A celebration of cricket

BUSINESS DAY, 25 NOVEMBER 1999

HARK! THE DISTANT THWACK of leather on willow! The soft patter like rain on an English summer resort of applause at the start of play! The slow creak and crack and ka-pow of Allan Donald’s ligaments! If you listen closely, you can hear the low rumble of Darryl Cullinan brooding. It can only mean that cricket is here, and if all is not exactly right with the world, then it is at least not all wrong.

When finally I shuffle off this mortal coil, bury me on a grass embankment – if you can find one at an SA test venue – with a clear view of the scoreboard, in easy range of the man selling the draught beer in the big plastic cups, and know that I will be facing my own private timeless test with a sigh and a smile and lazy howzat. For as long as there are 22 grown men in white flannels (as well as two umpires and a third to watch the television replays) prepared to spend five days in painstaking pursuit of a phantasm, wrapped in a memory, swaddled in a dream, then all is not lost, for I will know there is still place in the world for the fine and the foolish and the noble pursuit of the pointless.

Cricket is the game that most closely approximates life – it seems long but is deceptively short; it is circular and repetitive but moves to an inexorable end; it is just but not always fair; it follows a system of tightly woven logic, playing itself out in a charmed circle of glorious absurdity.

Perhaps the highest praise for the game of cricket is that the Americans so thoroughly fail to understand it. For cricket, bless it, is by all reasonable standards an exercise in madness. It is ludicrous, and that is the point, for “ludicrous” literally means “done in sport” or “playing the game”. And playing the game is what we still like to pretend that cricket is all about. This season England returns to South Africa for a tour, and there is a pleasing symmetry that they should return for the centenary of their hitherto most significant tussle with the home team. Even in the midst of bloody warfare, cricket played its role as a measure of civilised madness.

During the early stages of the Anglo-Boer War, the British in Mafeking were besieged by the Boers (commanded, then as now, by one General Cronjé). In April 1900 Veldkornet Sarel Eloff, a grandson of Paul Kruger, sent a note through the lines to Robert Baden-Powell, commander of the Mafeking garrison:

I see that your men play cricket on Sundays. If you would allow my men to join in, it would be very agreeable to me. Wishing you a pleasant day, I remain your obliging friend,

S Eloff

Baden-Powell, with a wily evasiveness alas unavailable to Nasser Hussain, declined, but you can but sigh for a time when cricket provided such a bond between civilised men. Perhaps it is simply spring fever talking, but I have never looked forward to a summer with keener pleasure. Ah, to be at the Wanderers, now that spring and England are here.