Like true sportsmen
The FameWorks were in Pakistan last week, where all the conversation was about an impending clash with India.
Happily, this was cricket talk. And I was invited to join in. But as one of an ever-growing number of Englishmen who doesn’t know his deep square leg from his silly mid on I fear I may have disappointed my gracious hosts in my inability to contribute. When I learnt that the match in question had attracted a global audience in excess of a billion, I realised there was probably a gap in my covers.
First stop in my efforts to remedy this grave renunciation of my Englishness was to get a copy of Beyond a Boundary. Widely hailed as one of the finest books on any sport ever written, it’s part autobiography, part examination of the post-colonial condition and part treatise on cricket. The author, CLR James, a Trinidadian Marxist, writer and one time top-class cricketer illuminates in exquisite detail the nuances of the phenomenon. He includes many pivotal reminiscences from his childhood; one of these concerns a neighbour, Matthew Bondman.
“[he was of] medium height and size, and an awful character. He was generally dirty. He would not work. His eyes were fierce, his language was violent and his voice was loud. His lips curled back naturally and he intensified it by an almost perpetual snarl. […] My grandmother and aunts detested him. […] It was from his mother that Matthew had inherited or absorbed his flair for language and invective. His sister Marie was quite bad, and despite all the circumlocutions, or perhaps because of them, which my aunts employed, I knew it had something to do with ‘men’.”
The subtext to all of this, of course, is that Matthew’s skin was several shades darker than the skin the author lived in. And in an early 20th Century Trinidad, where the prestige of lighter skin meant the hope of aspiring to the colonising class, darker skin signified the very opposite: the base, the vernacular, the morally lacking. But, as the Marxist James continues, ever alert to contradictions and dichotomies…
“… ne’er-do-well, in fact vicious character as he was, – Matthew could bat. More than that, Matthew, so crude and vulgar in every aspect of his life, with a bat in his hand, was all grace and style. […] He had one particular stroke that he played by going down low on one knee. It may have been a slash through the covers or a sweep to leg. But whatever it was, whenever Matthew sank down and made it, a long, low ‘Ah!’ came from many a spectator, and my own little soul thrilled with recognition and delight.”
What he describes is of course the quality of the sublime, and more than that, what Roland Barthes describes as jouissance – the pleasure to be taken from a text in which codes of signification are split apart. And all in the crack of willow on leather no less. For in James’ analysis, cricket is not just a game, but a system of behaviour and identity. In which the umpire’s decision, however irrational, must never be questioned; in which personal inclinations must be subordinated to the good of the whole; in which a teammate’s failures can never be denounced but instead countered with the words “Hard luck!” or “Damn good try!” The very embodiment of colonial order and harmony.
“Inside the classrooms, the heterogenous jumble of Trinidad was battered and jostled and shaken down into some sort of order. On the playing field, we did what ought to be done. […] Harrow and Eton had nothing on us.”
It’s little wonder, then, that the English ruling class has drunk so deeply from the pool of meaning bequeathed to the world by cricket. Dishonesty in any walk of life might be described as ‘just not cricket.’ A person of simple, uncomplicated integrity plays with a straight bat. And in one of the most momentous parliamentary speeches of recent years, Geoffrey Howe, in resigning from Margaret Thatcher’s Government on account of her increasingly shrill nationalist approach to relations with her European Union partners, chose to deploy the language of cricket.
“It’s rather like sending our opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find that before the first ball is bowled, their bats have been broken by the team captain. The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.”
He drew guffaws in the chamber, but Thatcher was gone within days, to be replaced by a passionate cricket fan. Order was restored. Such was the power of cricketing metaphor.
A simple account, then, of cricket’s enduring appeal to Britain’s former colonies might emphasise a hankering for the order and structure of empire. Certainly, Imran Khan’s words sending his countrymen off to the World Cup seemed chock-full of pretty unapologetic Englishness:
“Just give your best and fight till the last ball. Then accept whatever the result like true sportsmen. The nation’s prayers are with all of you.”
But perhaps there’s a bit more to it than just colonial hankering. Because there’s a great paradox to cricket.
For a game invented by the buttoned-up, emotionally repressed and puritan English – all straight bat, stiff lip and frigid wife – it seems cricket involves a striking amount of emotional intelligence. A key moment in this week’s great World Cup showdown is described by the Guardian’s Sean Ingle.
“…in going for glory they went down in flames, losing three wickets in 18 balls before rain stopped play at 166 for six. It was not all of their own making. Indian genius played a part. The Pakistan batsman Babar Azam had looked dangerous, moving swiftly to 48 off 57 deliveries. But as he made to accelerate he was bamboozled by a sharply spinning delivery from Kuldeep Yadav that bowled him through the gate. Unsurprisingly it was immediately hailed as the “ball of the tournament.’”
What Ingle describes, perhaps, is Yadav’s canny sense of how his opponent at the crease was feeling at that particular moment of the game, and his ability to deliver accordingly. It wasn’t just the skill of this ‘ball of the tournament’ (though it’s worth watching on YouTube, in slow motion, because it’s a thing of beauty), it was the emotional intelligence. CLR James described this talent of human intuition, 60 years ago, in the following terms…
“A great bowler has physical power, determination, co-ordination and some special gift, usually pace from the pitch, which makes him dangerous to begin with. But if you give those same qualities to another man one would be a great bowler and another would not be. The ultimate greatness of a bowler is in his head. He has a series of methods of attack at his command, but where he pitches any ball and the ball following, where he delivers one and from where he delivers another, where he quickens the pace and where he slows it down, this is a result of a psychological sensitivity in response to a particular bastman at a particular time on a particular wicket at a particular stage in the game.”
Perhaps the modern story of cricket has far less to do with post-colonial nostalgia. Perhaps one might see it as a space that requires, in the process of combat, some kind of empathy with one’s opponent (or psychological sensitivity as James put it, six decades ago). An empathy that opponents must seek to exploit for their own gain, for sure, but empathy nonetheless.
For two tense, neighbouring nuclear powers with - to put it lightly - “a bit of previous,” a game that produces such a heightened kind of empathy seems rather valuable. Spectator Qamar Ahmed had travelled from Essex with his 12 year old son Momin to see the World Cup encounter at Old Trafford; as he put it:
“Of course there is rivalry but cricket brings our two countries together. It is a shame India and Pakistan don’t play each other more often. There should be a cricket diplomacy.”
