As a child, I was indifferent at team sports – especially rugby union – and my preference was and is for individualistic games like golf, tennis, squash, martial arts (Bujinkan and fencing), or the odd game of poker (I guess some card games like Bridge count as a team game of sorts). One exception to the Pearce Crapness at Team Games was cricket. I loved playing it, unless some sadist of a captain put me on the boundary at point on a chilly afternoon with no prospect of a bat or bowl. I do not play much any more. My fielding was one of the best parts of my game: I once took a flying catch off a batsman who was beginning to rack up a big score and the catch was the pivotal point in the game. Our lot won. There is also the sensual pleasure of hitting a cover drive on the ‘sweet spot’ of the bat. You get a similar tingle down the spine when you do that in other sports, such as baseball. But cricket was my great team sporting love if only for the entirely selfish reason that I was just about competent at it.
I was reminded of all this by this excellent piece in the Daily Telegraph today. Like the author of that piece, I played cricket at a state school; cricket is being taught and played less in the public sector education system, to the detriment of the national game. Personally, as an advocate of private schooling and of reducing, not raising, the school-leaving age, I would not want to moan if the sport is taught less if that is what the parents, and just as importantly, the pupils, want (some kids hate team sports so much it has scarred their memories of schooling for life). But I would like to think that in a genuine private sector school system, where parents can use their consumer power to drive up standards, that the Greatest Game Known to Man would flourish a bit more.
I would be interested to know what fellow cricket nuts and Samizdata conspirators, Brian Micklethwait and Michael Jennings, have to think about this. Brian recently linked to this book, which looks very much worth a read.
I never played cricket at school. We did football for a single term, rugby once and hockey a few times. The rest of the time was non competitive ‘games’ and being sent to run round the park whilst the PE ‘teacher’ read the paper.
I was rather good at sports in school.
Center, wing or full back as needs be, in Rugby, and opening bat at cricket.
But golf was the family game. Dad was a Glamorgan and Wales amateur player, he had a handicap of +2 at one time.
That sweet spot thing is magical though isn’t it Johnathan.
I have occasionally hit the perfect drive and it feels as if you have missed the ball completely, but there it goes, soaring straight down the fairway.
What do Brian and Michael think of 20/20?
Not having stallite, I only see it in our corner shop. All the Muslim and Hindus round here have upgraded their package to get it.
I love cricket. I was a 1st division player in our country. But unfortunately I can’t continue my play.
I went through compulsory “physical education” in southern California public schools [that is, tax-funded schools that don’t charge fees; I’m not sure what they’re called in UK English], and though nominally intended to encourage health and physical fitness, in fact it focused entirely on sports, and predominantly on team sports. Its main effect on me was to give me a lifelong detestation of sports and physical exercise. I have learned intellectually that sports actually have a substantial cognitive element and that they can give people aesthetic pleasure, but I have never acquired a visceral appreciation for them. I don’t know if I would have been attracted to any sort of athletic pursuit had I not had unpleasant experiences with being forced into group activity with people I detested; but I can see the negative emotional residues of the experience.
Oh, that sublime feeling in sport when you hit a ball perfectly, leap something so efforlessly, kick a ball so well you just know it’s good. Some professional footballers have said they turn away at such a moment; they don’t need to see the ball hit the net, for they just know it’s going where it was meant to go.
My one memorable moment like that was doing archery. I loosed an arrow and simply knew I had got it perfectly correct and it would hit the middle of the gold. Actually I was a fraction disappointed when I retrieved the arrow as it was a quarter of an inch off dead centre, but sad to say despite many more attempts I never quite got that feeling again.
Are you foil, épée, or sabre? I’m guessing foil. I was sabre.
There probably isn’t a school in Australia (state, church, private, it barely matters) which does not have cricket teams. Children who are really enthusiastic about cricket will play for a club at weekends as well as playing at school, and junior club cricket is where the really competitive cricket is played. (In winter, we divide and play lots of different competitive sports depending on where you are, how posh you are, your ethnicity, and your personal inclination. I played hockey, and rather enjoyed it).
This may or may not make Australians into better people. What it does do is make them as a nation good at cricket. (A line from Catch-22 comes to mind here. “Shooting skeet eight hours a month was excellent training for them. It trained them to shoot skeet.”)
On the other hand, forcing people who are not inclined to to so to play competitive team sports is indeed a great way to make them miserable and fits into the “school is prison” idea pretty well. On the other hand, providing an opportunity for people who do want to play competitive team sports to do so is surely a good thing.
I could have been quite good at football, but I always lacked pace. And stamina. And skill. I was pretty keen though.
In the few representative games of cricket I played, my speciality was making up twenty yards and getting my hands to the ball only to drop the catch. That and staying there doughtily without actually hitting the ball very far, then being run out backing up.
I went to a soccer and cricket grammar school, so the only team I could get a regular game in was rugby. I wasn’t very good at that either, but since there were only fourteen other guys in the school who were daft enough to play, I usually got a game somewhere.
It wasn’t until I was in my late thirties that I discovered the sport that has been my passion ever since. In golf, it truly is you against the course, and no matter how badly I sometimes play, there is always a near perfect strike or two to keep me coming back for more, and when I play well there is always the knowledge that I could have played better. You always leave a few shots out on the course.
Golf can even be a team sport, but although a match against another club is fun, my favorite team competition is Texas scramble in the winter. It has just about the perfect combination of individual skill contributing to a team effort.
Nevertheless, it’s that element of you against the course that keeps us striving to beat the bastard.
Very few people who play the game are not bitten by the bug. I’ve known a few who lack the hand eye coordination to hit the ball at all, but most of those I’ve known who have given up, have done so because their temperament isn’t up to the demands of the game. When you smack a drive 250 yards down the middle of the fairway and watch it take a wicked bounce, roll of into the rough and nestle behind a tree, one’s ability to take life philosophically is tested to the limit.
I wish I’d been exposed to golf at a much younger age, but I’m glad I found it eventually.
I’m with William H. Stoddard on this one. Nothing ruined school for me more than sports; nothing seemed more futile. It was transparently obvious to all that I had no aptitude for these useless time-wasting activities; it was a source of humiliation and I don’t believe my character was built one jot by standing around freezing on a football pitch trying to keep out of the way of the ball.
Cricket is a particularly worthless pastime in my opinion. It clearly does nothing for its players, who are invariably fat and burst into a fit of wheezing if they so much as trot for a bus. The rules are incomprehensible and irrational, and frankly I think anybody stupid enough to actually put themselves in the way of a hurtling leather cannonball descending out of the sun at close to the speed of sound needs their head examining. As for batting, all I remember was the pre-gallows feeling as I wearily strapped pads to my legs, the 10,000 mile walk out to the “stumps” I believe they’re called, somebody would fling the ball at me, I’d (following the rational course of self preservation) jump out of the way, somebody would shout “out!” and I’d walk back to the pavilion, now 20,000 miles.
I’d have much preferred to sit in a quiet classroom somewhere reading my astronomy books. Really. If I were prime minister I’d ban sport in schools entire, and flog all the playing fields. No child should have to submit to state enforced abuse like that. People who like sports and want to inflict them on others are worse than nazis. Who were also very, very keen on sports, let us not forget. It’s all about trying to create ubermenschen. Ban it, and ban it NOW.
So you were a bit crap at sports then Ian? 🙂
If the Indian premier league goes well, then expect to see a lot more of the same popping up in Britain, with the same kind of people who currently wear Blackburn premier league shirts wearing “Blackburn Bulls Batters” shirts, for the few weeks in summer when the football isn’t on.
The masses need entertaining in a police state, otherwise they could overturn the parasite’s apple cart, so I fully expect cricket to become more of a circus than an art form.
But then, is this Indian premier league stuff cricket? I think that Joseph Schumpeter would have said that freezing your bollocks off in Scarborough in a cold English spring watching Yorkshire play Lancashire on the 2nd day of a mind-numbingly boring 4-day game ought to be creatively destroyed by the Indian premier league. And as one who was witnessed such torpor, I could be persuaded to agree.
Will there still be “test” cricket in 20 years? I doubt it, expect perhaps for England-Australia, and even then it will be 9 innings each, and if three go out in an innings, you’re all out.
This may be an evil prospect, but cricket must evolve if it is to survive. And to survive it must retain its popularity. The Indian premier league may well be the way ahead on that front, though you may have some thoughts on whether if that is the case, then is it worth the candle? But then anything is better than the state mandating that cricket be preserved in government schools. Such is the price of freedom.
“Proper” cricket may well go the way of the Eton wall game or Real Tennis. It may not disappear entirely, but I think the heady days of Botham and Willis at Headingley may have already disappeared, destroyed by the success of Gilchrist’s opening salvoes in the IPL.
No RAB, I was extremely crap.
and even then it will be 9 innings each, and if three go out in an innings, you’re all out.
Now Now jack, that’s Baseball your describing there
It’s had over a century to take off as a world sport, but with the exeption of Japan, hasn’t.
And it wont now.
I’m interested in the 20/20 league because it sounds exciting.
Like the way we used to play it in junior school. You couldn’t take three days to play a rival school, it was one innings each on a summer afternoon.
You had to give it some welly and take risks
No boring on like Boycott used to do, blocking it back to the bowler for a couple of days.
Never mind Ian, we cant all be good at everything.
I had a mate called Plug, and you being a cartoonist will know why.
Yes he looked exactly like the one in the Bash St Kids, with physical and social skills to match.
Thing was there was a damn fine bloke and a genius trapped in that body.
So we always picked him for our team, even though he was crap.
Cos he was a mate!
Ian B
Didn’t they try the old “school sports are fascist, sell off all the playing fields” thing a while age? Then we stopped qualifying for the World cup and every cricket team in the world beat us in test matches, and we won three bronzes in the shooting, fishing and horsey events in the Olympics.
Then the cry went up that our kids were all obese couch potatoes or hung around in alleys smoking crack and the nation demanded that school sports be brought back, (and that vast sums of my money should be spent on them.)
The answer of course is that education should be privatised, and if there is a demand, (by the parents who pay the bills), for schools that don’t force the kids to play sports, then the market will provide.
How very right you are…IanB too…It was my misfortune to go to a ‘sport-oriented’ English public (i.e.private) school…and loathed every minuute of it. The paradox was that I was pretty good at most of this mandatory stupidity (1st XV etc.) & was awarded plated baubles for my pain & suffering. I enjoyed shooting & squash but the rest was an utter waste of energy &, worse, studying time.
Compulsory sport improved neither my life nor my character which, as a result of my experiences, is ultra-bolshie & ‘widerspenstig’.
I grew up in England, playing sports at a state school, through the late 70s, and football, rugby, cross country were all available in competitive extra-mural settings. Sponsorship always seemed half-hearted, though. I now live in the states and my children attend school here. The biggest difference I have noticed is parent involvement. It seems as if any and every sport is available (except cricket!) in our community by virtue of overwhelming parental involvement and support.
So in order for cricket to survive, it must degrade into a talentless slogfest. I wonder how long it will retain its appeal. On the other hand, to quote Mencken, no-one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the public.
I am a bit more optimistic; I’d like to think that even a nation like India, which has the strutting confidence that comes with new wealth, will not want it to be said that their best players cannot hack the long-drawn-out Test games any more and prefer the equivalent of baseball.
To me the issue is not about sports or not sports, but for the State to get out of the way of schools so the schools can choose how much and of what kind and the parents and their children can have more of a choice, not least because more schools will open and a surplus of spaces the likely result.
Imagine if they taught reading like they taught sport at my school: a debating team and the rest left to be illiterate for all they care.
Thankfully I retained my enjoyment of badminton and Karate was very useful and taught me that “Armed Neutrality” is a very viable approach. I did play rounders, but that was in part due to the fact that mostly girls did, and who wants to stand about with a bunch of boys when you can be part of a rounders game and watch all those young ladies running about? Result was that I could hit a rounder almost every time – being a southpaw helped enormously, but it was all about getting a solid connection and boy was that a good feeling.
Sorry to say that Golf to me is a bit, how do I put it?…masturbatory.
Sorry to say that Golf to me is a bit, how do I put it?…masturbatory.
When you have failed, on your fifth attempt ,to get your ball out of a pothole bunker at the royal Porthcawl
You do feel a bit of a wanker… Yes indeed!
So in order for cricket to survive, it must degrade into a talentless slogfest.
I know, it’s appalling, isn’t it (though I would never accuse Mr Gilchrist of being talentless). I hope the “proper” game does survive, I simply fear that the dumbed-down demands of a state-educated mass who are trained to never think beyond obeying the police and paying their taxes, will mean the subtleties of the Mike Brearley long-play of teasing a batsman for 10 overs and then tickling him out will go the same way as the study of Latin and Greek. As someone who is currently stuck on the complexities of deponent verbs in L.A.Wilding’s latin classic, I don’t particularly care a fig for what the dumbed-down masses want for entertainment, I just fear that their wishes will be more important than mine and thine in the future of cricket. (Alas.)
I am a bit more optimistic; I’d like to think that even a nation like India, which has the strutting confidence that comes with new wealth, will not want it to be said that their best players cannot hack the long-drawn-out Test games any more and prefer the equivalent of baseball.
The problem comes with the players though. If I was Mr Gilchrist and I was offered £5 million pounds to play in the IPL, or £5 pounds and 50 pence to do another Ashes tour, I know what I’d be doing.
However, you may be right. Rugby Union has survived despite the populist assault of Rugby League and American Football, so maybe “proper” cricket will survive and flourish, as you say; I have no idea. But I do know that eventually the market will decide.
Of all the things I miss by having left S Africa to live in the USA, it’s cricket which I miss th most.
I loved playing it (too old and fat now), love watching it, and think it is the greatest game ever devised by Man.
Of course I hate limited over cricket and the latest nonsense: first-class cricket should last three days, and tests, five, just as
John Moses BrowningW.G. Grace and Mr. Wisden intended.And people who hate cricket are not worthy of acquaintance, in my opinion.
Not liking cricket is akin to not liking Shakespeare — the latter being also accused of being too long, too old-fashioned, not “exciting” enough and “not relevant” in today’s modern [ugh] world.
I have no desire to go back to S Africa, likewise none to live in England or India, and almost as little to live in Australia or New Zealand.
The chance to watch cricket, live, for the rest of my life would be the only thing that might change my mind.