Читать книгу More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years - John Major, John Major - Страница 5

All my life cricket has been a joy. My sister taught me the game when I was very young, and it met a need that has never gone away. She would bowl to me as I clutched a tiny bat and tried to defend the wicket chalked on our garage door. I was rather embarrassed by my sister’s tutelage until I learned that W.G. Grace had been taught under the eagle eye of his mother. That made me feel better, but not play better.

I have only a dim recollection of those early days, and of watching the local village side whilst my father enjoyed a game of bowls. He preferred Drake’s game to Hutton’s; but I turned my back on the bowling green and my eyes to the cricket square.

There was no coaching at my primary school, but we did play cricket. I can still relive one incident that has the power, over half a century on, to bring a hot flush of embarrassment to my face. It was a game in which for the first time I wore full whites, pads and gloves, and had my own bat. I was expected to score runs, and that made me even more nervous – caring too much rarely produces the best outcome, as I was to learn later in life. I strode to the wicket, took guard, carefully looked at the field placings, and prepared for the first ball. I played forward and felt the ball hit the middle of the bat. But the boy at first slip appealed, and the umpire/teacher squinted down the wicket, raised his forefinger theatrically and gave me out, leg before wicket. I was mortified, and without thought, stuttered, ‘But, but, I hit it!’

Uproar ensued. ‘Out,’ snarled the umpire/teacher. ‘Out. Off’ – he was now waving his arm like a windmill – ‘Off you go.’ He was right, of course, that I should not have questioned his decision. He was not right to mutter ‘Bloody boy,’ as, head down, I walked off, shamed and burning with injustice. That teacher’s angry face is imprinted forever on my mind; it is not a happy memory. But not even he could turn me away from cricket.

We are led to believe that our character is formed in our earliest years. I believe that. Joy and pain are at their sharpest when they are new. I remember trying to hide my deep disappointment that my parents were never able to see me play cricket. They had many reasons not to do so – chronic ill health, worry, the struggle to make modest ends meet when the week outran the money. They were old, too. When I was six my father was seventy, and my mother closer to fifty than forty. Both smoked, and their poor health was made worse by the foul habit. It would kill my mother in the end, but for many years before that, hacking coughs and shortage of breath were a daily occurrence. And they were exotics: our neighbourhood did not house many ex-trapeze artists, gauchos, jugglers, card-sharps or speciality dancers, and even as a boy I knew my parents were not to be judged by the usual criteria.

Once, I was certain they would come. Our school team was due to play close to our home, and I wrote out instructions for my parents on how to get there – out of our gate, turn right, then right alongside the brook, a further turn right where I went bird-nesting, and there we would be, in a field to the left. I was captain, and set a field with myself at cover-point and midwicket so that I had a clear view of the entrance gate, but neither of my parents came. My father had been doubtful anyway. He was losing his eyesight, although as a nine-year-old I was not aware of that. And my mother, who had gamely promised to come, was too ill with her interminable bronchitis. As I carried old Dr Robinson’s prescription to the chemist the following morning, I vowed I would never smoke.

Years later, Alec Bedser told me that his mother never saw him, or his twin Eric, play cricket. Not that Mrs Bedser was without opinions. When Alec took eleven wickets in his first Test match at Lord’s, the press asked for her views of her son. ‘Which one?’ ‘Alec,’ they said. ‘Why Alec?’ ‘He’s just taken eleven wickets in a Test on his debut,’ they explained. Mrs Bedser was forthright: ‘That’s what he’s paid for, isn’t it?’

As a child, cricket entered my bloodstream, and it has given me a lifetime of enjoyment and solace. Yet there are pessimists about the game. As long ago as 1932, C.P. Snow was moaning: ‘These days, a man of taste can only go to an empty ground and regret the past.’ The same dreary view can often be heard on county grounds today, as hindsight flourishes with the aid of rose-tinted spectacles.

I have never understood why we see the past as a Golden Age. It’s a false image. There was little golden about Victorian England, when children were sent scurrying up chimneys to clean them. Or Restoration England, when every portrait shows a closed mouth because a smile would have revealed rotten or blackened teeth. A cool analysis of the past will temper the rosing of the spectacles. The same is true of cricket: there have been many golden days, but the aspic of old photographs can hide the worst of times as well as the best.

As a game, cricket is complex. People who have never played are apt to say, ‘I don’t understand it.’ Much the same was said about the Impressionists, although there was nothing complicated about their art: as Claude Monet put it, ‘I simply looked at what the universe had to show us and used my brush to give an account of it.’ So too with cricket: it delights the eye and touches the soul. Part of this is physical: the smell of linseed oil on willow, the feel of ball on bat, the pleasure of holding a shiny new red ball, the clatter of disturbed stumps, the snick and catch that turns heads, and, on the best of days, the scent of newly-mown grass under the warmth of the rising sun. There is no cricketer alive who has not enjoyed these sensations, and cherished the memory of them. Lucy Baldwin, a fine cricketer and wife of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, put it well: ‘The crack of bat against ball amid that humming and buzzing of summer sound is still to me a note of pure joy that raised haunting memories of friends and happy days.’ Romantic tomfoolery? Perhaps. But cricket is that sort of game, and it would lose much of its charm if it were not.

One does not have to be talented to be besotted by cricket, as a thousand village games prove each summer. I first saw this at school. One boy, whose anonymity I shall protect, practised in the nets for hours – and often, I suspected, in front of a mirror – for every batting movement ended in a pose of classical perfection. No cricket whites were ever more neatly pressed, or pads or boots whiter, or bat more beautifully oiled, and when, head high, he strode out to the wicket, he oozed class and confidence. Alas, the image was false: he put so much into the elegance of every stroke that he overlooked the need to hit the ball, and all too soon would turn in surprise to look at his shattered stumps. He left the crease swiftly yet gracefully, nodding in congratulation to the bowler, head still high, bat tucked under arm, pulling off his batting gloves as if, for all the world, he was returning to the pavilion in triumph.

He was never downhearted. As he took his pads off, he would tell us all that he had been beaten ‘in the flight’ or ‘off the pitch’; and, theorists all, no one suggested he had, again, just missed a straight one. He knew the theory of cricket. He knew the statistics. He knew the spirit in which the game should be played, and he revelled in it. Runs or not, it was joy enough for him to be on a cricket pitch. I don’t know if he ever read A.A. Milne, but his poem had him exactly right:

But what care I? It’s the game that calls me –

Simply to be on the field of play;

How can it matter what fate befalls me,

With ten good fellows and on egood day!

I was so lucky that cricket was played at my grammar school; it was, with rugby, the only activity that made the experience bearable. During one game the pitch was positioned within striking distance of some enticing windows, and the temptation to put the ball through one of them was irresistible. The prize was to be a pint of illicit beer – I was only fourteen at the time, and such devilment appealed. A cross-batted heave missed the main target but did crash through an adjacent church window. The tinkle of glass brought a great cheer. It was enough: a triumph was celebrated.

Not long afterwards a heavier drink, scrumpy, caused more trouble. I drank a little too much, and as I travelled home it began to extort its revenge. I arrived safely, but when my father opened the door I was on my knees barking at him. I thought it was funny. He did not. Only my mother’s intervention saved me from being banned from cricket.

I was no cricketing prodigy, but nor was I a complete mug. I had my days, and they remain precious memories: 50 runs in a house match, with the winning hit a straight four that whistled past the bowler’s nose; 33 runs scored in three overs to win a game on a day when every hit seemed to find the boundary; 7 wickets for 9 runs, including a hat-trick, in a Colts game, when four of the runs scored off me were an edge that, half a century on, I still know that an even half-alert fielder should have caught in the slips. A meagre return for my love of the game, you might think, but only if you don’t know cricket. Runs, wickets and catches are all very well, but they don’t capture the fun of it all, the camaraderie, the hopes, the mini- triumphs and disasters, the wins, defeats and close finishes, the sunny days and the wet ones, all memories every cricketer locks away for the dark months when the summer game is in hibernation.

When my father finally lost his eyesight and all his money in the early 1950s, our family were uprooted from our modest bungalow in Surrey to two rooms of a multi-occupied Victorian relic in Brixton. The accommodation lacked finesse, but it was within walking distance of the Kennington Oval at a time when Surrey had the greatest county team of them all. I camped out at The Oval during the summer holidays as a devoted spectator. It cannot have been so, but memory insists that the sun always shone and Surrey always won. And what a feast they offered. Peter May’s bat rang like a pistol shot, and the suffering ball bounced back from the pavilion pickets before a fielder had even moved. May’s batting once got me into a frightful scrape.

I had borrowed my father’s precious gold stopwatch to time how long it took a May off-drive to reach the boundary, and in pressing the stop button it slipped from my fingers and smashed open on the terracing. The innards sprang out. The watch looked terminally sick. So did I as I confessed all to my father. ‘Tell me,’ he said, gingerly holding the watch by a broken spring, ‘about Peter May.’

May was one of many great players in that Surrey team. Tony Lock, menace shining from his bald pate, bowled the unplayable ball and caught the impossible catch. Jim Laker ambled gently to the wicket, but his off-breaks spun and spat at the batsman. The thin man, Peter Loader, was fast as a whippet; and Alec Bedser, the great medium-pacer, stately as a galleon, tormented batsmen with nagging accuracy and a leg cutter no other bowler has ever matched. Decades later he told me he discovered the leg cutter by accident, and had taken two years to perfect it. ‘It’s a leg spinner, really,’ he confided, ‘but you need these to bowl it properly.’ Thereupon he held up the enormous Bedser hands and chuckled. These were golden days of sun and shadows, Tizer and sandwiches, and I shall never forget them.

The 1950s were also a time of massive immigration to England from the West Indies, and many of the new Britons settled in Brixton. The house we lived in was for a time multi-occupied and multi-racial, and it provided a good primer on poverty for a future Conservative Prime Minister. I knew the immigrants as neighbours. I lived with them. I played with their children. I shopped with them in Brixton market. I saw them for what they were: men and women seeking opportunity and a new life in a land immeasurably more wealthy than the ones they had left behind.

Others, more fearful, more suspicious, saw them in a harsher light. They feared for their jobs and their livelihoods. They were frightened of possible turmoil in their neighbourhoods. Bigots and foolish men inflamed these fears. Pessimists predicted trouble. Brixton became a powderkeg of racial discontent. People waited for it to blow. Waited for the riots, the lawlessness. They waited in vain. The new Britons settled in. The dire predictions of conflict proved to be wrong.

In my youthful innocence, I wasn’t surprised. Instead of inciting fear, the bigots and pessimists should have gone to The Oval, where, when the West Indies played, it was carnival time: the atmosphere was noisy and full of fun as the crowd enjoyed glorious days of cricket. For those in the packed ground the painful reality of life in Brixton was put aside, even though at close of play it was still there. Prejudice and hardship were daily companions to the new Brixtonians. Dr Johnson, who knew London two hundred years earlier, had it right: ‘This mournful truth is everywhere confessed/Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed’.

Slow rises worth – but it did rise. And the West Indians’ cricket, the way they played and the way the team conducted themselves in victory, did much to help. A few years earlier they had taken on England at her own game, in her own country, at the very headquarters of cricket. And they beat her on merit. Perhaps no win in cricket ever had such social significance as Ramadhin and Valentine’s destruction of England at Lord’s in June 1950. A big hundred by Clyde Walcott set it up; it was then won by the charm and guile of the cricketing sophisticate’s delight: the art of great spin bowling. It was intelligent cricket – the West Indies out-thought England as well as outplayed them. As a result, all West Indians walked a little taller in their tough lives because their national cricket team had lifted their morale. No wonder the calypso rang out in celebration: ‘Cricket, lovely cricket’, indeed!

This is a classic illustration of the power of cricket. It can uplift whole communities – whole nations even – or cast them down. And because cricket is played largely in the mind, and reflects the society from which the cricketers spring, it can imprint the character of that nation indelibly upon the minds of those who watch the way in which a national team plays.

When not at The Oval, I spent hour upon hour defending a Brixton lamp-post against the bowling of any passer-by. Only my half-brother Tom and our mutual friend Butch were regulars, and only bad light, in the form of nightfall, stopped play. In 1966 my love of playing the game reached a premature end when a car accident in northern Nigeria left me with a leg so shattered it was almost lost; but that did not mean I would never again pick up a bat.

As Prime Minister, in 1991 I attended a meeting of Commonwealth Heads of Government in Harare and opened the batting in a charity match with the Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke. The previous evening Bob had entertained his fellow heads of government with a selection of Australian and trades union songs, most of them unrepeatable, as we shared more beers than was wise. The following morning, since I had not held a bat for years, I had a net before the game. As I looked around the lovely Wanderers ground, I was flattered to see that it was filling with spectators, although my Press Secretary Gus O’Donnell, never one to let hubris pass unchallenged, did wonder aloud whether they might have come to see their local hero Graeme Hick, who was due to bat at number three.

Bob Hawke and I opened to gentle bowling, and began to settle down, with Bob stealing the bowling towards the end of each over. I didn’t mind: it was a joy just to be there. We tapped the ball here and there, and ran our singles. After a few overs the wisdom of the Hawke strategy was revealed: ‘Off you go,’ said the umpire, waving us off the pitch as he added, rather pointedly, ‘It’s time for the real cricketers.’ A roar of applause greeted our departure.

Hawke had scored over 20, while I had less than 10. ‘Did you know we didn’t have long?’ I asked him as we trudged back to the pavilion. ‘Jeez, yes,’ he admitted, a Cheshire-cat-sized grin splitting his craggy features. ‘Didn’t you know, John? Arrh, heck – I thought you did.’ Not for the first or the last time, I noted that Australians play hard.

Our host in Zimbabwe was the President, Robert Mugabe, in the years before he encouraged militants to force out white farmers and steal their property. In 1991, Mugabe talked to me fondly of cricket. ‘It civilises people and creates gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe. I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen!’ From beyond the grave, Lord Hawke would have approved, though he, like me, would have regarded land theft as most definitely ‘not cricket’. Hawke would have disapproved too of the mismatch between Mugabe’s sentiments and the outcome of his policies: his government all but destroyed Zimbabwean cricket.

Forty years after I first visited The Oval, I came to know the Surrey club from the inside. During my years in government The Oval was a sanctuary where cares were put aside. Upon the morrow of defeat in the 1997 general election I bade my farewells to Downing Street and the Queen and headed to The Oval for a leisurely lunch and a soothing afternoon of cricket. Nor did the balm fail me: ‘You had a rough decision, mate,’ called out a gnarled regular, before turning to more important matters. ‘This boy is a good bat.’ Indeed he was: it was a young Combined Universities batsman, Will House, later of Sussex, who played a fine cameo innings. Since leaving office I have been able to step back into the pleasures of cricket as if it had never been interrupted by the rude reality of politics.

No one has ever had a sufficient gift of tongues to do justice to the charm of cricket. In fact we cannot even be sure how – or when – the game began. Folklore tells us that generations now gone would pause as they passed some insignificant village game, simply to see how the next ball fared, and then, uplifted and enlightened, pass on their way. Observation tells us that people do so still. So we know the fascination of cricket from its birth. We know, too, its historic moments and its famous players. But how did cricket come to be built into the warp and weft of the English language? How did it develop into the favourite pastime of a large part of the English- speaking world? Why – in all sport – does cricket possess a literature that no other can match? Why do grown men babble of games they never saw and cricketers who died a hundred years before?

A wet day makes a conversationalist of the most taciturn cricket- lover. One rain-drenched hour at The Oval was filled with a discussion about Don Bradman’s last Test innings, when the great man was bowled second ball by Eric Hollies for a duck in the final Test of the 1948 series. It is a story every cricket-lover knows, and, cheated of cricket, we were debating at which end the Don was batting. Someone turned to Arthur Morris, the former Australian Test batsman, who was listening silently as he sipped a glass of red wine. ‘Surely, you must know, Arthur? Were you in that team?’ asked an ignoramus. Raman Subba Row, the former England batsman, who knows his history, choked. ‘Yes,’ said Arthur, sipping placidly. ‘I was at the other end when Don was out. I scored 196.’

There is a postscript to this story. As Bradman returned to the pavilion he was stopped in the Long Room by Field Marshal Montgomery, once captain of cricket at St Paul’s school, who had famously encouraged his troops to ‘hit Rommel for six’. Montgomery barked at him, ‘Sit down, Bradman, and I will tell you where you went wrong.’ The absurdity of anyone telling the most prolific run-getter of all time how to bat apparently escaped the old soldier. Bradman revealed this vignette in a letter to the Surrey Club many years later; he did not mention whether he had taken the opportunity to criticise the Field Marshal’s battle plan at El Alamein, but probably he did not. This was wise, as Montgomery was never plagued by self-doubt. A man who can say, ‘As God said – and, on the whole, he was right …’ is not a man to be crossed. Bradman was prudent to keep his own counsel. Moreover, he was courteous even when a sharp response was justified.

I discovered this for myself that same rainy day at The Oval. I had never met Bradman, but I did occasionally speak to him on the telephone. As we debated his last innings during one of the showers, Raman remembered it was the Don’s birthday, and someone suggested I phone him with our congratulations. I did so. As we spoke, I described the day’s cricket and the wretched weather. ‘How is it in Australia?’ I asked. ‘Dunno,’ came the reply. ‘It’s two o’clock in the morning here.’

Sir Donald Bradman is from the aristocracy of cricket. He is one of the rare breed of cricketing knights, all of whom are from the upper class of talent. But the honours system is haphazard, ultimately at the whim of subjective judgements and sometimes perverse. In the more class-conscious Victorian age, even W.G. was overlooked. As Prime Minister, I wished to put right some injustices. I could not simply award honours, but I could nominate for the appropriate independent scrutiny committee to adjudicate.* My first nomination for consideration was Harold Larwood, one of England’s greatest fast bowlers, who had been disgracefully treated by the cricketing establishment after the notorious ‘bodyline’ series against Australia in 1932–33. He had been driven out of Test cricket for obeying his captain’s instructions.

The Scrutiny Committee were startled at a nomination for a cricketer who had ceased playing nearly sixty years earlier, and I daresay sucked their teeth before deciding to award Larwood an MBE – below tariff, I thought, but welcome nevertheless. I had a further small list of names, but thought it proper to proceed cautiously, a decision I came to regret, for the Grim Reaper struck before I did, and my other nominations came too late.

When Harold Larwood was awarded his honour, I received a message that he wished to speak to me. I telephoned him in Australia, and learned something of the generous mind of cricketers. Within two minutes he was talking not of himself but of Jack Hobbs and his skill in batting on treacherous wickets. Larwood spoke with affection of Hobbs, as well as awe, and that conversation remains imprinted on my mind for the generosity of spirit it showed. It is a trait that is uplifting in all walks of life.

The statistics of cricket are a total fascination to the aficionado. For years my Cabinet colleague Peter Brooke and I used to pose one another abstruse cricket questions across the Cabinet table, or in restaurants, or on any occasion we met. Peter’s knowledge of cricket is encyclopaedic: who else could name any cricketing parson who scored a hundred before lunch at Bangalore during the Indian Mutiny? My old friend Robert Atkins, an MP once and then an MEP, has telephoned me each Sunday morning for years to discuss the state of English cricket and bemoan the loss of Corinthian values. Sometimes he even talks of politics: he bemoans the loss of Corinthian values there, too. But not every politician is a cricket-lover.

When I was Prime Minister Cabinet met on Thursday mornings, at the same time as Test matches began. In those days Cabinet debated policy and took decisions, so the meeting stretched on until lunchtime. From time to time folded messages would be brought in to me by the Duty Clerk. I would read them before passing them to Robin Butler, the Cabinet Secretary, a descendant of the great Victorian cricketer Richard Daft, and from him they would cross the table to the Chancellor, and later President of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club, Ken Clarke. Grimaces or smiles would follow. These notes drove my Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine, who sat on my left, to distraction. Prime Minister, Cabinet Secretary, Chancellor … was sterling crashing? Was there a crisis? A ministerial resignation? No: they were the Test scores: disbelievingly, Michael filched the notes from my blotter for the Heseltine Papers.

Cricket can be a bridge between opposites. The late Bob Cryer, a very left-wing Labour MP, would always stop to talk cricket with me. John Redwood, a very right-wing Conservative MP, who in 1995 attempted with a great deal of gusto to pitch me out of No. 10, would do the same if, by miscalculation, we found ourselves at the same dining table in the Commons. Even the journalist Simon Heffer, a persistent and hostile critic, was able to summon up a bleak smile if we passed one another at the idyllic cricket ground at Wormsley Park in Buckinghamshire that was Paul Getty’s pride and joy.

Cricket can also bind friendships. When the Conservative Party lost the election in 1997, John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, and his wife Janette were among my first visitors: as a consolation John presented me with that Australian symbol, a baggy green cap: it is a treasured possession. Four years later I was talking about cricket caps and helmets to the old Australian Test all-rounder Sam Loxton. ‘Helmets,’ scoffed Sam. ‘I didn’t even wear a helmet at Tobruk!’ In 2005, when we met at Lord’s during the Ashes tour, a chortling Sam presented me with an authentic Australian helmet. I was forever grateful we’d talked of helmets, not protectors – although I doubt Sam wore one of those at Tobruk either.

A love of cricket is for everyone. As the great batsman K.S. Ranjitsinhji pointed out early in the twentieth century:

Go to Lord’s and analyse the crowd. There are all sorts and conditions of men there round the ropes – bricklayers, bank clerks, soldiers, postmen and stockbrokers. And in the pavilions are QCs, artists, archdeacons and leader-writers. Bad men, good men, workers and idlers, are all there, and all at one in their keenness over the game … cricket brings the most opposite characters and the most diverse lives together. Anything that puts very many kinds of people on a common ground must promote sympathy and kindly feelings.

That has been my experience, too. A few years ago I was invited to the beautiful island of Barbados to deliver the annual Frank Worrell Lecture. The following evening a galaxy of Caribbean cricketers – Everton Weekes, Clyde Walcott, Garry Sobers, Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith, Richie Richardson – attended a dinner for me at the British High Commission. Cricket conquers all differences, and I – an ex- Conservative Prime Minister – enjoyed some memorable (to me, at least) cricketing exchanges with the old West Indian opener Alan Rae, whose politics were very different. No one cared, and someone on that lovely evening, Wes Hall I think, referred to cricket as ‘the happy game’. You can’t play cricket if you’re unhappy, and you can’t be unhappy if you do play cricket was a maxim that met general approval over the rum punches and the laughter. It has certainly been true in my own life.

In fact, cricket can unlock all the emotions. On the day, after sixteen barren years, that England regained the Ashes at The Oval in 2005, I watched the crowd spontaneously and joyously sing ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. There are precedents for such a display. When Jessop scored a famous hundred to win the final Test against Australia at The Oval in 1902, the spectators hurled their bowler hats to the sky in ecstasy. We may be sure that many were lost. So too at Jack Hobbs’s first innings at The Oval after passing Grace’s record of 126 career centuries in 1925. Amid the applause the Yorkshire captain called for three cheers for Hobbs and then, Yorkshire being Yorkshire, dismissed him for a beggarly eight runs. The emotion displayed that day was affection for a great cricketer. When Boris Karloff, an enthusiastic amateur wicketkeeper, visited The Oval, Surrey weren’t sure what to do with him. He was watching the cricket avidly from the balcony when, in reply to a polite enquiry from an anxious host, he muttered in that inimitable voice: ‘Wonderful. I think I’m dead and gone to heaven!’

Karloff was a character. Cricket attracts them. I was on The Oval balcony with another, Sir George Edwards – then around ninety years of age – when a guest asked the old man, rather pompously, what he remembered of the war and what, if anything, he’d done in it. George smiled bleakly. ‘I helped design the Wellington bomber,’ he said, ‘if that counts.’ I treasure that moment. It was an understatement: George did more than that. He worked with Sir Barnes Wallis on the ‘bouncing bomb’ that destroyed the great German dams but which, in early tests, kept sinking. George, a keen cricketer, knew why. ‘It’s underspin, not overspin,’ he explained. Barnes Wallis relented – and the Dam Busters took out the Möhne, Sorpe and Eder dams with a leg-break.

‘History is bunk,’ supposedly said Henry Ford, who never played cricket. That is not my criticism. A number of fine writers have already told the story of cricket. Is there more to be gained by treading on the old turf? I believe so. There are myths to dispel, neglected areas to be examined, for the history of cricket is often seen in a vacuum, as if it developed unaffected by the turbulent history of the nation that gave it birth. But from its earliest days, to the recent tremors of match-fixing and corruption and the innovation of technology-aided umpiring, the game has held up a mirror to the temper of the nation.

Moreover, what of the cricketers? Too often, they appear in one- dimensional form only: all that is known is their on-field exploits. But what were they like? Who were they? What did they do after the cricket years were over, and their eyes dimmed and their sinews stiffened? What was happening off the field as they played cricket? How was the world changing? How did people live? What were their recreations? Cricketers had a flesh-and-blood existence outside the game, and however imperfectly, I shall try to bring alive the mosaic of times past in order to present a more rounded picture of them and the nature of their lives.

Cricket, once first among English games, is no longer so, as the winter sports of football and rugby grow in popularity. It must fight for its future. Even the cricket season seems to shrink annually as football eats away at both ends of the season. By the autumn equinox on 22 September the season is dead and gone, even though, theoretically at least, the sun is still above the horizon for twelve hours every day. Even the refraction of the sun’s rays, caused by the earth’s atmosphere, which gives the British Isles an extra six minutes of daylight, cannot compete with the commercial imperatives that lengthen the football season.

And yet – cricket is different. It is a team game made up of individual contests. Batsman and bowler are locked in gladiatorial combat. One must lose. Each batsman faces alone the hostile intent of every member of the fielding side, all seeking to dismiss him, with the sole support of his batting partner at the other end of the pitch. He knows his contribution may decide the outcome of the match. And can any other game provide a father figure for a nation to match W.G. Grace, who turned a country-house sport into an international obsession – and who is still recognised by his initials alone nearly a hundred years after his death? No, it cannot. Can any other game offer a pre-eminent genius so far above the normal run of talent as Don Bradman? No, again.

In its first 450 years, cricket has besotted wise men and fools. Its fairy godparents were gambling and drink. Its early enemies were Church and state. And yet, it has brought together beggars and royalty, thrown up a rich array of characters, invaded literature and art, and evolved from primitive beginnings to the sophistication of the modern game.

Although cricket is of the very essence of England, the skills of Bradman and Sobers, of Hadlee and Tendulkar, are evidence that the game has far outstripped the land of its birth. England no longer owns cricket. Like radar, penicillin, electricity, the steam engine, railways, the jet engine, computers and the worldwide web, cricket is an English invention – an export as potent as the English language itself. At one level it is a game and no more; at another it helped cement an Empire and bind a Commonwealth. Its legacy is a fellowship of cricket-lovers across continents and through generations. In the world of sport, it is the greatest story ever told.

It began a long time ago.

* As anyone can now do under reforms I instituted in 1993.