Pipe - Cricket, A Very Peculiar History

Title Page

CRICKET, A VERY PECULIAR HISTORY

With Added Googlies

Written by

Jim Pipe

Created and designed by David Salariya

Publisher Information

First published in Great Britain in MMXII by Book House, an imprint of

The Salariya Book Company Ltd

25 Marlborough Place, Brighton BN1 1UB

www.salariya.com

www.book-house.co.uk

Digital edition converted and distributed in MMXII by

Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Editor: Jamie Pitman

Assistant editor: Tobias Short

The Salariya Book Company Ltd MMXII

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders. The Salariya Book Company apologises for any omissions and would be pleased, in such cases, to add an acknowledgement in future editions.

Visit our website at

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for free electronic versions of:

You Wouldnt Want to be an Egyptian Mummy!

You Wouldnt Want to be a Roman Gladiator!

You Wouldnt Want to Join Shackletons Polar Expedition!

You Wouldnt Want to Sail on a 19th-Century Whaling Ship!

Dedication

To CVN, for paying our wages while we played cricket upstairs. Happy days.

JP

A few reasons to play or watch cricket

You get all the benefits of the great outdoors, safe in the knowledge that if it starts to rain, you can leg it indoors along with everyone else on the pitch.

Cricket is tailor-made for the born idler, one of the few pastimes where a whole game can go by without actually having to do anything. While your colleagues are batting, its perfectly acceptable to put your feet up or doze off (England cricketer Phil Tufnell was nicknamed the cat due to his nap-taking abilities in the dressing room).

Unlike any other game ever invented, cricket always stops for tea. This pause for rest, repast and reflection is fundamental to the games civilising influence on players and fans.

The satisfaction of hitting the ball clean out of the ground, skittling out rival batsmen or plucking the ball from mid-air for a spectacular catch lives in the mind for days after.

Not just a retreat from the dull cares of life, cricket instills a range of Zen-like qualities: endless patience, the strength to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and the grace to ignore a barrage of insults while at the crease.

Picturesque cricket grounds abound. Breathe in all that scenery, from fields of sheep to centuries-old churches, while the wind whispers sweet nothings in the trees nearby.

A few reasons not to play or watch cricket

Cricket whites may be elegant, but running between the wickets with pads on is at best ungainly and at times comical.

The noble game is not all its cracked up to be. Professional players shout and scream after a run out or for an LBW decision, throw a tantrum when theyre given out, and whisper obscenities at opposition players.

Sheer boredom. In 1947, England wicket-keeper Godfrey Evans once spent and hour and 37 minutes at the crease before scoring his first run, while in 1964 Indian bowler Bapu Nadkarni bowled 131 scoreless balls in a row. Yawn.

Watching a match, Groucho Marx once famously quipped Say, when do they begin? Some would say he should have asked, When do they finish?. The timeless Test match between England and South Africa at Durban in 1939 was finally abandoned as a draw on the tenth day (after 43 hours of play) because England players had to catch their ship home.

Its not really a team game. Playing for Aberdeenshire against West Lothian, Bermudan Alma Hunt took seven wickets for 11 runs then scored the 49 runs needed to win himself in just 25 minutes. Game over.

Collecting the ball. In a pub league match in Devon, Paul Crabb of Ilfracombe had to chase a ball over a kilometre after it rolled down a steep hill. He brought it back by bus, after the driver kindly overlooked the fact he did not have the 46p fare.

Introduction

Cricket is basically baseball on valium.

Robin Williams, American actor and comedian

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

George Bernard Shaw, Irish writer and playwright

I do love cricket its so very English.

Sarah Bernhardt, French actress

Anyone for cricket?

Why do people enjoy a sport where 22 players loaf about all day? Well

Its simple. One player throws a ball, another tries to hit it. To win, all you have to do is score more runs than the opposition.

Yet complicated. With its many laws, baffling terminology and unusual scoring system, cricket is also a game of immense complexity and beauty, where skill, strategy and raw emotions combine to create a fever-pitch atmosphere. Australian novelist Thomas Keneally called cricket a sort of mystery. In the early 1930s, when Adolf Hitler decided to use the game to train his troops for war, he rewrote the laws to make them simpler. Clearly the action of a crazed madman.

Its dramatic. At its best, cricket is soap opera, with a stock of villains and heroes and regular instalments of melodrama, hysteria and nail-biting suspense.

And tribal. When Australia play England, national pride is at stake. When 260 million people sat down to watch India play Pakistan in 2004, patriotic feelings ran high.

Its varied. My own experience of playing cricket in a local league is straight out of an Agatha Christie novel: the gentle murmur of conversation around the village green, hefted agricultural strokes, ruddy-faced umpires draped with spare sweaters, and scones and cream in the pavilion. The only thing missing was a body laced with arsenic. A modern international, especially the spectacle enjoyed by Indias passionate cricket supporters, is a different beast altogether, a heady brew of thousands of baying spectators, a bowler racing in like an express train to launch a rock-hard missile at the batsmans head and the potential for pandemonium if theres any controversy on the pitch.

Cricket also comes in several flavours: long-lasting five-day Test matches (which purists consider to be the only reputable sort), chewy one day matches with a set number of overs, and for those who like an instant hit, Twenty20 games where each side has just 20 overs to produce an orgy of runs.

Its unpredictable. When a match lasts for five days, acts of God are two-a-penny, from sudden downpours and bizarre fungal infections to pitch invasions by birds and insects. No wonder cricket has been a favourite with gamblers for hundreds of years. Even when the game slows to a snails pace, there is always something going on, a subtle change in fielding positions, how a bowler varies his delivery, or the the careful way a fielder rubs spit onto the ball to make it shine.