Nowhere Near 39 Steps

One thing in particular my dad cherished about Keith Miller. ‘When he came out to bat’, Dad told me, ‘he used to run down the pavilion steps.’ Dad, like his hero, was an all-round dasher: when he died one of his old clubmates at Alexandra Park CC wrote to us that he was ‘the only man who could bowl the opposition out and then go in and get the runs in time for us all to be home for tea’. Just as the Who in their early days used to run on stage, so that get-after-it spirit should be manifest even on the way out to start your innings.

But at how many major cricket grounds these days are there the pavilion steps even to walk down? Lord’s, of course; the Oval, except that today’s steep switchback – which doesn’t even lead into the pavilion – gives the impression more of negotiating a fire escape. At grounds like Edgbaston, however, the batsmen seem to just wander out of a dark tunnel better suited to the groundsman’s mowers.

Why did early films have their troupes of Busby Berkeley dancers fanning out down a sweeping staircase? Why did Parkinson’s chat-show guests enter down a flight of stairs? Theatre: the building of expectancy. This is why county cricket must return to St Helen’s at Swansea: the anticipatory descent to the outfield from the pavilion high up above Mumbles Bay is cricket’s answer to the staircase scene in Battleship Potemkin. And, for those dismissed for an ignominious duck, we have the Schadenfreude of the endless plod, step by step, back up.

To me such things are important. For a spectator – which is my capacity – cricket is spectacle; theatre. Why not maximise it? As Jon Hotten wrote in Wisden Cricket Monthly reviewing my book The Nature of Cricket alongside Philip Brown’s magnificent compendium of cricket photography, ‘Aesthetic beauty is an important component in sport,’ and ‘cricket has traded on its beauty almost since it began.’ So where has cricket today lost its beauty, and how could it reclaim its aesthetic? Here are a few thoughts.

Is draping a glorified bedsheet over a bank of seats really the best we can do for sightscreens – even at a Test ground? If there is to be coloured clothing at white-ball slogfests (my vote’s not), why do both teams so often wear the same colour? India (blue) v Sri Lanka (blue) – and with all that money . . . And how have we reached the situation where, at showpiece Test matches in this country, de rigeur attire appears to be a nurse’s outfit or even a furry gorilla suit? Would Wimbledon let in people dressed like this? Or the Masters? How does all this look?

I would be more fastidious still. When you think you’ve got the batsman out, you appeal: you ask the umpire, who decides on such things, a question. Howzaaat? Not in the modern game, it seems. You just groan Ugggghhh, as though in flight from a blocked lavatory. Or I’ve heard a wicketkeeper, seemingly under the impression that he’s a crazed inventor, cry Ahh! A-hahhh! As the umpire I’d remain impassive – I haven’t heard an appeal. If pushed I’d counter the incredulity with a prim, ‘Ask nicely . . .’ Caveman utterance is unappealing.

I realise, of course, that cricket is not just there as spectacle for people like me to watch like a film in a cinema: it’s a physical game fought out by the people out in the middle. Some years ago the giant kinesis of the Sussex fast bowler Steve Magoffin practising several full-tilt overs during the tea interval at Tunbridge Wells’s beautiful Nevill Ground, witnessed from just yards away, utterly eclipsed the pretty lilac of the rhododendrons banking the boundary.

However, a doyenne of my profession of book publishing, Diana Athill, used to say that ‘Clarity of expression means clarity of thought.’ All the instances I’ve cited, I’d say, bespeak a carelessness of intention just as much as a gap between bat and pad. What do we want cricket to be?

Decorum comes into it: not the-way-we’ve-always-done-it but a way that has a felicitous logic to it. I find one of the first things I do at a day’s county cricket is check the flagpoles. For both county flags not to be billowing at their masts feels ominous. That they don’t actually need to be there – the visitors, indeed, having to remember to bring theirs – is somehow the point. But also I find it an optimistic sight, recalling Cardus’s reflection that ‘When I think of an innings by Trumper I see in the imagination the unfurling of a banner.’ It defines the nature of the action we hope to see. In everything from Elvis Presleys at Test matches to the overhead ‘ramp’ for six I see decorum replaced by anything goes, and by that logic one day everything will have gone, and we will be at a baseball game.

It dismays me at the Oval therefore (on my rare visits) to come upon all the plastic plants behind the great whaleback of the Vauxhall End. At Hove apparently the plan is to bury the grassy bank at the Cromwell Road End beneath yet another stand and, as a sop to those who’d miss the idyll of watching from deckchairs there, stick down a bit of Astroturf. A melancholy sight recently was the temporary stand for the T20 erected over, to the point of mutilating, Hove’s row of apple trees.

This matters not just for its naffness, never mind ecological uselessness, but because of the bigger message. Trees make cricket grounds, but cricket grounds are becoming stadiums. They’re becoming stadiums because these days they’re really there just for the big showdowns, which apart from Test matches never see a red ball. Even Lord’s, I realised this season, is suddenly a stadium – and it has something to do with no longer being able to see the great plane trees behind the Nursery End (all chopped down to make way for the new space-age stands). Cardus could no longer write about a summer morning at Lord’s ‘when the sky is a blue awning blown out with soft wind, and the trees at the Nursery End make a delicate motion’. And Lord’s is supposed to be in St John’s Wood.

Originally published in County Cricket Matters

Oval Teens

When Geoff left the message on my answerphone I hadn’t seen him in twenty years. And it was a further twenty-five years before that when, as classmates at Trinity School in Croydon, we first met. Now, up at Canary Wharf for the day, he was in a smart suit and we were meeting as fifty-something men for a lunchtime beer. He was the same decent, affable guy he’d always been, and there was a lot to catch up on, but strangely the most important thing we’d done together didn’t come back to me until afterwards. It was with Geoff that I went to my first ever county cricket match.

Back in 1978 we got to the Oval on the 64 bus to Tooting Broadway and then the Tube. Surrey were hosting Somerset, and that first day’s play we saw would have been, I’m now able to verify thanks to Cricket Archive.com, 31 May: half term. The year before A-levels, I believe, which means Geoff’s children are already older than we were then.

The Oval – just the definite article – was still a cricket ground in those days, and a rather ramshackle one at that. I do recall from that fine sunny day the dry, brown, scabby outfield, but also – something it would retain for some years on future visits – a feeling of oasis: you walked in from the traffic of the Kennington Road to behold, improbably, a vast, open cricket field. Memory says it was that same day that The Times (why I would have seen a copy I have no idea) carried an advertising supplement for the brand-new Mound Stand there, a grey, concrete bunker-like construction with – fanfare – corporate hospitality provision.  

And these were the days – the golden age, really – when you turned up for a county game and a generous cross-section of the game’s finest players routinely took the field in front of you. John Edrich was still opening the batting for Surrey, along with the New Zealand Test opener Geoff Howarth. Surrey also had two Pakistani Test cricketers in the side, the middle-order batsman Younis Ahmed and the spinner and Test captain Intikhab, as well as two more England caps, Robin Jackman and Pat Pocock. No Ian Botham for Somerset, for some reason, but still Brian Rose and Peter Roebuck. Oddly I’d had no recollection of Viv Richards taking part until I found the scorecard on Cricket Archive, and then I suddenly had an image of Geoff turning to me and cheering, fist-clenched, as the great man was soon sent back to the pavilion for a handful (8, to be precise: caught by Roger Knight in the slips, it must have been, off Jackman).

Somerset lost wickets steadily from the start, Denis Breakwell eventually anchoring the innings with a painstaking 92 and missing out on a maiden first-class century lofting Pat Pocock into the deep. Cricket Archive will tell you that they took 92 overs to inch to 225 all out – the kind of total frequently posted in a T20 these days. Less than two and a half runs an over.

And I remember the two of us being utterly rapt. Geoff had brought his hardback scorebook along and recorded every single delivery. It was slow going, I could see even then, but because it was such a close-fought contest. I have a memory of Robin Jackman, having bowled all day, 24 overs altogether, squatting on his haunches in exhaustion before picking himself up for one last go at removing the tail, which he did, finishing with 5 for 63. That’s what it took to get Somerset out. Every run scored, and yielded, was precious. The game ebbed and flowed; bat and ball were evenly matched: these were good cricketers, playing hard. It didn’t matter that there were no pyrotechnics to thrill the young people.

Thirty-seven years later almost to the day, I was at the Kia Oval again, for an afternoon of Surrey against Middlesex a couple of weeks ago in the Specsavers County Championship. Now I found myself in a stadium, with the spaceship parabola of the OCS Vauxhall End extending round to the Ken Barrington Centre and the Mound (now Lock & Laker) Stand in two brand new sweeps of seating. It wasn’t all quite finished, the member of the groundstaff who directed me to the shop told me, “but it’ll be ready in time for the T20.” So I went for a nose around the bit next to the Mound where he said there was an amazing view.

At the top level, I came out into The Garden, an astroturfed terrace looking out over several rows of upholstered seats each with their own drink holder, attractively planted round with vines and grasses: a place for Pimm’s, cocktails and bubbly, surely. The cricket, with the wicket pitched far over, seemed miles away. The new seating opposite was too high any longer to see the red buses heading down the Harleyford Road. The outfield was as green and glowing as a snooker table. Underneath the OCS end, during the tea interval, I found the conference facility hosting The 12th International Conference of Turbochargers and Turbocharging. On the piazza beyond the pavilion end where the car park used to be there were olive trees in planters. At a quarter to five the floodlights came on.

County cricket grounds often used to be dumps: those squalid subterranean bogs at Hove; the splintery planks of wood straight from the builder’s yard to sit on at Northlands Road; the semi-derelict football end at Northampton – nothing to mourn there. This ground had been modernised, in parts palatially, and greened, but also brought back to its history, with handsome new wrought-iron Jack Hobbs Gates and interpretation panels around the Vauxhall End commemorating all the great Surrey players of yore. Who could object to any of that?

But why did I find myself watching the stadium, and not the cricket? There were schoolchildren in on a visit, not as old as Geoff and I had been, but hundreds of them, in perhaps half a dozen different uniforms, who swarmed and pullulated like bees up and down the rows of seats, in a bright hubbub of shrieks and laughter. They were having a whale of a time, but they weren’t watching the cricket. In this great bowl that distant county match seemed dwarfed, lost, as did we sprinkling of spectators. But also it seemed colourless, suddenly an unfathomable ritual: Surrey’s tail subsided lamely in their first innings, managing to fall 4 short of avoiding the follow-on – and then their openers batted out the rest of the day without a stumble. What was happening, and why? I didn’t even know who any of the players were, or at least care. It didn’t seem to belong here. I’m sure those brand new stands would have been full for the T20, and the crowds would have been as loud and rambunctious as those schoolchildren.

Best Place

“I felt tired in my soul”. It’s not the kind of sentence you’d expect to come across anywhere outside a Conrad novel. But I’m sure that’s what the man to the right of me was saying at one point during the afternoon session of Middlesex v Hampshire. His remarkably high-flown but elusive monologue to his companions also contained sentences such as “They’re comfortable with their place in Spanish mythology”, a brief history of the Romans’ imperial dominion along the Atlantic littoral and, at one point, the redundant confession that “I’m such an intense kind of person…” At that several heads turned and eyebrows arched in his direction.

The play had become a little becalmed, with Malan and Voges scoring freely (both went on to make hundreds), which was perhaps also why the men to my left had fallen to discussing the storminess of the sea in the Bay of Biscay. The straw-hatted man in front of us turned round and inquired whether they’d ever been to the Algarve? “Sea’s freezing there,” he informed them. “Specially for swimming. Well, it’s right on the Atlantic.” I seemed to have sat myself in a small pocket of south-west Europe, as well as on the cover boundary when the bowling was from the Lake end.

I wasn’t tired in my soul. It was a lovely afternoon: the first genuinely pleasurable day at the cricket since the start of the season. Hove for its opening home match had been bright but bone-cold, despite three fleeces, the Oval a grey midweek afternoon in a hollow stadium, and the cricket colourless at both. Today, however, was Merchant Taylors’ School at Northwood, the newest venue for first-class cricket in England – only since 2012 – and surely one of the most idyllic, up there near Arundel and Tunbridge Wells. You leave Moor Park Met line station along a path through the woods, and enter the truly vast playing fields along an avenue of magnificent red horse chestnut trees, at this time of year thick with puce blossom, and there is the wide Thirties frontage of the school ahead. The county cricket arena, with its wisteria-draped pavilion, is but one of eleven full-size cricket pitches – each time I thought I’d counted them I then realised there was another beyond, with the very furthest match a sprinkling of tiny white figures. A red kite banking in the air above the oaks; a herd of deer would not have been out of place under one of them.

Last year, with the visit of Somerset, the first day had been glorious sunshine from the start; this year play began under very murky skies, to the extent that, peering to pick up the ball as the West Indian Test bowler Tino Best hurtled in, I thought, I wouldn’t like to face him in this light, even in a helmet. I was slightly surprised the umpires had let play commence. The dank cold soon saw a queue for the coffee van a dozen strong through to lunchtime, and around the three distant pitches where Middlesex Youth Cricket was staging a T20 competition there were many plaid car rugs over parents’ legs.

But if the weather steadily brightened up, and warmed up, the cricket, right across this huge parkland, had been bright from the start. Here was a West Indian Test bowler, bowling on a flat club wicket, pummelling the air with glee when he got his first and only wicket of the day, greeting every four off him with a furious “Shit!” and sprinting in for 15, 16 overs before the close of play. And Best against Voges, two top Test players, was a rare and absorbing contest of the kind that thirty years ago used to be commonplace at little festival grounds like these. Meanwhile, every so often a chorus of exultant high-pitched “Yeees!”s would float over from one of the youth matches as a diminutive batsman was sent on his way. It may have been T20, but when I wandered over to watch during the luncheon interval I saw none of these young batsmen swiping cross-batted smears or winding up to cart every ball into the trees: I saw crisp cover drives with head over the ball, followed by scampering running, and a deliberate forward-defensive technique to a good delivery. The only thing they seemed to have learned from their adult forebears was the mid-wicket fist-bump after every decent stroke. 

I’d come away from Hove that day chilled into pessimism. Since the previous season the old club shop alongside the Sussex Cricketer pub had been re-let as what appeared to be industrial lock-ups. At the Cromwell Road end the grassy bank that had always run the length of the field was now truncated where the cricket bookseller had always parked his van and set out his stall, by a maze of new Portakabin offices and satiny tarmac parking spaces. I’m sure it is indeed “building revenue streams”, to quote the club website, but, thinking of the hi-rise blocks now circling the county ground at Bristol and soon to loom over Chelmsford, the Premier Inn at Worcester, and the Sainsbury’s convenience store, housing and – soon – retirement flats that have all been slicing away at Canterbury’s sylvan St Lawrence Ground, I suddenly had a vision of the county cricket ground of the future as reduced to a kind of garden feature at the centre of a trading estate or residential quarter, rather like the old pitch has become at what used to be Arsenal’s Highbury.

But I left Merchant Taylors’ yesterday re-enthused by a different vision, and one actually laid out around me in that amazing parkland: at one end the final overs of a keenly fought day’s play of county cricket between two teams featuring international players who were genuine draws, and beyond them, in match after match after match, receding to the horizon, the cricketers of tomorrow, playing with far more culture and class than some of the highly paid adult exponents of the sport’s more commercialised formats. Let them grow up, and join the Middlesex first team, and then this place still bring them here to play, and us to sit in the sun and watch.    

Original Instruments

Normally it is the end of a year that for some reason sees an accelerating procession of obituaries. The conjunction doesn’t seem inappropriate: people bow out once the trees are bare and the afternoons darkening. But since Christmas, and into a new year that is meant to proclaim optimism and fresh starts, it has been one goodbye after another – I’m talking about music still. First Lemmy, on Boxing Day, followed by Bowie, but then the Specials drummer, the Mott the Hoople drummer, Glen Frey of the Eagles, Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane, George Martin…

In classical music the departures have come just as fast: Pierre Boulez, Peter Maxwell Davies, Kurt Masur and, also last month, another living legend of a conductor, Nikolaus Harnoncourt. In most cases, including Harnoncourt’s, it may have been just old age, but it’s still our past that’s dying, from the making of the Beatles to, in the life of Kurt Masur, one man’s experience that spanned conscription into the German military to fight in Holland during the last war; building the magnificent new Gewandhaus concert hall in Leipzig for one of the world’s greatest orchestras – including using his NATO contacts in the West to secure state-of-the-art circuitry unavailable in Communist East Germany for its mixing desk; opening the doors of that concert hall in 1989 when the military police turned on the pro-democracy demonstrations that would lead to the Berlin Wall coming down, to provide sanctuary for the protestors; and conducting the New York Philharmonic in Central Park after 9/11.  

I saw Nikolaus Harnoncourt just once, in 2012, on what would turn out to be his last appearance in London, conducting what his Guardian obituary accurately describes as a “serene and moving performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis”. A dignified, imposing man – according to the Guardian he “was descended from various Holy Roman emperors and other European royalty” – by then already into his eighties, between movements he sat slumped on a stool on the rostrum, head limply bowed, in reverie or exhaustion it was impossible to tell. Afterwards he was presented with the Royal Philharmonic Society’s award for lifetime achievement, and his short speech, having courteously affirmed his gratitude, concluded like this: “But against all the great composers whose music I have had the privilege to conduct; and against all the great musicians whom I have had the honour to work with; against all of them, a conductor” – he pinched thumb and forefinger together – “is but a speck of dust.”

But Harnoncourt’s lifetime achievement was more than just disavowing the role of the conductor as autocratic maestro, whose florid, narcissistic bow seems to imply that he (always a he) has not only conducted the piece but also composed every note and played every instrument. Musically Harnoncourt was central to another innovation in the performance of classical music which has since become mainstream. He went back to the original scores of composers like Brahms, to try and appreciate with the finest, most forensic study how this music would have been intended to be played, and then, especially with Baroque music, he arranged for it to be played on original instruments from the period. Hitherto the performance of classical music, to be very broad-brush about it, had since the nineteenth century become both progressively louder and increasingly undifferentiated: all music from all periods tended to be bashed out in the same cavalier way. Harnoncourt was more exacting, but also more humble: valued historical awareness: took it as read that you couldn’t perform something in the present without being aware of its past.

And now the cricket season is upon us, and we’ve seen the last of the World T20 for a good while, all this has taken me back to Steve Waugh at Canterbury.

It was the summer of 1988, I think, when he was playing for Somerset, in the great days when the world’s best overseas players still put in a full season for their county, and came out to bat that Saturday at the St Lawrence Ground against, not a vintage Kent bowling attack, but one still mustering Matthew Fleming and Roy Pienaar. By late afternoon he was walking back to the pavilion after a hitherto chanceless 177. By chanceless I mean just that: not a single shot – not one! – was played in the air. Every stroke – not a blow, not a hit – was to the pitch of the ball, and a classical cover drive, on-drive, late cut or sweep. “We’ll wait a long while to see another innings like that,” my friend Richard murmured to me as we all sat down again after the standing ovation. I still am.

When Gideon Haigh was over for the Ashes last year, he was telling me how much he hates to get out, when he plays cricket for his club back in Melbourne. Many top players these days, he mused, don’t seem to mind as much. There’ll be another T20 along tomorrow for them to have another go, I suppose, which is why holing out again on the boundary is no big deal. Gideon only gets the chance to play once a week, and then not even bat every time. So isn’t there something to learn, for all forms of cricket, from that chanceless innings at Canterbury? If you don’t hit the ball in the air you can’t get out caught?

It wasn’t an insight that seemed to have penetrated the brief – like, one-minute – highlights of the World T20 I watched on the BBC website, the most that the hoi polloi without a satellite subscription were allowed. But I found I didn’t miss more: I was already bored… Nowadays the boundary rope appears to be five rows back in the top tier. I was even bored by that Chris Gayle century against England, granted the singular skill of stepping back to smack every short-of-a-length ball over mid-off for a “maximum”. It looked exactly like the one he scored in the T20 Blast last season for Somerset.  

A different kind of highlight came to mind: a single over of a BBC-televised Benson & Hedges match between Northants and Hampshire that Bishen Bedi padded in to bowl to Trevor Jesty. No runs were scored; no wicket fell. But Richie Benaud, commentating, who as a spinner himself appreciated these things, and especially in a limited-overs match, was as spellbound as I by the guile, the variation, the wit, of those six deliveries that had Jesty poking and jabbing and lunging to keep off his stumps, which to his equal credit he did.

In cricket the music has got louder these days, more strident, less differentiated, with all forms, 20-over, 50-over, even Test matches, increasingly being played in the same way. But if the game were humbly to acknowledge that however we do it now presumes a certain attitude to the past, and accept we might at least make a point of studying how they did things then, perhaps we’d find it being played as Waugh and Bedi did, and “played on original instruments” could even become a viable marketing strategy. “Ponsford’s innings reminded us that there is one glory of the sun and another of the moon,” writes Cardus, in a little volume called Good Days I picked up last summer at Sussex’s Horsham festival. (My edition was published in 1937 in Jonathan Cape’s “New Library” series along with titles by, among others, Herman Melville, Edward Thomas and Gertrude Bell – how wonderful that back then it seemed second nature to include a cricket writer among such peers.) The sun was Bradman in the Fourth Test of the 1934 Ashes series at Old Trafford, scoring 388 to Ponsford’s 181; together they achieved a record stand for a Test match of 388 in five hours and a half. “He was no bass fiddle in the orchestra of the day’s batsmanship,” declares  Cardus; “his innings was a solo part, too – in a double concerto of classical cricket.”  

David Bowie’s Lost Concept Album

How do you hit a six when you’re playing cricket indoors?

In the particular match I’m thinking of I don’t recall any being signalled, though almost every shot was lofted – but things were certainly knocked for six. Solid dark-wood bookcases, mostly.

The venue for this impromptu fixture was the book department in Harrods’ department store, Knightsbridge, SW1, second floor, if I remember rightly: off the escalator and through bedlinen, past assistants resignedly patting and plumping pillows with unnecessary frequency. It was just after six o’clock, when the store had closed for the day, and it was 1980. Good grief.

The book department, like all of Harrods in those days except for the Way In boutique on the top floor, was a hushed, strictly formal place. Working there in my year off between school and university, I found myself reproved one day by the floor manager for wearing “the loudest suit in the department”: it was a muted brown. Padding about the carpeted floor to locate a lavish coffee-table book on Persian carpets, we were “Mr This” and “Miss That”, at all times. The presence of women apart, something of the pavilion at Lord’s, and definitely Gentlemen rather than Players. The manager, a kindly, bearded man in his sixties, I would think, the sort of man you’d expect to smoke a pipe, and did, sat at a large leather-topped desk every morning and peered over his half-spectacles at the publishers’ reps trying to sell him their latest titles, and when it was the new Graham Greene or the new John Le Carré he’d order seven hundred and fifty copies, just like that, and months later they’d be wheeled in on trolleys, box upon box after box, by men in green nylon coats.     

But this one evening it must have been the buyer’s day off, and it would also have been the start of the cricket season, because the new Wisden was out, which was why we had a display on one of the tables of a pile of thick yellow tomes, together with a bat, a ball and other cricket accessories borrowed from the sports department. The last customers had asked in their clipped way for their purchases to be put “on accine-t” and drifted out, the tills had been cashed up, and that was stumps.

Except that suddenly the diminutive children’s book buyer was taking strike, to the underarm bowling of the paperback buyer, and no matter that she was playing rather across the line, with the bat somewhat away from her body. Thwack! – and that nice new cherry was going crash!-doonk!-crash! out on the on side, ricocheting from bookcase to bookcase, from History to Architecture to Biography. Another mighty swipe, and despite no back-lift to speak of, with a gunshot crack – the noise, when you smite a cricket ball in a confined space! – the next one was sailing past the tills over extra cover towards Food and Drink, and bidding to go all the way into the paperback room. I guess that would have been six, as would depositing it behind square leg amongst the Beatrix Potter figurines and the Famous Fives next door in children’s.

I can’t remember how the game concluded that evening: maybe we all just went on to the pub, as the young people among us used to do quite a lot. But I do remember, several weeks later, learning that the book department had had to pay the sports department for that no longer pristine bat with the red marks all down its blade, and the ball with the chunks taken out of it by the corner of a solid wood bookcase.

And this was where, on another day working in Harrods’ book department, I met David Bowie.

I was stationed on the till that morning, just before lunch, when a thin, serious man suddenly materialised in front of me and, looking up from under a floppy hank of hair, inquired shyly if we had a copy of Scouting for Boys.

No, we hadn’t, I was afraid: from my own scouting days I knew you had to go to the Scouts Association shop in Buckingham Palace Road to get it. There was an attractive dark-haired woman with him I subsequently discovered to have been Oona Chaplin, whom he’d got to know in New York while appearing in the Broadway production of The Elephant Man. The other book he was looking for, he said quietly, was The Count of Monte Cristo. I went and had a hunt in Classics: we hadn’t got that either. That was David Bowie!, I murmured to my colleagues after he’d left empty-handed, and later was mortified to find they’d gone and accosted him just outside the department to request his autograph, which he’d courteously obliged.

As far as I know, right up until he died last month David Bowie had no connection with cricket whatsoever, though I look forward to being corrected. But I think that dignified, retiring customer I encountered could have done. As who, though? Perhaps among the ranks of the more cerebral county captains around at that time – a Richard Gilliat, say, or a John Barclay? A spin bowler, no question, not a quick, and a measured, judicious batsman, not a pinch-hitter. Not an instinct player, either: a thinker – ever pondering, hunkered in the slips, pen poised over Times crossword while waiting to come in, how do we play this game? A proper sportsman; never a sledger. A clever man, to play a clever game. I could certainly see him at Hove – simultaneously raffish and home to the odd retired Major.

But – Scouting for Boys! I’ve always wondered what would have happened if Harrods’ book department had been able to find him a copy that day. Scary Monsters came out that year, 1980 – but what on earth might have been the concept album that followed..?

Overkill

The world of cricket has not so far come together to mourn the death of Lemmy. How can this be?

Granted, as the one-time publisher of Thinking Out LOUD, a small volume collecting the great man’s assorted philosophical wisdom, I cannot recall a single pronouncement that even came close to cricket. As you would rather imagine. When I think of a summer’s day at Arundel, Steve Magoffin loping in from the castle end, the susurrus of applause rippling round the crowd up on the bank, I cannot think of anywhere further away from the speed-and-Jack Daniel’s-fuelled onslaught of “Killed by Death”.

Presumably, of course, that, and a game that can be played with such decorous, precise craft, is what attracts people like Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Joe Perry of Aerosmith (sighted in a Test match hospitality box a year or two back) to cricket on their day off. Indeed, one of the most disagreeable things about the modern limited-overs game is how it’s been “rocked up”: you have to have your Big Bash in a cavernous stadium where AC-DC probably played the night before; everything, from a batsman’s entrance to a six-hit and probably the replacement of a bail, has to be choreographed to cacophonous hair-band muzak, and the atmosphere cranked up to a delirious, frenzied fever pitch. It’s not a game of cricket: it’s a Blast.

But the news of Lemmy’s death just after Christmas came soon after I’d been reading about another rock ’n’ roll hero – at least of mine – who also wasn’t the slightest bit interested in cricket, and in thinking about them both I asked myself why they did seem to belong to the same world I lived in as cricket. Lee Brilleaux was the frontman with Dr Feelgood, the 70s blues band from Canvey Island whose fearsome live shows on London’s pub rock circuit catalysed punk and the New Wave, and who have been mythicised in recent years through Julien Temple’s wonderful documentary Oil City Confidential. And last autumn a rather good biography of him appeared. Having seen the band a dozen times, and the film several, I knew most of the story of his life told in Lee Brilleaux: Rock ’n’ Roll Gentleman (Polygon, 2015), but not all.

I knew how, even in front of a couple of hundred people at the Half Moon in Herne Hill or the Red Lion in Brentford, he would explode off the front of the stage from the first note, microphone clenched like a hand grenade, gale-force vocals growling and snapping out the blues to the whites of his eyes in a performance of pure kinesis – understood that live music is live, when played like that, in the way that an electricity cable is live, and it’s called rock music because, if you do it right, it rocks you back on your heels; rocks a place to its roots. I knew he died at the age of 41. What I didn’t know was that until a year or two before his death the Feelgoods were doing two hundred and eighty of those gigs a year, all over the world. Then they cut down to a mere 220. I also didn’t know that on top of this he managed at least once to drink a whole bottle of gin during a single show… “He dug deep and he never short-changed anybody”, says his last bass player mildly.

After Lemmy died I went on YouTube to recall numbers like “Motorhead” and “Orgasmatron”, and found a video of the band’s last-ever gig, in Berlin only a fortnight before Christmas. In front of the requisite rampart of Marshall cabinets, under a huge hat, on stick-thin legs, a distant figure at the microphone was thanking the crowd for coming, and the trademark rheumy rasp had become an old man’s slurred, deep-under-water mush. Jesus. But then - it was as though a switch had been flicked - the arena, and even my iPad, was suddenly inflated with that thunderous, laughably excessive, afterburner roar! Why did he always give it so much? Lee Brilleaux’s mum asks in the book in sad bafflement; he didn’t have to…

What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?

A few days after Christmas, it was the Cape Town Test match, and Ben Stokes hit 258 in the fastest England double century of all time. I listened to it on TMS: even without pictures you could see these massive shots sailing high over the boundary. It was such an improbable innings: it didn’t have to be that good; it wasn’t necessary to score that fast, to be that belligerent. But just like the first time I ever saw him play, for Durham at Hove in an end-of-season county game, when he came out and cleanly tonked 40-odd in no time before holing out on the extra-cover boundary, he went for broke.

So did the father of Stokes’s partner out in the middle at Newlands, David Bairstow, whom I remember once seeing in the little John Player League on the TV one Sunday afternoon, coming in to bat when all seemed lost and, carving at everything and running like stink, shirt-tail flapping, eyes wide as white in a face red as a beetroot, gasping for breath at the end of an over, got Yorkshire home as though it was the Gillette Cup Final.

And so did Richard Hadlee in the 1987 Natwest Cup Final: someone who always rose to the occasion – who, when a rain-affected Saturday finished with Notts facing defeat and their star all-rounder, in his last season with the county, sunk in gloom, then went out on the Monday and didn’t just win the trophy for his side with a man-of-the-match innings of 70 off only 61 balls, but went out on a limb and smashed them to it, with a series of calm, imperious, conclusive drives. “You know, if ever I feel a bit down,” said Lee Brilleaux once, “Or, ‘Oh, I don’t really fancy playing tonight’, I think, well, that’s not how the Wolf would have handled it.” The Wolf was Howlin’ Wolf, the huge bluesman from the South with a voice, it was once said, “like a hurricane trying to squeeze through a letterbox”, who was still touring the UK and (when Brilleaux saw him) playing little pubs well into his sixties. “The Wolf’s a big man, he’d have gone out and done it. “

1991, and David Lawrence of Gloucestershire is walking back to his mark at the Radcliffe Road end at Trent Bridge against the West Indies. Built like a tank, not a fast bowler, which didn’t stop him hurtling in off a run that started almost back on the boundary rope and culminated in a torso-twisting delivery that seemed to almost snap him in two. Eventually, it appears, such a physique brought to bear on such hell-for-leather fast bowling resulted in a serious knee injury and the end of his career. But I can still hear the elated roar of the crowd that day when, late in the afternoon, he came steaming in for England, and got Phil Simmons caught behind for 1. His name for it was “rockin’ and rollin’.”

A Field All Gay With Tents and Waving Colours

This summer it will be 90 years since Neville Cardus went to Dover to cover Kent v Lancashire, and wrote about it in the most magnificent way for the (then) Manchester Guardian. You can still read his account of all three days – nearly six large pages of small type; thousands of words – if you can find a copy of Matthew Engel’s Guardian Book of Cricket.

It was a match that started slowly, even attritionally, but the wonderful thing is, it doesn’t matter, as it didn’t back then – since for Cardus the cricket out in the middle was not the whole, or even the main, story:

We have been free to watch the game idly and give ourselves up with lazy delight to the June charm and flavours of a field all gay with tents and waving colours; and we have been free to observe the delicious changes in the passing hour – the full light of noon, the soft, silent fall to mellow.

He finds time to set the scene, “with green lawns and terraces rising high behind the little pavilion, and you can sit here and look down on the play and see the cricketers all tiny and compact.” And soon after tea on the final day Lancashire suddenly had Kent eight down in their second innings and were on the brink of an improbable win:

As Hubble and Freeman took up the defence of the Kent ninth wicket the band on the edge of the grass made the mellow music of the madrigal out of The Mikado. The moment was too tense, perhaps, for these golden strains, yet their sweetness was in tune with the afternoon’s lovely English flavour. To my dying day I shall remember gratefully these afternoons in Kent, afternoons full of the air and peaceful sunshine of imperishable England.

But Kent no longer play at Dover. Indeed, no-one plays cricket any more at the Crabble ground, “tucked away in hills along which Lear must have wandered on his way to the cliffs”: nowadays, as Chris Arnot recorded in Britain’s Lost Cricket Grounds, it’s just a rather dreary rugby field, and the back cover photograph of Colin Cowdrey striding out to bat from a pavilion festooned with hanging baskets and thronged with a huge crowd an image of already distant history.

And this summer I won’t be going to Horsham. On financial grounds Sussex have cancelled their annual cricket festival. They’ll still go to Arundel, thank goodness, but that’ll be it.

The last two years have been beautiful occasions at the pretty tree-lined ground beyond the church. I love the way that, approaching from the railway station and walking down through the town, you end up getting to a county cricket match via footpath through  a wood, round a brook, and up a grassy bank. Last year the refreshment tent at tea hosted a stupendous array of home-made cakes. The beer tent offered nine or ten local craft brews. I bought a secondhand volume of Cardus from the cricket bookstall. When the sun hammered down after lunch you went and sat under the trees opposite the pavilion. Hove is now a well-appointed and always congenial place at which to watch the County Championship, but Horsham, like Arundel, was nicer.

When I think of all the best days out I’ve had at county cricket, most of them have been at festivals – at Scarborough, Arundel, Southgate, Northwood (a lovely addition against the run of play for Middlesex last summer), Southend (the Victorian neatness of Northchurch Park, not the windswept wasteland of the later Garons Park), Chesterfield… And yet the trend among the counties in recent years has, as we all know, been inexorably against festivals, with many no longer taking the game to any outgrounds, and county cricket no longer played at Abergavenny, or Bath, or Bournemouth.

I’m not going to engage with any of the usual reasons cited, from inadequate corporate hospitality facilities to expensive investments in county grounds to crummy dressing rooms – yeah, yeah, all confirmation that modern cricket at the top level is a business, even an industry. But it’s not the point, is it?

Actually, I think it is all about investment, and marketing, and branding. We should do all those things, through the ECB – all the things that the modern game already does with Twenty20. Why do these festivals clash so often? Why isn’t there one every week of the cricket season from June onwards? Why aren’t halcyon posters advertising county cricket festivals visible at every railway station? Why isn’t ECB money tied to each county having to visit one new outground every season, and doing it properly?

What is the point is that cricket, to a far greater extent than other sports, has always had a hinterland. It’s always not just been about the game. Cardus got that – wrote about it, indeed, all the time. And more than any other sport, with the possible exception of golf, it has always had an arcadian dimension, or potential. Cardus got that, too. That Arcadia need not only be realised on bucolic fields fringed with marquees and enfolded by ancient oaks – look at that sensational tableau from South Africa this winter, with Newlands “tucked away in hills” at the foot of Table Mountain – but it’s a lot more likely. When the big cricketers come to the small, pretty grounds they do seem “all tiny and compact”, as though in a painting - because the game is held in a wider landscape, like a country house at the centre of its estate, in which so much more than the match is going on, and so much more matters than who’s going to win. There is something to celebrate. It’s why they’re called “festivals”.

Cricket and Sky

A few years ago my friend Stephen got invited to the Lord’s Test. Sri Lanka were the opposition, I seem to recall – he wouldn’t. Stephen isn’t interested in cricket. His main interest is birdwatching, which is largely how I know him. But the offer of a free ticket for in a hospitality box in the Mound Stand – who’d say no to that?

It turned out to be a red-letter day for him. The landmarks of that day’s play, if there had been any, passed him by. But he was keen, eager even, to share one memory with me afterwards. He’d been looking up at the sky. And while in the Test Match Special commentary box Blowers would have been cataloguing every low-flying pigeon, Stephen had seen something much more significant. High above the Home of Cricket: a large bird of prey: that soaring-swerving flight; the unmistakable forked tail… a red kite! Never seen one that far east before, and never over London. A result.

I know when you go to the cricket you’re supposed to watch the cricket. But I’m with Stephen. There’s so much else to see at cricket matches, and particularly up in the sky. A couple of seasons ago I saw a red kite too: Middlesex v Notts at Uxbridge. More the red kite’s manor, in its inexorable drift eastwards from where it was reintroduced in the Chilterns – but still a great sight to see above a largely urban ground with traffic thundering down one side. It livened up a somewhat soporific day’s play on a very flat wicket.

It’s why I always take my binoculars to county cricket nowadays: good for identifying which umpire’s standing at which end, or whether the spinner’s pitching on a good length – but also for looking up, not straight ahead. This summer the Australian tourists began their tour at Canterbury against Kent: on a beautiful, sunny Saturday in early July the St Lawrence Ground was packed and abuzz. Mitchell Johnson, there; Michael Clarke – just there. I think I was one of the very first to see that day that Ryan Harris was hobbling, and worried for his fitness for the forthcoming Tests. But also, that afternoon, zipping and zooming around the cloudless blue sky above, I saw a hobby, a beautiful little bird of prey with its slender, boomerang wings: I even thought I could just make out that pretty rufous patch underneath.

But it need not be only living things aloft. Back in the eighties at the Oval, around 5 o’clock every weekday – the best view to be had from the Peter May stand near the old Cricketers pub – Concorde would come over, on its approach to Heathrow. Everyone would lift their eyes from the play and watch its graceful passage till it had gone, every single time. More than once at Kent grounds like Canterbury and Tunbridge Wells I’ve heard a characteristic liquid clatter and known exactly what I was looking up to see: a Spitfire.

The other day saw the last ever flight of the last flying example of the mighty delta-wing Vulcan bomber, a “giant manta ray, wallowing around the sky”, as it was once memorably evoked for me by a man who had actually bought one for himself (it’s now marooned at Southend Airport). But for one of the most remarkable Vulcan sights of all you’ll need an old VHS player like mine, and a copy of the best cricket video ever produced: Clive Lloyd’s Finest Hour – the story of the first ever Cricket World Cup in 1975. Yes, there’s that wonderful match at Edgbaston where the last-wicket partnership of Deryck Murray and Andy Roberts snatched victory for the West Indies from the jaws of defeat against Pakistan, and yes, there’s that magnificent century Clive Lloyd blazed in the final at Lord’s. But: if you watch the group match between West Indies and Australia at the Oval (where, later that day, Alvin Kallicharan would smash Dennis Lillee to all points of the ground), the Australians are struggling at 61-3 just before lunch against the fast bowling of Roberts and Boyce, when the camera picks up a formation in the sky heading south-west over Archbishop Tenison’s school. “It was a very nice gesture of them to send those planes over for the Australians hitting their first boundary of the morning,” muses Richie Benaud. The camera cuts to track them in close-up. Outridden by five what look like Phantoms, and riding their drifting con-trails, are no fewer than three Vulcans. The sky today never sees sights like that, never mind the sky above cricket grounds.

The View From the Hammock

This blog will not be written from out in the middle. I don’t play cricket. Never have, really, apart from a consistently unsuccessful school career where I never got picked for the school team, and the unavailability of toughened plastic lenses to enable me to play in glasses proved rather a handicap – and a solitary day’s single-wicket competition on a mudbath of a wicket in Bourn, Cambridgeshire on which, remarkably, I did manage to get a few runs.

I merely watch cricket. Not even on television these days, since I don’t have Sky, and not at Test matches: just county cricket – and even then, not at echoing, empty stadia, but, resolutely, only at picturesque festival grounds. I make an exception for a few county grounds like Canterbury and Hove. All this does narrow the focus, I grant you.

I don’t much mind who wins, either: I go to watch play – that’s all. I go for a nice day out: an occasion. And that’s what I shall write about. Not about whether Ian Bell should be in the Test side, or whether KP should be recalled, or who’s going to win the next World Cup. How should I know, even if I cared enough? I usually travel a fair way to see a day’s cricket, so I expect more than just 90-odd overs of a particular game: I hope for an event, and I’m interested in how and why it becomes one, and what kind. When the trend of sports coverage seems ever more concentrated on the minutiae of a game itself, with endless counter-factual speculations on how tactics, decisions and outcomes could and should have been different, I’m of the opposite inclination: easily distracted; a divergent thinker, I guess would be the technical term.

I’m on the outside: casting an eye on the action from my metaphorical hammock slung between those two trees beyond the boundary rope. That’s what’s intriguing and important about sport: that, while its oblivious exponents and aficionados are so caught up in this strange exclusive ritual, everything else that has nothing to do with sport is still coming into it. You get a good view of all that, swinging idly in your hammock.