Herding Cats Read online

  Over the years we have suffered from the presence of the former Kent, Middlesex and England batsman Ed Smith in our extended squad. Ed kindly played one game for us in our first season and one in the second, and so some of our opponents assumed he’d be playing for us week in, week out and selected teams with him in mind. That day in the Valley of Rocks, a young Devon batsman was summoned from the Minor Counties Championship to put our ageing attack to the sword. Coming on as first-change, I had just started my first over and things were not going well. The opening bowlers were regretting ever having agreed to play and the fielders weren’t far behind. Our brilliant nature writer, Will, fielding at point, dived to stop another boundary. His shoulder dug into the sodden ground, instead of sliding over it, and his collarbone gave way, as it is designed to. Had I been on a hat-trick, I might have had a tricky decision to make. As it was, I didn’t. Faced with Devon’s finest batsman, I took Will to the local hospital. As we drove off, a team-mate drily asked who was going to captain, now the two public schoolboys had gone. We arrived at the hospital just as the batsman was reaching his century.

  Since then I have kept an iron grip on the reins of power, like an ageing despot with degenerate offspring, never missing a match. I once limped uselessly through an entire game, having injured my knee the day before. I was out first ball of the match, then dropped a slip catch off the first ball of the second innings. I had thought it was better to play injured than for the Authors to take the field with ten – but this proved to be vanity on my part. In another game, I played for the opposition since they were two players short and we had two spare. Our perennial number 11 Tom made his top score of 27 not out under a more enlightened regime.

  A season ago I experimented with rotating the captaincy. It was fascinating to watch. We don’t have a record of the first match this happened, since the captain that day forgot about keeping score. He also turned up so late that the opposition opened up the pavilion and got the ground ready. In another match, we crushed the opposition so brutally that they struggled to a tenth of our score. Their number 11, a fine novelist himself, said afterwards that he’d hoped for empathy from a team of writers. One of our weaker players was captaining that day and proved my theory that the most merciless skippers are those who have never been given any quarter themselves. In a timed match against a very strong opposition, I’d asked one of our better batsmen to captain. Winning the toss, he promptly opted to bat, overlooking that we only had two regular bowlers, an old ball and little chance of taking all ten wickets for victory. He made 96 and it was the closest of the many defeats we’ve had there. Another player handed back the reins in the latter stages of a last-ball thriller, feeling the pressure from all the other captains in the side. Then there was one game which I don’t remember with pride when the stand-in skipper struggled to take me off and give someone else a bowl. Like all minor tyrannies, very little thought is ever given to succession. “Après moi, le déluge.”

  Who will help him make his decisions on the field?

  Cricket is the loneliest of team sports – the batsman out in the middle surrounded by the opposition; the bowler at the start of his run-up, having just been hit for successive boundaries; the fielder who has just dropped a high catch. The captain’s role is the worst of all when things go wrong, akin to that of goalkeeper in a penalty shoot-out. In the latter, you have the chance to be a hero at least. The captain rarely is the hero in cricket – the high-fives are for the bowler, rightly, rather than the person who made the change. When your attack is being flogged all around the field or your batsmen are coming back to the pavilion in a procession, your players look expectantly to you, to make that decision that will turn things around. But what do you do? And who will help you?

  There are two principal approaches to on-field captaincy, which in political terms can be classed as Right and Left. In the latter, the state/captain is all-important and will micromanage absolutely everything. Nothing should happen without your involvement. Every fielder is given a precise position in which to stand. One is on shining duties at cover and the ball should be returned there as quickly as possible. Woe betide the bowler who suggests an alteration to the field without asking the captain first. We’ve all heard the pompous cry of “through me please”, when he isn’t consulted. With this approach the fielders will usually be in too great a state of fear to suggest any tactical or field changes.

  The alternative method was defined by Keith Miller, who, on taking the field, just told his fielders to scatter. This is the free market in its most perfect form. Fielders go where the whim takes them. If it’s nicer in the shade then one side of the field will be more protected than the other and bowlers must take note and keep the right line. Players will drift towards those they’d like to talk to that afternoon. The ones who like fielding will position themselves accordingly with others hiding at a safe distance behind square. The bowler will scream ineffectively at everyone in the field but they’ll all keep doing their own thing. I have occasionally played with the former head of the UK’s Libertarian Party and he was very much of this school of thought, fielding where he wanted, fuelled by the ale he’d brought in the place of cricket kit. He arrives in his whites, knowing that they will be spotless after the game and he can wear them home.

  Somehow you have to find a third way, with a certain amount of direction in the field, but not so much that the over rate reaches Test match levels. You will usually be grateful for the help of various players – your keeper, first slip and mid-off and mid-on, all of whom can see what’s happening clearer than anyone else. That is where you want to station your better cricket brains, not least because you will cross paths with them more often, at the end of each over. The player whose every suggestion can be discarded should be put out in the deep, where no one can hear him scream.

  Do any general principles exist governing sound selection?

  In Test cricket the captain hopes for technically sound opening batsmen, one right-handed, one left-, one attacking, one more defensive. After that, a world-class number three, with strokemakers at four and five, before the all-rounder at six, wicketkeeper-batsman at seven, and then four bowlers, who will all trouble the batsmen in different ways. One will offer outright pace and bounce, another mastery of swing and seam with a left-arm mirror image of this at first-change. Then a spin bowler of extraordinary accuracy and dexterity who can bowl “dry” for long spells, and run through batting line-ups in more helpful conditions.

  In the amateur game you are more realistic. For starters, your aim is just to get 11 players. Then you need at least three of them to have cleanish driving licences and cars to ferry your players there. After that you can think about cricket ability. Someone will need to keep wicket. You’d like a player who will take at least four out of five catches, concede a handful of byes on a difficult wicket and keep the side alert and tidy in the field. You’d settle for someone with his own keeping kit, meaning you don’t have to ask the opposition if you can borrow theirs. For many Sunday sides the keeper is a figure of fun, and more than one have nicknamed theirs the Human Sieve. The keeper is also burdened with the role of sledger in chief. Often it feels as if the opposition has chosen their most annoying player and positioned him closest to the batsman to disconcert him.

  Once you have allocated the gloves, you will look for two opening bowlers who will send the ball thudding into them again and again, testing the batsmen just outside off stump. Your opening attack will set the tone for the game. There are few things worse than an innings that begins with a plethora of wides and no-balls. If cricket is a religion, this is sacrilege, heresy and blasphemy all rolled into one. Even the batsmen would prefer a bit of consistency instead of being dismissed by the only good ball of the over. If you’re playing limited-overs cricket, you will need a first- and second-change, both of whom should not be completely hopeless if you are to make a game of it. The third-change, however, can be a terrible player. This is when you deploy your lob bowler, who’ll go
for eight an over but might just get you a wicket or two. Ideally you want a reserve option – one of your batsmen who can also bowl – to take over when the situation demands it.

  With five slots remaining, you can address the batting. Most batsmen will want a berth in the middle order. They all want to feast on the change bowling, with the true dross to come once they’ve got their eye in. But really they’re there because they don’t bowl. Your choice of openers is key. If you have two good batsmen comfortable in the role, then great. This is rare. It is more likely that you’ll choose the most disposable batsmen to go up top. They are happy there because it’s the one place where no one will complain about their scoring rate, for at least eight overs. You are happy because they won’t be clogging up the middle order and losing you the game. Plus, if you’re lucky, they’ll be out in the sixth over, having taken a bit of shine and hardness off the ball and protected your best batsmen from their best bowlers.

  Of your five batsmen you would hope that three of them have some shots in their locker and are capable of upping the run-rate. Of your bowlers and keeper, you’d hope that three of them have some ability with the bat. My team-mate Richard, a fine and obdurate opening batsman, was captaining once and asked a player where he batted. “Eleven” came the response. Richard persisted, wanting to know: “Are you a hitting eleven or a blocking eleven?”

  The last selection point is about quality. Not all of your fixtures will be against sides of the same standard. Saturday teams don’t struggle with this – their firsts play other first teams and the league structure pits everyone against reasonably well-matched sides. As a Sunday captain, however, you somehow have to steer certain players towards certain games without insulting them. The truth is that they will not hold up well against 75mph bowling nor batsmen who will hit them out of the attack in one over. You may even find that your better players do the opposite, making themselves available against the weaker teams. Then it is easier to flatter them into doing something else that day. We would all love to be deselected for being too good. A regular can play against anyone but the part-timers should only be selected for the right games. The most important thing is to have the spine of a side – an opening bat, a middle-order shot-maker, an all-rounder, a keeper and a seamer or two who play week in, week out. With these in place, you can integrate the newcomers around them. They don’t have to be devastatingly good, just reliable and able to provide dressing-room harmony.

  Is there a structure of youth cricket within the club, through which the senior sides may expect to receive a flow of promising players?

  Proper clubs have structures of youth cricket, with Colts sides aplenty. Sunday teams have a small squad and their children, who may one day be enlisted. The players who come to you are promising in that they have told you that they are good. You will need the forensic skills of a criminal barrister as you seek to establish the truth of what they tell you about previous cricket performances. I have played with enough players whose verbal alchemy turns a terrible performance into something passable. They are far from being the exception.

  In 2011, Worcestershire released a young batsman, Adrian Shankar. Plenty of players don’t make it in first-class cricket but what was strange here was that the county had only signed him a fortnight earlier. Even more unusually they reported him to the police afterwards. Shankar had come to their attention after a run-filled winter in Sri Lanka. Previously he had been under contract at Lancashire and had played for their Second XI, as well as for Bedfordshire in the Minor Counties Championship. His sporting CV mentioned a century for Cambridge University in the Varsity Match, as well as spells in Arsenal’s academy and the national junior tennis squad. He went straight into Worcestershire’s first team as an opener, and was out third ball for nought. In his next innings he made ten before retiring injured. He didn’t play for them again and subsequent investigations showed that he was three years older than he’d claimed and that parts of his story was embellished or made up. He had played in Sri Lanka but not at first-class level, and some of those he said he’d faced in particular matches were demonstrably elsewhere on those days.

  Stories like this one are rare in the professional game. Usually the counties check the players’ records a little more carefully. But at our level this sort of embellishment is all too frequent and there have been several players I would happily report to the police. Fantasy is a big part of Sunday cricket after all. Most of us delude ourselves a little bit about our abilities and some take it further. I know a number of people who claim to have played junior county or other representative cricket – almost all of them with or against Andrew Flintoff. If their claims are true, the county game would be in a rude state of health and it is no surprise Flintoff’s knees gave out on him. A few of them did play at that level, but more often than not their stories don’t add up. If they really were that good aged 16, why are they so bad now? Surely some trace of that skill would remain, even as the athleticism vanished. At least the mindset would still be there. Knowing your game is one of the most important parts of cricket after all. Shankar didn’t and he is not alone. My suspicion is that many of these players who claim to have played junior county cricket instead turned up to trials there. For these they would have been nominated by their clubs or schools, but there is a big difference between going to a trial and making the cut.

  Learning to judge a player whom you’ve never seen play is a vital skill.

  In these situations, you’re relying on a player’s word. Iris Murdoch wrote her first novel, Under the Net, about the failure of language. Never will it let you down more than here. “So what do you do?” you’ll ask, with the same despair as a hairdresser asking a teenage boy how he’d like his hair cut. You’re hoping for a clear response which lets you know exactly what you can expect from this player. Something along the lines of “I open the bowling for my club seconds, medium-pace, outswing. I bat at seven or eight and can score quickly. I am better in the outfield than in the slips and I can still throw to the keeper from the boundary.” But you won’t get this. Most will claim to be a middle-order batsman. “I bat a bit”, they’ll say. This could mean anything, from opening for their university to successfully weathering a testing spell from their younger sister in childhood.

  My favourite ever response came from a languid latecomer, who’d kindly filled in for us at short notice. He was a bowler, he said. He was tall and reasonably athletic looking. But to counterbalance that he’d turned up 40 minutes late in orange shorts. I put him at number 11 and he duly didn’t get a bat. Later, in the field, I asked him exactly what he bowled. “Inside fast”, he replied. By this stage, the prospect of victory was fast receding. The opposition’s star batsman was well set and making a tricky pitch look easy. The ball had lost its hardness and shine, after countless visits into the distant undergrowth. I couldn’t refuse the newcomer a bowl, despite my instincts. But what was inside fast? And how should I set a field to it? As he marked out his run-up, our mid-on asked him again what he bowled. “Just wait and see”, came the jaunty response.

  The first over of inside fast took a mere seven balls to bowl and cost 12 runs – the burly batsman hitting a four and a six. It could have been so much worse. But the batsman was only getting started and perhaps didn’t want to hit this bowler out of the attack. He was experienced enough to know that you can shear a sheep many times but only skin him once. I’d seen enough and took him off. The warning signs were there – the shorts, the lateness, the terminology – but I had to give him a bowl. After all, it’s one of the cardinal rules of Sunday cricket that if you turn up, you get to do something. Thankfully the match wasn’t in the balance. Just sometimes the terrible bowler will buy you that crucial wicket. More often than not he’ll cost you the game.

  Nothing changes the course of a match like an over going for 20-odd runs. I learned this from bitter experience and have bowled a few such overs myself. Cricket is all about momentum and as one player implodes, so does everything else, as the
amateur captain watches on helplessly.

  The Morning of the Match

  Hugh de Selincourt’s The Cricket Match opens with a young boy waking at quarter to five on a Saturday in a state of high excitement at the prospect of the game ahead. He’s not even definitely selected but he leans out of the window to check the weather. It is a glorious day, thankfully. “What a morning! What a morning! What luck!” he exclaims in the breathy way fictional children sometimes speak. The narrative then switches to other members of the team, who make their own preparations for the day’s play. The opening bowler is whiting his pads and boots, before a morning’s work bricklaying. The local squire, meanwhile, is having breakfast in bed, while his maid lays out five pairs of trousers for him to consider. The treasurer is also breakfasting in bed, while trying on the club’s new caps, which have arrived that morning. The players’ mindsets range from pleasant anticipation to rancour at how the club is being run. The captain is dealing with other problems, namely the withdrawal of the wicketkeeper. He has to cycle round the village to find another player who’ll take the gloves.

  The night before the match is often plagued by worries that the weather gods will ruin the day’s pleasure. The professionals may occasionally find rain a relief, allowing them to rest tired bodies. But a cancelled match is the worst possible outcome for the amateur cricketer. You often do wake in the middle of the night, wondering if that was a sudden shower, suffused with the dread that the match will be off. It was bad enough getting out cheaply last weekend but not having another match in which to make amends … That is the worst possible outcome for a cricketer.