Herding Cats Page 2
Those who have written about it tend to peddle the same bucolic vision. A thatched pub squats at the boundary’s edge, out of which spill garrulous bearded locals, tankards in hand. On the pitch, the players are getting on with the game. They are either incredibly good or incredibly bad, nothing in between. Balls are hit for six or flatten the stumps. There are no uneventful moments, none of those longueurs that cricket specialises in. The blacksmith roars up the hill to bowl, while the vicar sends down his gentle lobs from the other end. A child fields at backstop and a stockbroker, who has recently moved to the village, is out for nought. Ducks waddle past the boundary rope. The umpire is drunk and makes a number of poor decisions. An American is playing the game for the first time and cannot make sense of it all. And so on. It is a timeless scene and a lovely one. A. G. Macdonell captured all this in England, Their England and Hugh de Selincourt in The Cricket Match but there are echoes of it elsewhere.
These writers could have been describing J. M. Barrie who did all of this for real. He possessed tremendous enthusiasm and very little skill. The greats – Bradman, Sobers, Tendulkar – are always described as natural cricketers. Barrie was their polar opposite. There are players whose every movement betrays how hard they find the sport. Running, catching and throwing are deeply unnatural to them; the techniques of bowling and batting even more alien. Onlookers express surprise that they don’t fall over more frequently. But there they are, playing most weekends, defying the laws of physics. Barrie’s gifts were mostly deployed off the field. He ran his team, the Allahakbarries, with charm and energy and represented a third way of captaincy. He founded his side because no other would have him, like many have since. In the Allahakbarries, it was acceptable to be hopeless, if not actively encouraged. Barrie was a slow bowler himself and said that after a delivery he would go to mid-off and sit there, waiting for the ball to reach the other end. Sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t. If he didn’t like the delivery, he’d run after it and stop it before it could reach the other end. The story of his team is delightfully recounted in Kevin Telfer’s Peter Pan’s First XI and the Allahakbarries inspired a type of cricket that continues to this day.
J. M. Barrie also played for another wandering side from the same period, one that I have captained for the last five years. The Authors’ Club was founded in 1891 and its cricket side featured Arthur Conan Doyle, A. A. Milne and P. G. Wodehouse. Each year, they took on the Actors or Publishers at Lord’s, though Barrie didn’t make the cut for these games. On one occasion Conan Doyle and Wodehouse opened the batting together. Conan Doyle was a solid cricketer, playing ten first-class matches for MCC. (His highest score was 43 and he took one wicket, that of W. G. Grace himself.) Wodehouse was then an emerging novelist and a fast bowler fresh out of the Dulwich First XI. The Actors were captained by the formidably mustachioed C. Aubrey Smith. The star of films like The Prisoner of Zenda and Little Lord Fauntleroy, Smith was an excellent cricketer, nicknamed “Round the Corner” for his unusual curving run-up. He played for Cambridge, MCC, Transvaal and Sussex and represented England in one Test, in which he took five wickets. He later moved to Los Angeles, where he launched the Hollywood Cricket Club, with Wodehouse as secretary and Boris Karloff behind the stumps.
A later incarnation of the Authors was captained by Douglas Jardine and featured some of the greatest players in history – Denis Compton, Richie Benaud and Jack Fingleton – with a handful of novelists and poets making up the tail. This literary Lashings had lost its ties with the original Authors’ Club in Whitehall and played each year against the National Book League in Westminster’s Vincent Square. The side re-emerged briefly in the 1980s before petering out once again. Proper teams have committees and structures to ensure longevity and succession. Sides like the Authors usually depend on the lunatic enthusiasm of one person, which is why they die out, re-emerge and die out again. I’ve played for dozens of similar teams and it’s always the same.
In September 2011, the Authors were revived in unpromising surroundings. I sat in a car with Nicholas Hogg, a novelist and former Leicestershire Under-19 cricketer. We had just played the last league match of the season in the shadow of the M25 as power lines crackled overhead. A bleak cricketless winter stretched before us. In a bid to alleviate this despair we talked about next season. A few weeks before we’d put together a team of writers for a one-off match in Kent. Could we do so again? Quite quickly we were planning the perfect summer of cricket and the recruiting started. A few years previously, I’d started playing for the historian Tom Holland’s Sunday team, after a decade-long absence from the game. The standard was pleasingly low and the conversation ridiculously erudite. A number of the team were writers and in this company I was able to scramble a few runs and even take two wickets. I hadn’t known cricket like this existed. At school I’d been a weak player, dropping five catches the one time I was selected for a team. The ball followed me mercilessly that afternoon and I made a duck to boot.
So I wasn’t the obvious choice to captain this new team but Nick didn’t want to, and nor did anyone else. Like Barrie, and hundreds of others in Sunday cricket, I found myself in charge, playing a sport I hadn’t quite mastered. Soon there were others. Tom joined, along with Jon Hotten, whose Old Batsman blog I’d long admired, and children’s author Anthony McGowan. Nick, Jon and Tony were all fine cricketers in their youth, with varying degrees of reticence about their feats. Tom was a good and strangely effective bowler, if prone to dropping the simplest catches. These four became the stalwarts of the side, playing each week, on the council pitch in Hackney where we started and the more scenic grounds that followed. In our first five seasons together, we played almost 150 matches and I had some of the most enriching experiences of my life. After a certain age, many of us find that we no longer make friends in the way that we used to when young. Writers enter the world of books thinking they’ve finally found their people. But these people spend most of their time in a room on their own. There are few mechanisms for them to spend much time together enjoyably, where they don’t find themselves comparing careers. A cricket team proved to be a surprisingly successful way of doing this and provides the right element of competition.
Nick, Tom, Tony, Jon and I were joined by a dozen others. Somehow we’ve played on a number of Test grounds, on Mumbai’s maidans and in the Rajasthan desert, in Sri Lanka’s tea country and on grounds rebuilt after the 2004 tsunami, as well as on pitches the length and breadth of England. We have faced opposition that has included the national team of Japan, a Rajasthan Royals XI and the Vatican. We have been dismantled by sides much better than us and have somehow triumphed against others whom we’d never expected to beat. We’ve been dismissed and hit for six by countless former professional players. But just occasionally we’ve come out on top against them. We’ve lost seven straight games and narrowly avoided mutiny during that run. But we’ve won a great many matches, too, despite a selection policy that requires players to have had a book published. It’s been a steep learning curve for all, particularly for a novice captain.
Cricket asks a lot of those who play it. It is a game of great complexity and there are so many ways in which things can go wrong. Just look at how it punishes those who are playing together for the first time. When the Authors first took the field, we put in a horrible ragged performance on a wet concrete pitch in Hackney. Catches went down, extras flowed and at least one player broke his glasses in the field, cursing a nonexistent groundsman. That day we relied entirely on individuals, rather than teamwork. Few could take any pride in our performance. Our first-ever wicket was a stumping off a wide – a moment of brilliance from one player making up for the failure of another. Our opening batsman Sam kept us in the hunt, as we sheltered under a tree, before the rain became heavier. But something happened that day, enough to keep us coming back. Cricket is like that. It gives you enough to keep going, when you most need it. After five years of playing together, we are far from perfect and will put in at least one shockin
g performance every season. But we’re a world away from that fumbling XI that would lose and lose and lose again. Some of this is down to captaincy, some down to time spent together. We’re well-drilled in the field and mostly stand in the right places. We know our weaknesses, as well as our strengths. We know when we have to back up a hard throw and when we have to run towards the fielder because he can only underarm the ball back from the boundary.
Recently we played a team much like we were then. Just as we had, they’d bluffed their way onto various lovely grounds, only to come unstuck upon them. That is the natural order of things. Good pitches are made for good cricketers. The groundsman doesn’t spend hours preparing a track for a bowler who can’t hit it. It pains him to see wides and no-balls and misfields on his immaculate turf, where greater players have trod and will tread again. That day we put the pretenders to the sword, running up a score of 296 in 40 overs. We weren’t unusually strong: they were dreadful. The 11th man was late so I fielded for them for the first dozen overs and was able to see them up close.
Their bowlers were short of practice and probably quality, too. Only one of them, the captain, showed any kind of consistency. The rest of them served up several bad balls an over. My childhood hero Waqar Younis was feared by batsmen for his toe-crunching yorkers. Their third-change almost broke his own toe, releasing the ball straight into the ground beneath him, not once but twice. And yet he continued to bowl. Their skipper had no other options. We’ve all had those despairing moments, when there is no one you can trust with the ball. You know you have to find eight overs from somewhere. Do you ask an occasional spinner, knowing he’ll concede at least 60 runs? Do you take the gloves yourself and ask the keeper to have a bowl? Dare you try the newcomer?
When it was their turn to bat, only two of their players reached double figures. Five made ducks. I’d taken the first three wickets and didn’t want to come off – I guessed what was to come and the non-captain part of me wanted the glory myself. I’ve never taken five wickets for the team and this was as good an opportunity as I’d get. A brief internal struggle ensued. It’s hard enough to get five wickets in Sunday cricket, when you usually only have seven or eight overs in which to get them. It’s even harder if you’re captain and have to think about the team. If I kept myself on, then others wouldn’t get a game. Eventually I did the right thing and brought on our left-arm spinner. He took a wicket with his first ball, three more in that over, and finished with five for 18, as we bowled them out for 102 before the drinks break. The only resistance came from their skipper, who’d bowled so well. He made a half-century but couldn’t stave off a heavy defeat. But the chasm between the teams was not as much about skill as about time spent together. We’d played together 150 times and been on five tours abroad. For the other side, this was their fourth fixture. Their branded whites and caps couldn’t disguise their rawness. Nor could their hastily bestowed nicknames.
Cricket is like poker in that you scrutinise the opposition for the faintest sign of weakness. We’ve all been misled by a player’s appearance. I’ve seen a 12-year-old throw down the stumps from midwicket, a morbidly obese number seven hit a quick-fire 80 and a 70-year-old seamer bowl a miserly ten-over spell. But usually appearances aren’t deceptive. There are hundreds of ways in which you can spot a novice cricketer. As Shakespeare put it, “The apparel oft proclaims the man”. In cricket this means that there is always a single to the man in black trainers and at least two to the fielder in chinos. Sunglasses usually denote either a very good or very weak player. The latter if they’re in any way fashionable. Other tells include struggling to return the ball to the bowler each time and constant drifting out of position in the field. Amateur cricketers often do things we’ve seen good cricketers do on TV. We shout “catch it” when the ball goes up in the air, as if that is really going to help a weak and nervous fielder under the high ball, or “bowler”, as he gathers and throws, always to the wrong end, where the batsman has comfortably made his ground. We mean to be helpful but it just doesn’t work at our level. We set fields with slips and gullies to a bowler who cannot put two balls in the same spot, let alone a set of six. We either pay no attention to the state of the ball or far too much, with each player slobbering on a different side, then trying ineffectually to shine it.
That day our opposition were guilty of many of these. One player seemed to delight in throwing the ball back to the bowler as hard as he could, stinging the hands of the next fielder. By the 30th over, their team had given up. No one knew or cared where they were meant to be. The tea interval couldn’t come quickly enough, nor the end. They shook our hands ruefully afterwards, before heading to the pub, where all games should end. The point of this is not to glory over a beaten foe – God knows we’ve been on the receiving end of hammerings enough times – but it is a useful starting point to analyse the differences between the sides, and show where a captain can make the difference, both in the short and long term.
Let’s return to the three types of captaincy, as represented by Bradman, Brearley and Barrie. Brearley was unquestionably the best skipper of the three and his The Art of Captaincy a superb insight into his leadership of the Middlesex and England sides. In the literature on the amateur game, we have mostly heard from the Barries. Their books are often hilarious as they glory in the ineptitude of their sides. But they never seem to improve. How would Brearley tackle this type of cricket? How would he make his side better? Somehow he’d harness the star league all-rounder to the man in orange shorts who was brought in at very short notice and coax them to play together effectively. But what would he do when his best bowler was driven for six off the first ball of a match? How would he handle an over which went for 37 runs? Where would he place the fielder who can’t throw, the one who can’t catch, and the one who takes his phone, pint and cigarettes onto the pitch? And how would he make sure his players turned up on time?
This is what I wanted to know, convinced that therein lay the secrets to great captaincy. Ideally I’d persuade Brearley to dust off his whites and take the field again. Instead I have gone back to his book and its structure and taken inspiration from the questions he poses in it. In each of them, surely, there is a formula for amateur captaincy. By considering them carefully, we might not scale the same heights as his teams did, but we would hopefully improve. And what more can the amateur ask for?
Captaincy in Action
It’s a beautiful summer’s day. A man stands alone outside a thatched pavilion watching a game of cricket. He is wearing whites, telling you he is not a spectator. (Though why would there be spectators at this out-of-the-way ground?) He’s looking at the batsmen out in the middle, who are making slow progress, as the scoreboard testifies. The scorer is marking each dot ball diligently in the book. But where is the rest of the side? You scan the outfield. One is umpiring at square leg. He stands there in a white coat, hoping not to be called upon to make a decision by the fielding side against his own team-mates. Another two are walking slowly around the boundary, deep in conversation about their love lives. They are the opening batsmen, Sam and Will, dismissed cheaply early on. Cricket could not be further from their minds. High on a bank above them sits another cricketer. Nick is the team’s vice-captain. No one quite knows what he is doing up there on his own – also thinking about his love life? Meditating? Learning Japanese? Being English, his team-mates never ask. They’re used to these absences. In another corner of the field stands Tom, probably the most successful member of today’s side. He is on the phone to Radio 4, who want his opinion on the Islamic State’s latest atrocity. Towards the end of the game a taxi may arrive, to whisk him off to a studio somewhere for another opinion or two. Again, cricket is not at the forefront of his mind. Another player has gone for a walk with his family who have grown mutinous at the prospect of this whole day of cricket. It is not clear if they are coming back. Their discarded newspapers and toys lie on a picnic rug in front of the pavilion. The remaining two players are in the changing room,
padding up. One will be prone, felled by a hangover. The other will be fussing over his kit, both almost entirely ignorant of the match situation. Only the captain is watching what is going on the field of play. Soon the time will come when he has to think about his own performance, like any other player, as he walks out to bat. But now he’s plotting how his team can win that afternoon.
How does a captain think?
“How should he think?” Brearley asks. The amateur captain has a great deal to ponder. First you’re thinking more prosaically – the what, rather than the how. The country’s hopes may not be riding on what happens on this field of play but you nonetheless have your preparations to make. Unlike today’s professional skipper, you are burdened with endless administrative duties in the days before a game, from selecting the team, replacing those who dropped out during the week, providing detailed directions to the ground and then driving a number of them there yourself. You may have had to shop for and make tea – these days you’ll probably have to provide vegetarian or gluten-free options – before loading the car with the paraphernalia of Sunday cricket and the items certain players left behind at the last game. Only once this is all done can you focus your thoughts on your principal role, that of on-field captain. In this, your aim is to make cricket into as much of a team sport as it can be.
The footballer Steve Archibald famously defined team spirit as “an illusion only glimpsed in victory”. It’s a fabulous line but doesn’t apply to cricket, where the best games are those in which your team fights together, in victory or defeat. Every single contribution matters. The opener makes eight runs against superb bowling, knowing that he has allowed the middle order to attack afterwards. The seamers give nothing away, as the fielders chase down every ball, as if they’d bowled it themselves. The spinners keep the pressure on and catches are all taken. Our best wins have all been like that, games in which it is hard to single out a particular player who stood out above the rest. Team spirit is forged in the heat of adversity, with shared horror stories bringing the group together. Then it cools and strengthens as the team improves.