Crossed Batting

Chappell stood as though blasted from primordial rock, staring down Michael Holding, Kerry Packer and Bradman himself. Dennis Lillee and Thomson were wicked of arm and spiteful of temperament, Thomson publicly lusting for carnage, Lillee raging ungently through each game.

The sheer animalistic force of muscle pounding the ground, or hurling the ball, or clubbing sixes was now laid bare for all to behold.

There was a physicality so visceral it hinted at the sexual: shirts draped open, dense moustaches and sweaty brows, long hair and headbands, gold medallions laid on chest thatch like a novelty jeweller's display, dressing-room photos of barely dressed players lounging insolently and heedless of the camera. There was Rod Marsh crouching like an angry wombat behind the stumps. Doug Walters and Terry Jenner playing cards and sucking down cigarettes like old war vets at an RSL. Then came Allan Border, topping even Ian Chappell in the hard-bastard stakes, and David Boon, as likely to retreat as a household brick. We had Dean Jones nearly dying in the Madras heat, and Steve Waugh who would one day break a guy's leg with his face. These were Real Men^TM, and their success was slated home to the designation.

One obvious strength of a good writer is the ability to stir the imagination when the eyes have yet to behold the reality. Lemon does this well, employing a magnificent range of vocabulary to enliven the already larger-than-life figures of Chappell, Holding, Lillee and Thomson. Even as I re-read the stunning paragraph, my eyes widen in sheer excitement and even terror! I mean, I would certainly not want to face Lillee bowling at me.

PASTORAL CRICKET

The image constructed is shocking because cricket is one of those sports that suffers insufferably from a crude stereotype. Mention the word “cricket” and which non-devotee does not conjure up the simplistic photo-vision of village greens (or in our case, padangs), men in white standing around aimlessly looking at the sky, portly umpires and spectators who apparently arrive to snooze the lazy afternoon away.

Even with the emergence of the frenetic version of T20 cricket, it is hard to garner more than a wry smile from the unconverted whenever the subject is brought up. My Head of Department (for Sports and Games!) once remarked, after trying her utmost to show an interest, that the boys “standing around in the field” looked strangely funny every time they bent over, half crouched, waiting for the arrival of the small red leather ball which seldom came their way, and when it did, more often than not, caught them by surprise.

So be it.

Even Agnes Jones Goodwillie Newton, of Oak Park, Illinois, USA, who arrived in the British administered North Borneo town of Sandakan in the mid-1930s, could barely understand the game.

And this was after one whole afternoon spent watching her husband Harry Keith, of the Forest and Agriculture Department playing in a marrieds-vs-bachelors cricket match.

Let her describe her life-changing afternoon in her own evocative words:

As I had never before seen cricket, or my husband playing it, I thought I should attend.

I went down to the padang at ten o’clock with my best hat on, as I knew the women would be there too, and we all sat under the canopy with cold drinks, and waited for the game to begin. The men were on the field in smart white flannels, moving about in such a leisurely manner and with such gentlemanly courtesy and good feeling, and such apparent desire for the opponent to make the best shots, and such well-modulated remarks of “Well bowled, sir,” that I, accustomed to American football, thought they must still be practising.

My husband was sitting (he says he was standing, but he wasn’t) in the extreme corner of the field looking at the sky. I though he was a substitute and waiting for his turn to come.

Meanwhile the gentlemen on the field continued to exchange courtesies about the weather, and to applaud each other’s plays, and occasionally one would trot good-naturedly off the field towards us, and we would pat-a-cake amiably. The trotting off the field was about the only violent movement there seemed to be. Every time someone retired I expected to see Harry flash nobly into the thick of the action, or what would have been the thick of the action if it hadn’t been cricket. But he remained with dignity at the corner of the field looking at the sky.

As I had been warned that the game might continue all day I thought I would just walk over and ask Harry if he couldn’t sit in the shade until his turn came to play. I strolled down the edge of the field to his corner, and although he seemed still to be looking at the sky he saw me out of the corner of his eye, and he looked around with disapproval at me for making myself conspicuous. Just then a ball got away from one of the quiet gentlemen who were talking about the weather in the middle of the field, and came towards Harry. But as he was looking with disapproval at me instead of the sky, the ball had the field to itself.

I went home then because apparently Harry had been playing cricket all the time, and that was what his job was, to sit in the corner of the field, and look at the sky, and not, even with good cause, to turn and look with disapproval at his wife. (Agnes Keith, Land Beneath the Wind, 1939)

For the first century or so of the game, no one understood what happened next. Science has only recently unpicked, in increments of milliseconds, what processes the body goes through when confronted with a hard leather ball propelled towards it from close range, and why some people can deal with those brief fractions of time better than others.

The initial discovery, made decades ago, was that a batsman does not watch the ball right onto the bat. Photographs taken at the moment of impact showed that the eyes were more often than not shut, the head pointing in the direction the ball was expected to be hit. But it was not until detailed research by Land and McLeod in 2000 that the reality became clear, and the reality was this: however hard anyone willed themselves to look at the ball, they would do so only fleetingly. Instead, they would play a complex visual game with its flight. First, as the ball left the bowler’s hand, the head would be still and watching. But then, about 140 milliseconds into the ball’s journey, the eyes would shift rapidly downwards and away in a movement known as a saccade, to a point on the pitch where the brain anticipated that the ball would pitch. As the head followed the eyes downwards to that point, the eyes would move upwards again as the ball bounced to watch it for another 200 milliseconds until it moved ahead of the gaze for the final 100 milliseconds until impact.

Despite all of those hours of training and urging of the will, the eyes were on the ball for around 340 of the 600 milliseconds that it took to complete its journey – or, put more simply, 57 per cent of the time.

So much for Agnes Keith’s dreamy perception of cricket, where men moved about in such leisurely fashion, and when trotting off for drinks was “about the only violent movement there seemed to be.”

And thus a game of cricket is not so languid as it all seems. A cricket afficionado would have quickly sorted out this inherent contradiction. From afar, all seems so pastoral, even medieval and timeless. At its core, however, is a bare-knuckled duel between bat and ball.

Back to “Man, Manlier, Manliest.” The strange thing is that in this (new?) brutal, power-packed cricket world, so contrary to the “village-green” stereotype, many cricketers still emerge who appear to be an affront to the “manliest” sort. Take the famous England captain, Mike Brearley for example, a rather unlikely cricketer but whose man-management skills were legendary. As an undergraduate in the early 1960s, he represented and captained Cambridge University, where he was reading Classical and Moral Sciences. In 1998, after retiring from cricket, he became an Honorary Fellow of his Cambridge college, St. John's and in 2006 was awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford Brookes University. In much of his outward appearance, mannerism and style of play, Brearley was unequivocally not “manly.”

To Australian eyes, Mike Brearley could easily have been, and generally was, mistaken for a quintessential man of the establishment. Cambridge educated, not obviously robust in appearance, and — most crucially — a captain whose place in the national team was awarded for his leadership rather than his ability with the bat, Brearley was the English antithesis of how most Australian cricket followers saw the game and its practitioners. In his book about the 1978-79 Ashes series, The Ashes Retained, he even lamented the bone-crushing Australian handshake. What could be more inflammatory to a dinkum Aussie than that? (Tim Lane, for the Sydney Morning Herald, 28 November 2015)

There are other contradictions too. For one, cricket is both a team sport yet the individualistic battle between batsman and bowler remains an essential feature of any match, whether test, ODI or T20. Here’s another - the most intense action occurs in the centre of the field, yet the wide boundaries and stretches of green (and seeming idle fielders) are crucial to the game. And another - the contrasting emotions that surface between facing a fast strike bowler and standing at “third man” are stark indeed. Even so, the complex, multi-layered nature of the game is such that even an intellectual as Mike Brearley can find a place in it. He remains to this day, widely admired for his brains rather than his brawn.

ODDITIES IN AN ODD GAME

Contradictions are essentially ideas in conflict. But ideas are representations too; and when representations are in conflict, the results are often very uncomfortable. The Australian Kim Hughes always had a difficult task when he was appointed in 1979 the captain of the test team, already much depleted and weakened by the rival breakaway World Series league. Till this day, he cuts a disconcerting, disconsolate figure, yet another of cricket’s inherent contradictions, partly because he did not fit in with the emerging manly cricketers.

According to Lemon, Hughes “never stood a chance.” Any man “named Kimberley doesn't start ahead of the game, but blond curls and delicate features finished it.” Like the Englishman David Gower, his tender looks incited “something savage in competitors who see ruggedness and plainness as authentic and deserving.” It certainly did not help “when the pretty boy gets ahead.” And when Kim Hughes was appointed national captain over Geoff Marsh, the team environment “devolved into the petty brutality of a primary school lunch break.” (Lemon, “Man, Manlier, Manliest”)

The unfortunate Kim Hughes came onto the scene during what has been termed “the bad old days of Australian cricket.” (Christian Ryan, Golden Boy: Kim Hughes And The Bad Old Days of Australian Cricket, 2009) In precisely that era when cricketers became more tough and rough, Kim was the “gifted, curly-haired dreamer in a sunhat who could do great things with a cricket bat when the mood took him.” However, it was

his effete manner which first offended the machismo sensibilities of Lillee, Marsh and the Chappells, it was Hughes’ ascent to the Test captaincy at the expense of Marsh that led to his team ‘mates’ closing ranks, leaving the ostracised Hughes burdened with an impossible job. (Richard Thomas, “The Ten: Cricket Books,” 2014)

Kim Hughes had the misfortune, not so much of being a contradiction per se, but a contradiction within his own team and in his own country. His very public and emotional announcement of his stepping down as captain of the test team will long remain seared into the minds and hearts of the cricketing universe. For years thereafter, “Kim Hughes was associated with weakness because he became teary when resigning from one of the hardest tenures in Australian captaincy.” (Lemon)

Contradictions, it must be said, make for a more dynamic, exciting and less sterile worldview. One of the sweetest draws of the game of cricket is indeed its own unfathomable mystery in a present world of instantaneous answers. Where the few taps of a keyboard, utilising some online search engine (“let’s google it!”) will prompt a long list of information, or at least websites, on any conceivable subject on earth, the game of cricket remains a conundrum to many passers-by. Understanding the game requires physical effort, discipline of mind, focussed concentration, sheer will-power and a generous stretch of time. Once an understanding and appreciation is acquired, though, the satisfaction is immense. The cricket fan is now an exclusive member of an international community whose passion and knowledge of a very complex and intricate sport is often looked upon by others with a mixture of disdain and admiration.

Contradicting responses indeed, to a rather befuddling game.