bat but not by nature a big hitter, lifted Verity for six on the Big Stand roof with a thump you could hear all over the ground, and the roar of delight was ‘audible in Withershaw’, as my father put it.
The magical thing about cricket is that a sublime batsman combines glittering accuracy of eye and exquisite timing, the delicate touch of an artist — all the microvirtues — with the macro-power of sheer physical strength. These skills come together in a great stroke — you remember it all your life. And when the sap is running strongly, the man at the wicket is seeing the ball ‘bigger than a football’, as Patsy Hendren used to say, and the bowlers are in despair; then Francis Thompson’s run-stealers are no longer flickering to and fro but whizzing faster than the eye can follow, like a worsted weaver’s shuttle. That’s how a century comes early and fast. Among all the glorious things a boy of my generation would have wished to do — have your work acclaimed as Picture of the Year at the RA, make a savage maiden in the House with the arrogant aplomb of F.E. Smith in 1906, or do the Whymper ascent of the Matterhorn solo — to notch up a hundred runs before lunch at Lord’s was the grandest of all achievements. Oh the glory of it, the sheer blissful glee of running back to the Pavilion, having done it, bat on shoulder, the girls in their summer silks rising to blow kisses, the old white-whiskered men in the Long Room growling their approval, and then settle down, modestly, to roast mutton and Watney’s Director’s Bitter — well, life after that is bound to be a come down.
Cricket is a game of subtleties but, all the same, you can’t beat a big hitter when he gets going. That’s why I’d love to have seen the amazing Lancastrian Andrew Flintoff flog the bowlers last week on that idyllic Worcester pitch, surely the most beautiful ground in England (always excepting the wonderland the late Sir Paul Getty built near High Wycombe). Of Flintoff last Friday, the Guardian’s elegant writer Paul Weaver recorded that he began ‘incognito’ and ‘lumbered and galloped and almost fell over’. But once Worcester put on the spinner, Gareth Batty, the disguise was thrown off. ‘His first delivery was struck past him with immense power for a flat six. Then Flintoff came down the pitch to drive him through the offside for four. When Batty was withdrawn, his three overs had cost 31, all of them scored by Flintoff. By then the bowler had been hit to the pavilion roof and over wide long-on and into the diningroom for another six.’ Now I know that classic cricket writers like Sir Neville Cardus rather poohpoohed bouts of frantic run-scoring, preferring perhaps the quiet methods of a Len Hutton to the bravado of Denis Compton. All the same, when a run-getter’s daemon takes over and he starts to slash out frantically all over the ground as if possessed, you have to watch almost as much in terror as in admiration. It is like, after a long, long diet of Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’, suddenly coming across Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, having never seen it before.
Down in Somerset they still talk about the exploits of a man called Wellard, who had ‘hit the ball out of every respectable ground in England’. They say, ‘You could hear the thwack of his bat from Taunton to Bridgwater.’ For cruel and brutal hitting power the only man to beat him was Percy George Herbert Fender (1892–1985), the Surrey captain. I wish we had a movie of the magical occasion in 1920 when he scored the fastest century on record, in 35 minutes, at Northampton. It is true this feat has since been equalled (but never bettered). True also that Northampton in those days were a weak side, and their bowlers were already tired when ‘Percy’ came in. All the same, Fender could hit the best for six. Facing Maurice Tate, probably the best pace bowler between the wars after Larwood, he took 25 runs off him in a single over. E.W. Swanton wrote, ‘With his horn-rimmed spectacles, crinkly hair, short moustache, and sweaters almost down to his knees, his appearance was as unusual as his cricket. He was the cartoonist’s delight.’ Fender could bowl fiendish googlies, and made legendary catches in the slips, where his antics delighted the crowds. But it was his bat which pulled them in. It is calculated that he hit a Kent bowler out of the Oval into the street in a stroke of 132 yards before the first bounce. He did the same thing again in a square cut — an impossibility, you’d think. Fender ran a highly successful wine business for over half a century and never doffed his cap to anyone, especially the cricket authorities. That is why he was never made captain of England. He died in his nineties, blind but remembering everything, defiant. Such characters are rare today. But maybe Flintoff is one. He has certainly restored my delight in cricket.
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