The Picador Book of Cricket

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by Ramachandra Guha


  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  Another evocation now – more cheerful perhaps, and of a living ground rather than departing players. A writer born in India, educated in England and now resident in the United States explains why Lord’s will always be the loveliest place to watch a cricket match.

  TUNKU VARADARAJAN

  To Lord’s with Love – and a Hamper (1995)

  At no other ground is the light so tautly drawn; nowhere else is there green of such deep and clenched perfection; and in no other place where cricket is played is the air as flecked with feat and fable. That is why I love Lord’s.

  I loved Lord’s early, before I learned to love most other things. As a small boy at boarding school in the Rajasthan desert in north-west India, with transistor pressed to small left ear, I heard John Arlott speak and Brian Johnston, too, of the sloping ground, and of old Father Time with his scythe and wicket.

  I moved to England in 1979, and in the years since – spent first as sloppy London schoolboy, then at university down the M40, and lastly as settled Anglophile ‘incomer’ – I have missed the Lord’s Test match only once, in 1991. Yet even then, on holiday in Guyana, I kept in touch with St John’s Wood by sharing short-wave radio and rum with men who loved Lord’s and its game almost as much as I do. ‘Lord’s is where even the baddest cricket look full and sweet,’ said a man called Bacchus in a bar in Charity, on the Essequibo coast. He may never have been to Lord’s, his grammar may have been toasted on some eccentric flame, but there was a truth in the tidy Guyanese compliment, to which I clinked my glass of the best Five Star.

  Now, as Michael Atherton’s men make white-flannelled war against Richie Richardson’s West Indians at Headingley, I prepare myself once more for a pilgrimage to Lord’s, where the summer’s next and most important Test match will soon be played. ‘The Tavern is noisy and vernacular,’ wrote Cardus in his English Cricket, in 1945, ‘with London spread outside.’ The pavilion may no longer be ‘a chapter out of Galsworthy’, but the place boasts still a cavalcade of English character. Preparing to watch cricket at a venue such as this is a taxing examination of the senses and, as with all examinations, the student is advised to ready himself beforehand.

  Some of us need no such counsel: guided by instincts which kindle themselves awake at the merest hint of a Test match, the mind surrenders to the sweetest tension. As a boy, I spent many nights before a match – sometimes five or six – in a sleepless and fragile accounting of possibilities. Would Ajit Wadekar win the toss? Would Gavaskar survive Andy Roberts’s opening spell? Please, please let Chandrasekhar be fit to baffle the Englishmen with his googlies and topspinners and leg breaks. If only Bedi could get Tony Greig early with his arm ball. Let it not rain; whatever happens, let it not rain.

  Older now, I still cannot sleep or wake or work as gently as I would like in the days before a Test match. A vivid series of images, shots, wickets and shouts takes over every idle moment, as if from the Revd Cotton’s cricket song:

  Here’s guarding and catching, and throwing and tossing,

  And bowling and striking, and running and crossing . . .

  Test cricket’s pace and style may have altered, and the cricketers are now mostly younger than I am, but the game is still dependent more than any other on the character and idealism of its players. ‘Character and idealism’: such strange and awkward words today, but those who watch cricket know them well, and understand their import. Those who watch cricket are aware of other truths: in accounting for a day at a Test match one must account also for all the other senses.

  Sitting on a hard seat beyond the boundary allows me not just to watch and marvel at balletic play, to record scores and statistics, and to commit pure strokes to memory, but to eat delicious food and drink chilled wine and beer, to smoke strong cigarettes and share stronger observations with people who begin the day as strangers but who linger with you at stumps ‘in the westering sunshine, reluctant to return to the world’ (as Cardus puts it) after the last flash of flannel has departed.

  Ever since I acquired control of such things, I have made sure that I take with me to a Test match those provisions which are essential for a day given over totally to pleasure. As a small boy at my first Test match at Delhi in December 1972, when England, under Tony Lewis, beat India by six wickets, my grandmother packed for me a small boy’s lunch: bread spread thickly with jam, packets of potato crisps, bananas and several bottles of sticky Gold Spot. My brother and I were also given a few rupees to buy warm peanuts in their shells from the hawkers who roamed from stand to stand, shouting loudly and getting in people’s way.

  Jam sandwiches gave way gradually to better and more stylish food. With each passing Test, I began to associate my evolution from novice spectator to older hand with the food and drink which I brought to the ground. Yet it was not until my first Test at Lord’s that I grasped the full richness of possibility that can rest in a lunch basket. On this occasion, a man and his wife sat next to me, drinking cold champagne and eating neatly sculpted sandwiches of salmon, tongue and Parma ham as India were bowled out for 96 by Botham, Lever and Hendrick. I nibbled on a lunch (I will not reveal what it was) that was, by comparison, as paltry as India’s batting had been. Only my hero, Gavaskar, made a score of 42, I think, before he was caught behind, off Gooch of all people. My dejection must have been apparent to my neighbours, because they offered me some of their lunch. It was not my first glass of champagne, but it was my first tongue sandwich.

  I have eaten many more since then, my Brahmin palate having acquired an unlikely taste for beef. Basking in the new-found beauty of Lord’s that day I learned a simple truth: however compelling the play, a poorly assembled lunch can ruin a day at the Test match. Now I take to Lord’s only those things which are fit to be eaten and drunk at a ground of such sovereignty. What best accompanies the cricket at a Lord’s Test match? Just as one would not dream of drinking Coke with crab or Liebfraumilch with sweetbreads, one must ensure that, while the eyes and mind feast on a Lara or an Ambrose, the mouth receives only that which is in some sort of harmony with the game. I believe that heavy food is not appropriate: however delicious it is in the eating, food that lulls one to sleep should not be taken to a Test match. Small parcels of food are best, easy to pack and convenient to share with neighbours.

  There is as much pleasure in turning to the man next to you and offering him a slice of your Spanish omelette on bread, or whatever else you have brought, as there is in the exchange of Jesuitical observations. And, over the years, I have received a cornucopia of goodies in return: Jamaican patties, Trinidadian roti, biltong, crab pie, samosa, shrimp sandwiches, quail’s eggs, even Chilean empanadas (from an Australian who married a girl from Valparaiso, divorced her, but still retained his love for her food). This year I will take small pitta-bread parcels, some smeared inside with black olive paste and stuffed with mortadella, others filled with Pecorino Romano and Serrano ham. I will drink, I think, some chilled sauvignon – Cloudy Bay, perhaps, or Poggio alle Gazze, if I can find any in London. And for tea time I might take a box of Indian sweets from Drummond Street, to be eaten with strong black coffee and rum from a hip flask.

  Part of this feast I will share with agreeable neighbours. A Lord’s Test makes one generous. There can be no generosity, however, towards those who will, with their transistor radios and mobile phones, drown the hollow sound of wary bat on ball; or those who would, by the waving of their flags and banners, introduce at Lord’s a tribal taste to which the place is just not suited. Cricket is played in a variety of places, to a flock of styles and values, yet at Lord’s it must be played and watched as it has always been done.

  Of course I love Lord’s because of its light, its green and its air. But I love it most of all for the quietness of its passion and the soft culture of its observation. In this, we must resist all wanton change. John Arlott wrote the following words on cricket at Worcester, and I imagine sometimes perhaps too fondly in the present day their echo at Lord’s:
<
br />   Like rattle of dry seeds in pods

  The warm crowd faintly clapped;

  The boys who came to watch their gods,

  The tired old men who napped.

  The members sat in their strong deckchairs,

  And sometimes glanced at the play,

  They smoked and talked of stocks and shares,

  And the bar stayed open all day.

  These are old-fashioned thoughts, of course, but Lord’s is an old-fashioned place.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  For the truly great, there is always life after cricket. Sometimes after death, too. Alan Ross writes of the continuing presence in his home town of Ranji, ‘the prince of a small state, but the king of a great game’. This is followed by a shrewd analysis of the Bradman legend by a fellow Australian.

  ALAN ROSS

  The Presence of Ranji (1982)

  It is, naturally, at Jamnagar that the presence of Ranji remains most evident. Although the princes have long since been stripped of their titles and their privy purses – within a score of years all Ranji’s predictions came to be fulfilled, though whether for the general good or ill is a matter of opinion – in many princely states the trappings, if not the reality, of power survive. Nawanagar was never anything but a minnow in the large pond of princely India but Ranji, by his own prestige and his progressive management of industry and agriculture, saw that it counted for far more than its size might have warranted. Fifty years after his death Jamnagar is still recognizably his city. Cattle may wander beside the bazaars or be parked like motorcars outside the arcades of Willingdon Crescent but the job of clearing and cleansing, that was Ranji’s first priority when he became ruler, has not been undone.

  The four main palaces of Jamnagar still remain, externally, much as Ranji left them. They may be the habitat of birds and bats, like the enclosed and highly decorated City Palace, or of pet animals, bucks, antelopes, gazelles, like Ranji’s preferred Bhavindra Vilas, or simply shuttered and empty, except for the rare cold-weather visitor, like the multi-domed Pratap Vilas Palace, or used as a government guest house like Vibha Vilas Palace; but whatever uses, or disuses, they are put to, they stand within their palace walls – the locked gates attended by Arab guards – as stately and resplendent as ever they did.

  The grounds, alas, are scarcely kept up and gradually their handsome outbuildings – stables, garages, badminton and racquet courts – are being disposed of or converted. It is ironic that the huge and magnificently ornate Pratap Vilas Palace, which Ranji himself had built, should have received as its first guests his own mourners.

  Within, the palaces reek of desertion, though their long corridors are still swept and a residue of ancient palace servants, a dozen or so in all, emerge sleepily from compounds or pantries to preserve the illusion of occupancy.

  It is in Ranji’s own room in the Jam Palace – the room in which he died – that the illusion is most devotedly fostered. Nothing here has been disturbed since Ranji’s body was carried from it. The bed with its silver headboard is made up, and propped against the pillow lies a portrait of the Jam Saheb in ceremonial dress. On a bedside table Sir Pelham Warner’s photograph, inscribed ‘To Ranji, the greatest batsman of my time, from his sincere admirer and friend ‘‘Plum’’, December 1912’, bears witness to Ranji’s farewell season in English cricket. Popsey’s cage is there, and many portraits; a row of cricket bats the colour of rich tobacco; old uniforms and turbans.

  The heart of the room is not the bed but the locked glass cabinet beside which, on a shelf, stands the romantic alabaster head, in the art-nouveau style, of a beautiful young woman. The cabinet itself contains such items as a letter from George V’s secretary commiserating on the King’s behalf on the loss of Ranji’s eye; Ranji’s glasses and cigarette case; his medals and Orders; his half-hunter on its gold chain, a miniature silver bat, a lighter; rings and cuff-links and pins; pieces of jewellery.

  On the highest of the three shelves Ranji’s passport, the photograph in Indian dress with turban and eyeglass, lies open: Caste/Rajput; Religion/Hindoo; Indian home/Nawanagar; Profession/Ruling Prince; Place and date of birth/Sarodar 10 Sept 1872; Domicile/Nawanagar; Height 5 ft 9; Colour of eyes/Dark brown; Colour of hair/Black/grey; Visible distinguishing marks/Smallpox marks on the face.

  On the right of this, the six glass eyes which took their turn in Ranji’s face are lodged in two satin-lined cases, marked ‘G. Muller, 8 New Oxford Street’. For nearly a third of his life the socket of Ranji’s eye had each night to be bathed by his doctor. During his years at Jamnagar, Dr Prosser Thomas later recalled, he had made efforts to establish a clinic in the city. Always, though, Ranji would mischievously summon him from his work to make up a four at bridge. Until the last days the ritual of replacing the eye and washing the eye socket were the only tasks the doctor was allowed to perform.

  There are still two servants alive at Jamnagar who have looked after the Jam Saheb. In their old age they carry out their shadow duties, materializing silently on bare feet, much as if His Highness were still alive. They attend and guard his room as if it were a shrine, allowing nothing to be moved.

  For all that, Ranji’s room is not a solemn place, simply the bedroom of a much loved and revered ruler who, in his day, happened to be a great cricketer. His trophies and personal effects are all around and, though the sun streams through the shutters over the marble corridors outside and the hyenas and peacocks screech, within all is shuttered cool.

  ‘When a person dies who does any one thing better than anyone else in the world,’ wrote Hazlitt, discussing the fives player John Cavanagh in his famous essay ‘Indian Jugglers’, ‘it leaves a gap in society.’ That was certainly true of Ranji. Elsewhere in the same essay Hazlitt wrote, again about Cavanagh: ‘He could not have shown himself in any ground in England, but he would have been immediately surrounded with inquisitive gazers, trying to find out in what part of his frame his unrivalled skill lay’ – and that was true of Ranji too.

  His effect on people was not confined to cricketers. The sculptor Eric Gill observed in his Autobiography, published seven years after Ranji’s death:

  And while I am thus writing about the beauty and impressiveness of technical prowess I cannot, for it made an immense difference to my mind, omit the famous name of Ranjitsinhji. Even now, when I want to have a little quiet wallow in the thought of something wholly delightful and perfect, I think of Ranji on the county ground at Hove . . . There were many minor stars, each with his special and beloved technique, but nothing on earth could approach the special quality of Ranji’s batting or fielding . . . I only place it on record that such craftsmanship and grace entered into my very soul.

  GIDEON HAIGH

  Sir Donald Brandname (1998)

  The Australian sporting public is notoriously fickle, bestowing and withdrawing devotion in a blink, apt to forget even the firmest of favourites within a few years of retirement. Yet the flame of Sir Donald George Bradman, seven decades since he first made headlines, has never burned brighter.

  No public appearances are expected for his ninetieth birthday on 27 August: almost a year after the passing of his beloved wife, Bradman finds them strenuous. But his continued health will be the subject of front-page encomiums, and feature in evening television bulletins: an annual vigil for some years now. Whatever the tribulations of state, cricket-fancying Prime Minister John Howard will convey congratulations.

  Never mind that the youngest people with clear recollection of Bradman the batsman are nudging sixty themselves, for his feats appear to be growing larger, not smaller, as they recede into antiquity. In the last decade, the cricket-industrial complex has produced a trove of books, memorabilia albums, videos, audio tapes, stamps, plates, prints and other collectables bearing the Bradman imprimatur, while the museum bearing his name at Bowral continues deriving a tidy annuity income from licensing it to coins, breakfast cereals and sporting goods. ‘He is the symbol of Australian cricket,’ says Steve Waugh. ‘The heartbeat;
the inspiration; the image of all that is good in sport and life in general.’ In other words, the perfect marketing tool: Sir Donald Bradman is become Sir Donald Brandname.

  In some respects, it has been ever thus. Mention of ‘the Don’ in Australia has never been mistaken for a reference to The Godfather. Little bits of his legend can be found everywhere. Australian state capitals boast twenty-two thoroughfares named in Bradman’s honour (Victor Trumper has eight). Australians corresponding with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation do so to post office box number 9994: Bradman’s totemic Test batting average, a pleasing notion of the Australian Lord Reith, Sir Charles Moses. A newspaper poll last year found that Bradman was the Australian most respondents wanted to light the flame at the 2000 Olympics: at ninety-two, it would be a feat to rank with anything he accomplished on a cricket field.

  Today, however, cachet implies cash. A Bradman bat from 1930 changed hands at Philips in London last year for £21,732, a lifesize Bradman bronze at Christie’s in Melbourne for $65,000 six months ago. A second collecting institution has opened in his honour at Adelaide’s Mortlock Library. There has been yet another reissue of Bradman’s 1958 instructional bible The Art of Cricket and, despite full-scale biographies in 1995 and 1997, three more books are forthcoming: a collection of tributes, a volume on Bradman’s 1948 side and a compilation of Wisden writings. To paraphrase ABC’s This Sporting Life: too much Bradman is not enough.

  Australians can count themselves blessed that the Don is still with them. It is sixty-four years since newspapers, fearful of his prospects after a severe appendicitis, first felt the need to set obituarists on him. And Bradman was half his current age when he retired from stockbroking after a ‘serious warning’ from his physician. In some respects, however, Bradman himself has been supplanted in importance by Bradmyth. The idea of him is at least as important as the reality. It is odd, but not really surprising, that the best biography of Bradman was written by an Englishman: Irving Rosenwater’s stupendous Sir Donald Bradman. And, despite the recent proliferation of Bric-a-Bradman, no one anywhere has tangibly added to the sum of human knowledge about the Don in twenty years. The most recent Bradman biography, Lord Williams’s Bradman: An Australian Hero, is a case in point: of 428 footnotes, 244 referred to four titles, two of them previous Bradman biographies.

 

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