A View from the Boundary, indeed. How soon after a theme is dispensed with does one need it again.We might go the cricket on Sunday. What do you say, now, if it's a nice day, now. What are you doing Sunday, Baby.
It's day one of a four day game and so nothing will have been decided after one day. We've been on potentially interesting last days- I've been to Lords on a potentially interesting last day- when something might have been decided but, as it turned out, nothing was and, after four days of endeavour, the match was left as a draw and everybody went home. And one reflects on how such an event might be explained to an American, or any other nationality, that isn't accustomed to cricket. Four days were spent in esoteric consideration of field placing, bowling changes, defensive batting, time wasting, drinks taken out with a change of batting gloves, umpires deciding when to next inspect the wicket after a shower of rain, tea will be taken twenty minutes early.
The draw is a commonplace in chess and sometimes that is for tactical reasons after two players have played through moves they know well to arrive at a drawn position because it suits them both but it can be after one has gone on a foray of attacking moves, just failed to win the game and settled for the half. And so Russians would not be surprised at a draw but, increasingly, sport wants to see a winner on the day. A winner and a loser.
Whereas, in cricket, cricket is just something that happens, like going to church, gardening or poetry. You take a newspaper to do the crossword, devise a quiz on how old the famous people whose birthday it is now are, Brigadier Arthur St. John Carruthers is 92 today, and Tracey Emin must be at least 48 by now. You might take a flask and a few sandwiches, the field moves in and out for each delivery in a speeded up re-make of a film of the tide going in and out. Be careful not to be concentrating too hard on 15 across because you might miss a dropped catch in the slips. Years ago it was said the bowler was Holding, the batsman's Willey. Now the commentator can be Holding, the umpire's Willey. That is a perfectly acceptable, English thing that can happen.
It's a bloody tough game going on out there. That ball is very hard and can hurt if it hits you at 85 mph. It can kill people, and has. But the day passes in a bubble of arcane irrelevance as wars continue in other parts of the world, the FTSE moves down by 0.2% and somewhere in a University, a small discovery towards a cure for cancer is made or an academic works on a revision of his book on Duns Scotus. But here, the sun goes behind a cloud and the wind has changed direction since the morning, and, as a result, the bowler achieves a degree of reverse swing with an old ball and two wickets go down, taking the score from 225 for 3 to 232 for 5 and suddenly the game looks slightly different even if it will still almost certainly end in a draw.
Which you certainly wouldn't get in a T20 match, designed to be exciting, last not much more than three crash, bang, wallop hours and provide a winner and a loser almost every time to an accompaniment of repeated pop music soundbites and some enormous strikes made possible by the fact that the bowler has to bowl the ball in such a restricted area so that the batsman can.
It's tense, action-packed, usually provides a close finish and yet, to a cricket lover, is considerably more meaningless than the studied stalemate of a four day draw.
No longer, apparently, can the schoolboy in his summer holidays, spend a morning watching fast bowlers run in endlessly to bowl outside the off stump so that the opening batsman can carefully shoulder arms and watch it go by to the wicket-keeper. And, similarly, you rarely see the blacksmith in the country inn with his pint of ale, John Major riding his bike to the village green or John Betjeman mooching around a quaint old church in a straw boater. Even the England of Sean O'Brien's beloved delayed trains and heroic librarians, 'like Francoise Hardy's shampooed sisters', is forever a thing of the past because now a day at the cricket is a disappearing ritual, one that we never used to question, like the need (for a specialist, separatist sect of low church believers) to spend 12 Hours on a bike and see how far you could go.
Now England takes place on Twitter where Piers Morgan says it's a long time since John Cleese was funny and the great John diminishes himself by replying.
