Ah, 2012, that annus mirabilis for British sport. Bradley Wiggins in his yellow jersey, John Terry in his shin pads, Andy Murray in tears, London in the spotlight and Olympians in excelsis. Whither cricket in all this? Wither, more like.
It’s Saturday 4 July at Kevin Pietersen’s now-infamous “Tough Being Me” press conference at Headingley, and KP is not feeling the love. “Why has it reached this stage?” asks Stephen Brenkley, cricket correspondent of The Independent. “You’ve just made one of your most brilliant hundreds, the whole country is looking forward to seeing you play Test cricket for another five years or so …” Our hero drops his guard, breaks into an involuntary grin, The Smith’s providing the soundtrack: “I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does.”
But the whole country isn’t looking forward to seeing KP play Test cricket for another five years. They’re watching the Olympics. This is Super Saturday, remember. Jess Enniss, Mo Farrah, that other one who won the long jump. If KP crops up in the national conversation at all he’s being held up, along with every diving, imaginary-card-waving footballer, as a contrast to the refreshing humility of our Olympic heroes. But what if – and this is the rub – what if when saying “it’s tough being me”, KP is speaking for cricket? Nobody is bigger than the game, but if anybody thought they might be qualified to speak for it …
He could certainly have been speaking for me. Apologies for slipping into solipsism, but for me 2012 was not the glorious year of sport that history will record. Saturday 4 August wasn’t the worst day of my cricket season (that had come six weeks earlier, bowled leaving my first ball), but it was in no way super and may have been the most symbolic. Bad weather, bad back, bad form … just bad. So bad that it was tough. So bad that I offered to be one of the two wickets we had to forfeit as part of a revised target after a lengthy rain break. You thought Duckworth-Lewis was incomprehensible? Try the Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire Premier League’s rain rules.
And the Olympics didn’t help with my rain-soaked mood. Helped by being somewhat of a contrarian and, possibly as a result, opting not to have a TV in my newly-purchased flat, I vowed to ignore the Olympics as much as I could. The response I got was one of surprise. “But you love sport!” I love music too, but I’ve never got too excited by the Eurovision Song Contest. Why would a sports fan love all sports? It’s no surprise when a film buff isn’t a fan of horror. (Isn’t life scary enough?) Why should it be a shock that I don’t get dressage or the hammer? Or maybe I get it, but I want to get more from my sport. Just because it’s the Olympics and just because it’s in London doesn’t mean I should suddenly find myself an avid fan of 10m air rifle shooting. There’s a reason why I don’t follow these sports. In fact, I would hesitate before calling most Olympic events sports. Competitions, yes. But sports? Sure, I could get swept up in the competition and all those stories of human endeavour, triumph and failure; the journeys, the revealing of character. After all, watching the sheer joy on Kelly Holmes’ face in 2004 is one of my most vivid sporting memories. I’m not ashamed to say I shed a tear. But just like I wouldn’t watch X Factor for the music, I wouldn’t watch the Olympics for the sport.
From the moment in 2005, during that truly golden summer for British sport, incidentally, that London was awarded the Olympics, it didn’t take much to predict that cricket would take a back seat in 2012. It would be tough being cricket. But even with the fortunes of England taking a tumble after the highs of winning in Australia and topping the Test rankings; even with South Africa only granted a derisory three-Test series, there was, in my humble opinion, more to marvel at in the world of cricket than in the Olympics. True, most of it was carried out by a formidably good South African side, but KP’s innings at Headingley took the breath away. It was genuinely genius in a way that simply running or throwing or jumping or rowing or swimming or cycling – or snatching, cleaning and jerking for that matter – could ever be.
That most Olympic events are so basic is hard to see as a good thing through the prism of cricket. Running round in circles. Spear chucking. Artistic falling in water. Mincing on a horse. Try explaining cricket in such simplistic terms. Cricket is cricket, and that’s the beauty of it. Why would you stop a game of cricket – in all its multi-contextual intrigue – and retire to the nets to see who can bowl the fastest or whose cover drive the judges will award highest for artistic impression. You’re athletic? You’re gymnastic? Well done. Now do something with it! Incorporate it into a more interesting contest. Imagine if Michael Holding or Thierry Henry had settled with merely running fast in a straight line. Conversely, imagine if the Jamaican 4x100m relay team were carrying on the tradition of terrifyingly fast bowling in the West Indies.
To me, sport – like art – should reflect humanity. Haven’t we moved on from who’s the fastest, strongest, has the biggest … ? It’s what separates us from the animals. A fish can swim, greyhounds, horses, camels, even cheese can race, but try pitching Monkey Tennis to the BBC. Or, for that matter, teaching a monkey to bowl leg-spin, bust out a Cruyff Turn, rack up a 147 break or hit a ton-eighty. People laugh when darts is suggested as an Olympic sport. “But they’re not athletes!” To me, compared to javelin, darts has taken spear chucking to another level. I’d never thought that I’d be using darts as proof of evolution, but there you go. And if I can use darts then imagine what I can do with cricket, sport’s greatest reflection of (and gift to) humanity.
Just as sport is for the individual a way of expressing oneself, sport itself tells a story. Essentially these are thrillers – whodunnits, or whowonnits – and clearly some are more thrilling than others. I like to think you either love cricket or you don’t understand it, and for those lucky lovers it’s clear that cricket, and Test cricket especially, is the most thrilling of all. The suspense, the ebb and flow, the twists and turns, the stories within stories, the wide and diverse cast of characters – it all adds up to a narrative as rich and complex as any novel, and demands the same investment of time.
It used to annoy me so much when Channel 4 interrupted its excellent cricket coverage for horse racing. By all means tell us the result. We’ve got time, the tale of the tape is not a long one. It’s accurate, though, I’ll give it that. So accurate it’ll save us the bother of watching it. Let’s face it, we don’t need to be there – just like we don’t need to watch the national lottery draw. We only really care about the result. The result is the story.
“Who’s winning?” If you’re asking the question you just don’t get it, and I can only pity you. But I’ve come to realise that this unanswerable question is what makes cricket so great. Anything can happen. The situation, the pitch, the weather, the ball, tactics, decisions, form, fitness, confidence, luck – these factors are forever changing. A score update can tell you where we are but can only hint at where we are going. It is the same at the end of the game. The result is merely the last chapter in an epic story – a story that a scorecard can only begin to tell. Perhaps it is no coincidence that cricket, of all sports, has the richest literary tradition. There is room for more than just poetry in motion.
In this context, where cricket is a novel, I like to see gymnastics as a handwriting test and athletics as speed typing or a competition to write the longest word. I know what I would rather read and, as an aspiring writer, write. As a sports fan, I know which I’d rather watch – and think, talk and write about. As a batsman – and I sometimes wonder if that is what defines me most; it’s certainly the time when I feel the most (happily) myself – I know what I’d rather play. Incidentally, what I watch and what I play amount to the same thing: football, cricket, and anything you can play in a pub, basically. My brother quotes a mate at Uni saying “there are things that I’m good at and there’s things that are shit.” Who knows if I wouldn’t think better of athletics if I was a little more athletic. I suspect I would still find it dull. I don’t have the mindset to enjoy anything so mindless, so lacking in skill and creativity. I’d like to think I’d still love cricket, a game of the mind and soul as much as the body, even if I was hopeless. Which is a good job as, a year on, my body is falling apart.
“Do what you have to do to get yourself back loving cricket,” was among the many supportive things my captain said when I told him that I was thinking of jacking it in. I do love cricket. I always will. It’s unconditional. It’s for more than a fortnight every four years. I’ve just read On Warne, Gideon Haigh’s excellent biography, inside two days. I’ve listened to every match of the Champions Trophy. I can’t wait for back-to-back Ashes series. It’s not you, cricket, it’s me.
June 2013