The Picador Book of Cricket
Page 53
In the Essex second innings Pearce and Peter Smith made a stand of 133 but they had to fight every run. The Australians bowled and fielded seriously and unsparingly to the last Essex wicket, and they won by an innings and 145 runs. They never gave away a run, never relaxed, the field was always placed as tightly as it would stretch round the batsman. The Australians play their hardest and they expect their opponents to do the same, then, they say, in effect, the result is absolutely accurate.
So far, so good, we know where the Australians stand, we know where we stand. But, unless we are prepared to play as hard as the Australians then we ought not to play Test cricket against them. There has long been a custom in much English cricket for the batsman to ‘give the bowler a chance’ after he has scored a hundred. An Australian batsman merely takes guard afresh after the first hundred: of Bradman’s 108 scores of over 100, 37 – more than a third of them – have also been over 200. Again, we expect that, in Test matches, where the bowling and fielding combination is stronger, batsmen will not score so heavily as in ordinary county or state matches – but Barnes, Bradman, Miller and Morris have higher averages in Tests than in ordinary games!
The Australians set out to win Tests. They start at the bottom, they train their youngsters hard. The young Australian cricketer fights for his place in grade cricket – often against seasoned Test players. And the Australians trust their young men early with great Test-match responsibilities. There is a single-mindedness about their cricket – Lindwall, Loxton and Miller gave up football in the preceding Australian season to be certain of being fit for their tour of England. Several doctors sat on a consultative board to decide whether Toshack was absolutely fit to make the trip. Recall, too, that there is no full-time professionalism in Australian cricket and that many of the men making an English tour are saved financial loss only by their (uncertain) tour bonus. They draw no pay from their jobs in Australia and their pocket money for the tour is much less than their normal wage. There are strict rules against players being accompanied by their wives, against their broadcasting or writing. They are here to play cricket and they are not to be diverted from that purpose.
We in England can learn from them. Some of our players have already done so – it was Hutton who took fresh guard after his first hundred to go on and break the record for a Test innings at the Oval in 1938. Godfrey Evans batted 100 minutes for 0, doggedly partnering Denis Compton in the fourth (Adelaide) Test in 1946–7. Denis Compton is a great batsman when all depends on him – but sometimes, when things are going well, he seems to relax as the Australians never do.
We are faced with Australian batting, bowling, fielding, captaincy – and ‘Australianism’. ‘Australianism’ means single-minded determination to win – to win within the laws but, if necessary, to the last limit within them. It means that where the ‘impossible’ is within the realm of what the human body can do, there are Australians who believe that they can do it – and who have succeeded often enough to make us wonder if anything is impossible to them. It means that they have never lost a match – particularly a Test match – until the last run is scored or their last wicket has fallen.
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In the scattered islands of the Caribbean, cricket is more than a game. It has been, indeed, the vehicle of anticolonialism and cultural assertiveness. Dozens of small nations, each with its own army, flag and seat in the United Nations, come together as ‘the West Indies’ for the purposes of cricket. The social significance of sport was brilliantly captured in the title, contents and conclusions of C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary. I reproduce here a review of that book, published when the book appeared and written by the young V. S. Naipaul. In the essay that follows, the novelist J. B. Priestley, a Yorkshireman, marvels at the fluid grace of the great Garfield Sobers. This tribute was written at the end of a summer in which Sobers led the West Indies to a 3–1 win over England. In the five Tests he himself scored 722 runs, took 20 wickets, and held 10 catches.
V. S. NAIPAUL
The Caribbean Flavour (1963)
‘Who is the greatest cricketer in the world?’ The question came up in a General Knowledge test one day in 1940, when I was in the fourth standard at the Tranquillity Boys’ School in Port of Spain. I saw it as a trap question. Though I had never seen him play, and he was reported to live in England, no cricketer was better known to me than Learie Constantine. Regularly in the Trinidad Guardian I saw the same picture of him: sweatered, smiling, running back to the pavilion bat in hand. To me the bat was golden: Constantine, in a previous General Knowledge test, had proved to be ‘the man with the golden bat’ as, earlier, he had been ‘the man with the golden ball’. But now – the greatest cricketer? I wrote, ‘Bradman.’ This was wrong; the pencilled cross on my paper was large and angry. ‘Constantine’ was the answer to this one too.
The teacher was a Negro, brown-skinned, but this is a later assessment and may be wrong: to me then, and for some time afterwards, race and colour were not among the attributes of teachers. It is possible now to see his propaganda for Constantine as a type of racialism or nationalism. But this would be only part of the truth. Racial pride pure and simple in the victories of Joe Louis, yes. But the teacher’s devotion to Constantine was more complex. And it is with the unravelling of this West Indian complexity that C. L. R. James, politician, pamphleteer, historian, former cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, is concerned. He has done his job superbly.
Beyond a Boundary, like Nirad Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, is part of the cultural boomeranging from the former colonies, delayed and still imperfectly understood. With one or two exceptions, a journalistic reaction to his material – cricket – has obscured the originality of Mr James’s purpose and method.
Since 1950 the newspapers have perhaps made us too familiar with calypsos at Lord’s. For West Indians, as one cricket writer says, the game is a carnival. But what a game to choose for a carnival! It is leisurely, intricate, difficult to appreciate, its drama often concealed or curtailed; and the players stop for tea. Soccer, swift, short and brutal, would have been more suitable; or baseball, or bullfighting. But cricket has been chosen; and the conclusion must be that we are dealing with more than the picturesque. Consider just what cricket means to the West Indian: in Trinidad, with a population of 800,000, 30,000 can go to a Test match on one day. Consider the mixed population. Here is Mr James describing the cricket field of his school in the 1910s:
We were a motley crew. The children of some white officials and white business men, middle-class blacks and mulattos, Chinese boys, some of whose parents still spoke broken English, Indian boys, some of whose parents could speak no English at all, and some poor black boys who had won exhibitions or whose parents had starved and toiled on plots of agricultural land and were spending their hard-earned money on giving the eldest boy an education. Yet rapidly we learned to obey the umpire’s decision . . . We learned to play with the team.
Racial generalizations – about certain people being good at ball games – won’t help. There has been no West African cricketer; the only Chinese cricketers of standing have come from Trinidad; and, though the fact is seldom noticed, white West Indians have produced more first-class players per thousand of their population than any other community anywhere. Consider now the history of the islands: slavery until 1834, indentured labour until 1917. And then consider the cricket code: gentlemanliness, fair play, teamwork. The very words are tired and, in the West Indian situation, ridiculous, irrelevant. But they filled a need. In islands that had known only brutality and proclaimed greed, cricket and its code provided an area of rest, a release for much that was denied by the society: skill, courage, style: the graces, the very things that in a changed world are making the game archaic. And the code that came with the game, the code recognized by everyone, whatever his race or class, was the British public-school code:
I learned and obeyed and taught a code, the English public-school code. Britain and her co
lonies and the colonial peoples. What do the British people know of what they have done there? Precious little. The colonial peoples, particularly West Indians, scarcely know themselves as yet.
Twenty years ago the colonial who wrote those words might have been judged to be angling for an OBE or MBE. But Mr James, who is over sixty, has a background of Marxism (he was a prominent follower of Trotsky) and African nationalism. He was the first of the emigrant West Indian writers; and his first book, published in 1933, was The Case for West Indian Self-Government. Self-government has more or less come to the West Indies; Sir Learie Constantine is now the Trinidad High Commissioner in London. The West Indies, captained for the first time by a black man, did great things in Australia in 1960–1. A quarter of a million people came out into the streets of Melbourne to say goodbye to the cricketers: West Indian cricket’s finest moment, which Mr James sees as something more. ‘Clearing their way with bat and ball, West Indians at that moment had made a public entry into the comity of nations.’ It is a success story, then, that Mr James has to tell, but an odd one, since it is also the story of the triumph of the code. To Mr James Frank Worrell is more than the first black West Indian captain: ‘Thomas Arnold, Thomas Hughes and the Old Master himself would have recognized Frank Worrell as their boy.’
This is the last sentence of Mr James’s book, and this is his astounding thesis. To dismiss it would be to deny the curious position of the West Indies and West Indians in the Commonwealth, to fail to see that these territories are a unique imperial creation, where people of many lands, thrown together, ‘came to maturity within a system that was the result of centuries of development in another land, was transplanted as a hothouse flower is transplanted and bore some strange fruit’. Stollmeyer, Gomez, Pierre, Christiani, Tang Choon, Ramadhin: the names of West Indian cricketers are sufficient evidence. To be a nationalist, Mr James says elsewhere, you must have a nation. The African in Africa had a nation; so had the Asian in Asia. The West Indian, whatever his community, had only this ‘system’; and my fourth-standard teacher could only grope towards some definition of his position in the world by his devotion to Constantine.
It is part of the originality and rightness of Mr James’s book that he should have combined the story of his development within the system with his view of West Indian political growth, and combined that with sketches of West Indian cricketers he knew and watched develop. In the islands the cricketers were familiar to many; they were as much men as cricketers. So they emerge in Mr James’s pages, but even so they remain touched with heroic qualities, for their success, as with Constantine or Headley, was the only type of triumph the society as a whole knew. And their failure, as with Wilton St Hill who, achieving nothing in England in 1928, remained all his life a clerk in a department store, bitter tragedy.
How did Mr James become part of this ‘system’? He was born in a small Trinidad country town at the turn of the century. His father was a teacher. Yet slavery had been abolished only seventy years before, and ‘Cousin Nancy, who lived a few yards away, told many stories of her early days as a house-slave.’ Already, then, the slave society had been transformed, its assumptions destroyed; and this rapid transformation must be regarded as part of the West Indian good fortune. The family was not rich, but for the young James, as for every boy in the island, there was a narrow way out. Every year the government offered four exhibitions to one of the two secondary schools. There a boy could get a Senior Cambridge Certificate, which would ensure a modest job in the civil service. He could do more: he could win one of the three annual scholarships. With this he could get a profession in England, come back to Trinidad, make money and achieve honour. The form of promising boys was studied as carefully as that of racehorses; the course, from exhibition to scholarship, aroused island-wide interest and excitement.
James won his exhibition. He came from a house with books. Preparing for his exhibition, he became a ‘British intellectual long before I was ten, already an alien in my own environment’. But he was ready for the public-school code of the Queen’s Royal College, staffed for two generations by Oxford and Cambridge men. ‘Our masters, our curriculum, our code of morals, everything began from the basis that Britain was the source of all light and leading, and our business was to admire, wonder, imitate, learn.’ It was not hard. The colony might be ruled autocratically by Englishmen, but there was as yet no National Question and, within the school, no race question. ‘If the masters were so successful in instilling and maintaining their British principles as the ideal and norm it was because within the school, and particularly on the playing field, they practised them themselves . . . They were correct in the letter and in the spirit.’ They were also not competing with any other system. Today, he says, these teachers with their ‘bristling Britishness’ would be anachronisms. But was it possible to reject them then? Was it possible for Mr James, forty years later, at a public meeting in Manchester, to accept Mr Aneurin Bevan’s sneers at public-school morality? As it was, however, the playing fields of Queen’s Royal College undid Mr James. Cricket possessed him; he did not win the scholarship. But he had educated himself ‘into a member of the British middle class’. In 1932, with the encouragement and help of Learie Constantine, he came to England. And he has been a wanderer ever since.
To me, who thirty years later followed in his path almost step by step – but I only watched cricket, and I won the scholarship – Mr James’s career is of particular interest. Our backgrounds were dissimilar. His was Negro, puritan, fearful of lower-class contamination; mine was Hindu, restricted, enclosed. But we have ended speaking the same language; and though England is not perhaps the country we thought it was, we have both charmed ourselves away from Trinidad. ‘For the inner self,’ as Mr James writes, ‘the die was cast.’
In our absence the static society we knew has altered. Secondary education is free. Not three, but more like thirty, scholarships are given each year. With the new nationalism and confidence, the public-school code has become as anachronistic as the masters who taught it. What new code will be developed in a society so clearly British-made? Cricket is no longer a substitute for nationalism. Has it then served its purpose, and will it die in the West Indies as it has died (in spite of Dexter, in spite of the Lord’s Test) in England? Trinidad, we must remind ourselves, has produced no major player since Ramadhin, discovered in 1950. It would be interesting to have Mr James’s views. In the meantime let us rejoice over what he has given us. Beyond a Boundary is one of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West Indies, important to England, important to the West Indies. It has a further value: it gives a base and solidity to West Indian literary endeavour.
J. B. PRIESTLEY
The Lesson of Garfield Sobers (1966)
I seem to have spent a lot of time, this summer, sitting in front of the TV watching Garfield Sobers. Always I have stared at him out of a mixture of apprehension and admiration. He frightened me and enchanted me by turns. Batting, bowling, fielding, captaining his side, he seemed to be pronouncing, often with a grin, the doom of the England XI. More than once – in the bitter hours facing defeat – I wished he would sprain a wrist or turn an ankle. But even so, admiration came seeping through these mud walls of partisanship. And it was not only his feats with bat and ball that compelled my applause; it was his style and manner, the way he carried himself, the way he moved.
There is none of the chin-up-chest-out nonsense about Sobers. He isn’t one of your stiff-necked athletes. He carries his head slightly forward, as if eager to swing the bat or deliver the ball and so break another record, and he seems to ripple towards the wickets. All is loose, easy, instant and powerful. And if I were coaching young cricketers – though I must add here that I think some of ours have been over-coached and so torment themselves wondering what is the correct stroke to play – I would show them films of this great cricketer, asking them to note his posture and movements, his avoidance of unnecessary effort and strain, the whole cat-like style of th
e man.
I don’t know what happens now in military training, but I do know that the way we were taught to carry ourselves in 1914 and early 1915 was utterly and damnably wrong, the worst possible preparation for what we were called to endure later at the front. Nothing was loose and easy, minimizing effort and strain. It was as if we were being drilled to go on guard at Buckingham Palace, not to survive long night marches, to carry heavy coils of barbed wire up slippery communication trenches, to go raiding across no man’s land. I realize that today’s army is far more sensible than the one I knew (it could hardly be less), but it might be helpful, even today, if somebody in charge of training took a good look at Garfield Sobers.
But while we remain with the body I am like a hippopotamus trying to describe a leopard, so now I turn with relief to the mind. This doesn’t mean – please, please, everybody! – that I imagine that my own mind has the loping ease and then the instant power of a Sobers in the field. What it does mean is that I believe there is a mental equivalent of the Sobers style. And indeed we can choose as an example a member of his own race, for I have always liked the story of the old coloured woman who was asked how she had been able to cope with her own troubles and also help many other people. She replied: ‘I wear my life like a loose garment.’