Now is September Passing Through

 In the Nineteen Sixties, Leslie Frewin edited and contributed to three cricket anthologies, The Boundary Book, The Poetry of Cricket and Cricket Bag.  They are treasure troves; ‘blogs’ of their day.  Third Man is sure that Frewin would relish this medium.

The Cricket Bag concludes with one of his poems which Third Man hopes no one will mind him passing on.

The photograph above was unearthed from the countless images to be found on the web.  It serves as a mark of respect to all who played in 2010 and as a memorial to the unknown village side, especially to those who may knowingly or unknowingly have played their last game – the bowled September men of the poem.

With the addition of a few imaginary numbers, this single still image captures as much as de Selincourt’s The Cricket Match and much more than anything broadcast by Sky. 

It could have been taken almost anywhere and anywhen.  Someone is rushing up from Third Man, so excited for his team that he cannot keep his cap on and just MUST scratch his head.  “Well I never, well I never.” 

The umpire at the batsman’s end is replacing the bails so we can conclude that the bowled September man has just left the scene … forever.

Now is September Passing Through

Now is September passing through,

The golden days are over, swift they came

With soft expectancy and magic new

Tempting our senses with ephemeral fame.

O, there has been much laughter, much that’s fine

Where flannelled fools have roved, and umpires called

Not Out! And now the darkness sets in other time

To hush the scene which once the wickets ruled.

The night has come, let’s close the echoing bar

Where evenings, after match, good fellowship was all,

But thoughts again will wander to a summer far

Ahead of winter, and to bat and ball.

Now is September passing through

The rusted gates of wind and storm and rain,

The cold is cold, and fires leap anew

Until the cricket season comes again

As come it will, when winter’s chafing hand

Conjures the dreamed-of scores that might-have-been,

When pads will re-emerge, and wickets proudly stand

Once more upon the village and the county green.

And who shall play again?  Whose names be on the card,

In some new season, by pavilion door?

Who, too, shall toast with sadness and regard

The bowled September men who’ll play no more?

By Leslie Frewin

The Role of Imaginary Numbers in Understanding a Game of Cricket

 

Upon retirement the Cumberland fast left arm round-the-wicket swinger, Melvin Bragg, launched a radio discussion series for the BBC exploring the history of ideas.  He called the series In Our Time Machine.    A sub-editor at the Radio Times, short of space but not of time, removed the word Machine from the title so that the series is widely but erroneously known as In Our Time.

Melvin has a Type II Time Machine which, although stylistically an inferior model, does the basics very well, though it must be rather cramped for four.

Melvin travels as he bowled, that is, furiously and with an unreliable internal radar system.  The cluster of short legs that he insisted on having round the bat were often in greater danger than the batsman.

For this reason time travellers give Broadcasting House a wide berth on Thursday mornings and use The Radio Times to forewarn them of dates and locations to avoid when Melvin and his mates are fooling around in the continuum.

This week the programme  covered the subject of imaginary numbers and, while Melvin and his mates were coming and going, only the reckless among other time travellers dared drop in at the C16th Lombardy home of Hieronymus Cardanus   (to use his Sunday name) for morning coffee or any of the mid C16th haunts of Rafael Bombelli for a gossip or Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss’ very late C18th rooms for a morning glass of schnapps. 

Third Man has always left ‘that which is under the bonnet’ of his Mark III to the village blacksmith, but apparently for some (the French cricketer with a limited back lift, Rene Descarte being one) there can be a difficulty in imagining a number which when squared comes to minus 1 or, for others, seeing the back of their head in a mirror (not of course for Rene Magritte -see above).

As any fule kno, Bombelli in L’Algebra (1569) had been the first to perform computations with negative numbers and ‘Minus times minus makes plus’. So, as Form 3B would say,  ‘timesing’ a number by itself to produce -1 is pretty damned difficult and would have given even Roy Webber, Arthur Wrigley and Bill Frindall a few sleepless nights.

Third Man finds “Just jump” a helpful rule of thumb.  Imagine a number with the property that, when squared, equals minus one.  That should do it: viz.  i ² = −1 where i is the imaginary unit, et voila M. Descarte.

With these imaginary units Third Man finds he can work with real units to pry into the meaning of most experiences and take a shufty at ‘the thing in itself’ .

[Skip the following if you’re tired but the Squire, who is a member of the Royal Society and who likes to think he understands these things, insists that Third Man uses some of his notes on the concept of complex numbers (found here).    

[We can represent a complex number by  a + bi  where a and b are real numbers, and i is the imaginary unit, which has the property i ² = −1.  The real number a is called the real part of the complex number, and the real number b is the imaginary part.  For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number, with real part 3 and imaginary part 2.  If z = a + bi, the real part a is denoted Re(z) or ℜ(z), and the imaginary part b is denoted Im(z) or ℑ(z). 

[The complex numbers (C) are regarded as an extension of the real numbers (R) by considering every real number as a complex number with an imaginary part of zero. The real number a is identified with the complex number a + 0i. Complex numbers with a real part of zero (Re(z)=0) are called imaginary numbers. Instead of writing 0 + bi, that imaginary number is usually denoted as just bi. If b equals 1, instead of using 0 + 1i or 1i, the number is denoted as i.] 

Complex but rewarding stuff if you have time enough.

Actually it maybe a lot easier just to look at a couple of paintings by  the rather stolid Belgian opening batsman Rene Magritte, who like Boycott is in to hats in a big way as this portrait demonstrates.

Magritte’s juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context gives new meanings to familiar things.  Very a + bi . 

In works entitled The Human Condition, (above and below) Rene Magritte tries to make the point that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself.  (To substitute ‘ the thing in itself’ here may be going too far but these two examples begin to make the point.

Ceci n'est pas un match de cricket

Third Man’s own surrealistic work (left) and homage to Magritte “Ceci n’est pas un match de cricket” with it’s realistic representation of the 2009 Lord’s Test complete score card appears at first sight a contradiction but is of course actually and indisputably true.

Indeed this is not the cricket match – the cricket match, qua the thing in itself (to borrow from Kant and Schopenhauer), was contained somewhere in a complex combination of the real and the imaginary parts of the continuing Clarke/Hadden partnership and Andrew Flintoff’s fitness on that final day of the match.

Could Clarke and Hadden ensure Australia made 522 to make cricketing history and go one up in the series? Could Flintoff take his first 5fer at Lord’s in his last Test match there … even possibly in his last ever Test appearance?

Prior to the start of play that morning, Flintoff bowled just two deliveries in the nets before limping back to the Pavilion, leaving a trail of questions.

The next installment which follows the match next day can be found here.

A Manifesto of the Imagination or The Vanity of Trying to Conveying Meaning through Real Numbers.

Third Man comes from a generation for whom Roy Webber and Arthur Wrigley were the great notchers; the principle scorers and statisticians of their age.  For us Bill Frindall was an off-comer and, to be frank, a bit of an up-start whom we never could quite come to accept – altogether more obtrusive than either Roy or Arthur.  They thought scorers should be neither seen nor heard.

TM is sure that most of his readers will be shocked by this opinion and criticism of the ‘The Bearded Wonder’.  It is nothing personal (well it is really).  It is not simply a function of familiarity and discomfort with change.  The cult of the scorer, the primacy of statistics takes us away from the meaning of events.

The way such a reader may feel about Bill is the way TM felt about Roy, whose italic handwriting decorated our small black and white television screens.  As a batsman made his way back to the hutch we waited for the ink to dry on his beautiful score card (literally) which was held up in rather shaky fashion to the camera probably with the aid of a collapsible music stand. 

Roy was the invisible man in BBC television cricket coverage until his early and tragic death from a heart attack in 1962 when only 48.  Among many publications he compiled two volumes of Test Cricket scores.

Over on the Third Programme Howard Marshall had selected (interesting term) Arthur Wrigley to assist him in his commentary on the England v Australia Test match at Old Trafford in 1934, the same year in which Arthur had been ‘invited’ (another interesting term) to join the playing staff of the Lancashire County Cricket Club. 

On Roy’s death, Arthur took up one of Roy’s mantles when he produced The Book of Test Cricket published by the Epworth Press in 1965.  For TM it could be said that Test cricket stopped at the Oval in 1964, which was chronologically the last scorecard in the book. 

Where TM’s treasured 1961 copy of Wisden gave him all those glorious records from throughout cricket and the details of every first class match played the previous season, The Book of Test Cricket gave him the scorecards of every Test that had ever been played, a page for each, as if TM had bought them from the Print Room on each Test match ground. Reading the 62 mm thick tome was more hushed, more reverential.

Opening it now at random at page 174 instantly transports Third Man to Brisbane in November 1954 and the titanic 153 and 162 of Morris and Harvey in Australia’s 601 for 8 declared. 

And what of that 1934 Old Trafford Test when Wrigley silently assisted Marshall?  It is on page 142: Hendren 132 and Leyland 153 in England’s 627 for 9 declared.  Match drawn when, with McCabe (he must have been good) scoring137, Australia made 491 to save the follow on.

But in his introduction to The Book of Test Cricket, Arthur reminds his readers that Neville Cardus, after watching an innings of Walter Hammond wrote, “The scoreboard can never tell you half the truth about a great batsman. I am prepared to argue that when a Trumper, Hutchings, J.T. Tyldesley or Maclaren is at the wicket the true lover of the game often forgets the existence of the scoreboard.”  How lovely is the use of that ‘is’ stoutly refusing to give way to a ‘was’.

In that sentence we meet full square the imagination of the greater writer.  It refuses to be contained by facts and figures.  It desires to roam free.  In fact that sentence can be seen as A Manifesto of the Imagination.

Departing Visitors

Two nights ago the garden was full of the tchirrips, the tchichirrips and the occasional panicky tseeps of the house martins.  Hundreds were flying high in the sky engaged in their ceaseless trawling for insects. Last night there was only silence. The final gathering and departure has taken place.  The nests under the eaves are now empty. 

Last night, the 2010 cricket season came to an end and the final flock of overseas cricketers packed their kit and prepared to migrate to their winter homes.  Their English and Irish cousins will be following soon.  The squad for this winter’s tour of Australia will be announced at 2.30 pm today.

Before they left we were treated to another wonderful innings from Morgan, who at the Rose Bowl  last night, despite loosing the strike for much of the batting power play, moved with a comforting inevitability from the 80’s to his ‘hundred’ in the final two overs of England’s innings.

He had arrived at the crease with England in some danger at 106 – 4 when Bell was out to the last ball of the 26^th over.  So, Morgan scored 107 out of 150 runs in 101 balls of the remaining 24 overs. 

With his hands gripped at the very bottom of his Kookaburra bat he whipped the ball to all parts of the ground in an innings that included eight fours, one six and every shot in the modern game.  One can now talk of England’s limited overs cricket as BM and AM: ‘Before Morgan’ and ‘After Morgan’.

Some batsmen are not only good themselves, but they make batting at the other end easier.  Morgan is one such player.  He neutralises pressure like a mop of Flash in the advert carves through grease. Only two further wickets fell while he was at the crease. 

There followed a further treat; ten wonderful and extraordinary overs from Graeme Swann.  The wicket was turning quickly, so, he would have been expected to cause trouble, but actually the real damage, the real threat, came in the air.  He was gaining prodigious and very late drift.

Belived to be the FRench Curve with which Graeme Swann works out the trajectory of his deliveries. The nail varnish should surely come as no surprise.

The left handed Fawad Alam, who has looked like a novice against spin this summer, was beaten in the air when Swann,  bowling around the wicket to him, made the ball drift like the trajectory of a French curve to pitch just out side leg stump from where it gripped, turned and hit the top of off stump.

Mohammed Yousef provided a greater challenge and drew from the bowler an even better response.  This wonderful batsman had been going about his business with great calm, stroking the ball with apparent ease, scoring singles at will wherever he wished; until he met Swann. 

It was obvious that Yousef was intent on not getting out to Swann, a mark of considerable respect.  He played as late as he could and ‘with the spin’ but was beaten through the air when he was lured into over reaching and extending his bat to a ball which drifted even further and later than he had predicted.   Landing far beyond him, it turned quickly and sharply on its way through the gap that the stretch had opened up between the right hander’s bat and pad to strike the off stump.

This was a very special ball indeed and it then brought Shahid Afridi to the wicket.  The Pakistan captain, in a very Afridi way, decided that he could break the laws of physics (and of batting) by premeditating a cut against the best advice in cricket.  Inevitably the ball cannoned off the underside of his bat onto the wickets.

Pakistan subsided. 

That England’s admirable captain and Man of the Series, Andrew Strauss, made sure he had one of the stumps was itself telling.  The team revelled in the victory, further betraying their true feelings about the side they were playing.  Later there were handshakes but that tightly gripped stump and that belligerent victory huddle had revealed it all. 

England had reached out to cricket in Pakistan when offering to host their contest with Australia this summer.  The MCC had actually sponsored the Lord’s Test match between the two countries when no commercial sponsor came forward. The England players did not deserve or merit being unworthily traduced by elements of the Pakistan set up.  It is one thing to counter attack on the cricket field but quite another thing to counter attack in this way off it. 

An improper tour is ended.

Seven cold months now confront us, over half a year of anxious waiting for the return of the swallows, swifts and house martins with whom we have shared this summer.  Let us hope as many as possible return fit and well to rebuild their nests and add charm and interest, drama and fulfilment to the summer of 2011.

For the arrival of the house martins all that time ago see here.

Cricket: The World of Will and Representation

Arthur Schopenhauer has been supplying some of the best mental equipment for cricketers since 1814.   Much of it was on show on Sunday 19^th July 2009 at Lord’s where Third Man has taken his trusty Time Machine.   For those who have not shared the journey There’s a chance to catch-up here . 

Andrew Strauss has declared England’s second innings closed at 311 for 6, setting Australia 522 runs to win. 

Andrew Flintoff – Team Talisman and Keeper of the Keys to Victory –  has been the last man to emerge from the dressing room that morning, his aching wounds numbed by pain-killing injections, his mind reaching down to the very depths of his mental cricket bag, where among the stray sticking plasters, bits of used batting tape, old chewing gum packets, empty cans of Red Bull, discarded bat grips and tattered comics, great cricketers keep the special kit that marks them out from lesser players;  deep desire, striving, wanting, effort and urging.  

Now, from the slips, Flintoff watches as Anderson bowls the first over of the day.  Between deliveries he searches for the thing in itself.  In the theatre of his mind he feels for his rhythm and finds a representation which will propel a pristine Duke  nineteen yards towards the Australian openers.

Flintoff puzzles with the noumenon as he puts a shine on the Duke

In only his second over, Flintoff draws Katich into a loose drive. The batsman’s feet sluggish from the wrong kind of adrenalin barely move.  His bat at the extremity of control finds the ball a nano-second early. He has lost this skirmish for the point of contact and the Duke flies to the waiting Pietersen in the gully.  

Zeus, immediately, the Match Referee and two million viewers seconds later, see that Fintoff’s front foot has overstepped the line – but not Umpire Koertzen.  17 for 1.

This brings Indomitable Ponting to the wicket with the inexperienced Hughes who, six overs later, edges a Flintoff delivery to the low-cupped hands of Strauss.  Ponting yells to Hughes to stay his ground, challenging the England Captain, but Koertzen once more has made his decision. 

Zeus chuckles at the arbitrary world he has created for these foolish men as Strauss, surrounded by his jubilant team, picks a stray blade of grass from beneath his finger nail. The phenomenon is 34 for 2.

Third Man is loitering in the Long Room after lunch, twiddling the end of the blue silk cord that the Australian captain has asked to be put up to keep his team safe from impassioned members of the MCC.  It is therefore a fitting place from which to watch a livid Ponting return, bowled by Broad for 38 (78 for 3). 

A member offers his sympathy – Hard luck, Mr Ponting – to this passing Giant of the Game, who takes a further step or two and, without once looking back to his well-wisher, raises his super-short Kookaburra and clatters it against a glass cabinet appropriately full of previously donated bats.

Swann dismisses Hussey and then bowls North with the one that ‘goes on’.  But thanks to Michael Clarke and Brad Haddin Australia are 178 – 5 at tea.

Third Man is at the bottom of the home side’s stairway when the earner rings.  He watches a relaxed and buoyant England descend from their dressing room. 

As Strauss pushes the swing door that will take him into the Long Room another great roar goes up from within.  Bringing up the rear again, Flintoff hears the cry, feeds off the energy from below, takes up the holler like some imitation of the Primordial Scream, and, from the landing, launches himself head first onto his unsuspecting team mates below like a surfer catching a reef break to be carried by them onwards into the foaming mass.

But Clarke and Haddin have other ideas, other wills, other representations. Nor Swann, nor Collingwood, nor Broad, nor Anderson, nor even mighty Flintoff can part them, nor diminish their confidence, nor tame their aggression, nor stem the flow of runs.

Haddin and Clarke - representation or the thing in itself? Time will tell.

At 6.55 pm, with the two unbeaten on 125 and 80 in a partnership of 185, they leave the field, all England wondering whether tomorrow it is just possible that Australia can make the remaining 209 runs to win.

Flintoff and Australian Pain Barriers

27 overs 4 maidens 5 wickets for 92 runs.  Andrew Flintoff’s  first 5 wicket haul at The ‘Home of Cricket’ and only his third in a career spanning 79 Test matches.

Then why was that 5fer in his last innings at Lord’s inevitable?  He willed it so.

It was the second Test of the series.  In the first, England, against the odds, had hung on to the worst end of a draw.  In their first innings at Lord’s, thanks to a mighty 161 from Andrew Strauss they had clocked up a solid 425 – a par score from which the game could take each of its four possible courses.  Classic cricket.

Led by Anderson and Onions, with four and three wickets each, England bowled out Australia for 215 and established a grip on the Australian throat.  Tightening that grip, Strauss chose not to enforce the follow on and at 4.35 an over each England batsman played his part in taking the lead to 524.

Could Australia match England’s defensive spirit from the first Test?  Could Australia rise to the record breaking challenge and on a good wicket execute a morale destroying coup de grace? At 356 – 6, on the final morning, with Michael ‘Dancing Feet’ Clarke 136 not out and Johnson connecting well, for the faint of heart history looked in the making.  Yes, yes and then came Flintoff.

But Third Man has taken things too far too quickly.  He must reverse the trusty Time Machine 24 hours to the start of the fourth day’s play on Sunday morning the 19^th July. 

Juddering into the new present (time travel can be nausiating), he finds good company on the top deck of the Pavilion where the ‘live’ question is whether England will declare their second innings at their over night score of 311 with Flintoff not out 30 and Broad not out 0, or will they make Australia field again.

Soon a buzz goes round the ground.  “They’ve declared!”

Third Man’s companion says that he is going down to the Long Room to watch the players take the field.  In years of slipping in and out of Dark’s, he had never done this before, believing that players deserve their privacy walking to and from the field.

He had once unintentionally passed a hot, sweating and devastated Graham Gooch on the stairs, had see in his eyes the mental exhaustion as the adrenalin that had sustained him left him to the mercy of the deepest fatigue.  It had seemed an unforgiveable intrusion just to be walking down stairs in an ‘ordinary walking down stairs way’ when here was the helmeted Ajax returning to within the Walls of Illium after an hour’s battle with Akram.

He remembers, too, Rod Marsh and a member having a serious set too on the concourse in front of the Committee Room window during a long and tedious break for rain.  “Mr Marsh, I take great exception to that!” had screamed the member.  “You can take what you f**king like, mate,” had replied the Antipodean.

But this is a special occasion and TM so wants to see Flintoff in what he thinks will be the Preston boy’s last Test, so hobbled does he seem from injury upon injury and reliant on pain killing injections to silence the warning pain as more and more irreparable damage is being done.

TM skips down the southern stairs in a stream of excited members making for the Long Room, but he chooses to stand alone on the bottom rung on the first landing outside the England dressing room.  One by one the players emerge, led by Strauss.  He counts ten of them chatting to each other and going about their business as if it was any other day.  But no Flintoff.

Then, out he comes.  As silent as the dead.  Staring into the middle distance in a trance of concentration, summoning from somewhere within him the power of the will to win.  He is set apart, physically and mentally.  He alone can and will win this match.  He alone has the mental strength to return to his mark time and time again, turn and run in … no matter what the situation, no matter where the game is, no matter what had happened to the previous ball.

As Strauss reaches the bottom of the stairs and, with nine of his team behind him, enters a Long Room packed tight there rises up the stairway such a roar that it shakes the historic foundations of the building and stirs in the trailing Flintoff a special force …

(to be continued.)

AN EXTRA: later that day the Australian captain asked for barriers to be erected to allow his players through the Long Room unmolested and from somewhere in the banqueting suite Mr Bradshaw and his stewards found polished silver posts and a bright blue silk rope. Behind these oddly refined pain barriers, Ponting and his batsmen, one by one, showered in cruel invective, a particularly English mixture of venom and sarcasm, would make their way through that room to the double doors, into the searing light and the vivid green of the field of play.

Stop Blowing Holes in My Zeitgeist

 

Is Captain Jack Sparrow the very model of a modern major England cricketer?

It ain’t corporate unless it has a mission statement, a strap line and a slick promotional video.

When the two waves of 45 sixteen year old cricketers and their parents  assembled for a short ‘induction’ before starting their Talent Testing at the National Cricket Performance Centre last weekend (reported here) the first thing ‘up’ was the ubiquitous DVD.  Cue music.

Something unmitigatedly English such as Lark Ascending?  Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto, famously hummed by Mike Brearley to drown out the chin music that was all around him in the ‘70s?  A little Lily Allen, curtesy of cricket’s fashionable convert?  Or something from Muse, Live At Old Trafford?

No, the Zeitgeist of England Cricket was denoted by the swashbuckling theme of the Black Pearl, with Muttiah Muralitharan standing in as Jack Sparrow, Shane Warne as  Will Turner, Andrew Strauss as Captain James Norrington, oh, and Andy Flower as an unexpectedly perfect ringer for Hector Barbossa.

With this rousing music as background, readers must imagine the fast cut action shots of splintered masts stumps, smashed cannon balls, flying fish catches, elation and victory, treasure and triumph. 

The euphoria is interspersed with clips of the England captain obviously far from comfortable with the emphasis he is encouraged to place on ‘fighting spirit’.  Flower, brooding and taciturn, revelling in the part of a boatswain who, if you as much as blinked in action, will as soon as look at you send you down the gang plank.  And a young cricketer not many years older than those watching scripted in the role of cabin boy.

The Cheeseland spirit of individualism and market orientation with which this video tried to capture the attention and adherence of its audience was Ad Faberly summed up in the strap line: OWN THE MOMENT.

Concerned followers of Third Man will be relieved to know that the assembled talent did not appear to be taken in.  Probably they knew better than their elders that the facetious Captain Jack “Stop Blowing Holes in My Ship” Sparrow was ‘without doubt the worst pirate (the garrison camander) had ever seen’. 

Proof that it was only a film: pirates being made up

Almost certainly they were too sophisticated to buy this uncool pitch.  They have been through so many trials and tribulations by this time that they don’t need to be told that, when the going gets tough, the tough get going.  They know who funks it or finds an injury when the track is flat.  They know who they’d rather have down the other end when the ball’s lifting from a length and a helmeted short leg’s breathing down their back.

It may come therefore as a great relief to realise that these talented young people who navigate the oceans of an electronic globe with Facebook friends amounting to several hundred and walls stuffed with notes and snaps would rather SHARE than own the moment.

Sparrow sporting IPL12 clothing

Others may argue that those who think that ‘the moment’ is collectively attained and part of a long series of moments that make up a deep and multifaceted experience are not destined to become world class cricketers.  But to portray Steve Waugh or Mathew Hayden, Satchin Tendulka or Brian Lara as ruthless individualists is to caricature them.  Their extraordinary will power and their abilities were at the service of their team and they expressed their talent for more than their own benefit. 

Cricket it not a zero-sum game.  Ask Flintoff and Lee.  And you don’t have to believe it is to get the best out of yourself.  Quite the reverse.  Though it is very C20th to say this.

Or it could be that Third Man is doing everyone a disservice.  Those behind the video and the narrative may know perfectly well that a pirate’s life was notoriously one where a strict hierarchy and defined roles of high grid and high group were mediated by a strong commitment to democracy, collective decision making, team work and sharing. 

Unlike in the Royal Navy of the time, a pirate captain received little more than twice the share of prize money destined for the lowliest crew member. He was elected, accountable and sackable.  He was consultative and kept his office for only as as long as he kept the confidence of his crew.  No doubt as such he was a fine cricketer too.

Alternative (England) Sea Songs: 

Test Cricket – Assessing and Developing Emerging Talent

This weekend 90 of the country’s best emerging 16 year old cricketers made their way in two groups to the ECB’s National Cricket Performance Centre at Loughborough University to undergo, in a little over 24 hours of intensive activity, a series of Talent Tests.

A few weeks ago 13 year old emerging players underwent similar tests and 19 year old and 22 year olds will make their way to the Centre in the coming weeks.

These ages are seen as significant gateways for those who eventually become world class.  Age 13 is when the best are taken on to the County/ECB’s Emerging Players Programme. Age 16 is when assessments for entry into County Academies tend to take place.  The world’s best are often establishing first team places for County sides at 19 and by 22 they are knocking on the door to international cricket.

One of the ideas behind the testing is therefore to have records of how world class players mature and how they were performing mentally and physically at these ages.  The data is being compiled and analysed at Bangor University.

The young men and women under assessment are defined as batsmen, pace and spin bowlers or wicket keepers.  All undergo batting tests which include performance against pace and spin with the emphasis on forcing the pace either pinch hitting in the earliest power play overs of an ODI or in the later frenetic run chase. Pace bowlers are speed tested and the spinners have their revolutions measured and their accuracy assessed for both their stock delivery and their variations, such as arm balls. 

Besides physical strength and stamina tests (the Bleep Test has given way to the Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test [ SPARK (Yo-Yo)  Test ], there are also psychological assessments, learning style analysis using the Fleming VARK model, (visual, auditory, reading/writing tactile/kinaesthetic) and assessments of tactical awareness.   A detailed history of cricketing practice, reaching back to their experiences as 7 year olds, is also taken.  There is also a session on The Spirit of Cricket.

The environment of the testing is deliberately pressured, with as much physical and mental stress applied as possible.  There are late nights and early rises with each individual responsible for getting up at the right time, getting to the right test at the right time, with the right equipment and having done the right warm-ups.  There is no coaching, it is purely assessment and an individual’s ability to function well under stress and tiredness is part of the examination.

ECB expects world class cricketers to be fighters who accept a challenge and thrive on responsibility, and they are looking for early and consistent signs of this.

The results are not necessarily used to make selections.  Certain individuals prior to these tests have been invited to join demanding England Development squads with full-on programmes which for the 16 year olds for example would mean around 7 days a month being dedicated to the Development Programme at Loughborough, Derby, South Africa and Australia.  The ECB’s aim is to win two World Cups in the next four years.

For these young cricketers a very difficult decision is upon them as their academic education is bound to take second place to cricket and for them and their parents there is a stark choice.  For the old pros who joined their county staffs at 16 this would have been no big deal, but in a world where academic qualifications matter far more for future life chances the decision is a very large gamble: enter this special gateway to cricketing opportunity with nothing guaranteed or go the university route, perhaps through a University Centre of Excellence, and hope you still have the ability and experience to make it as a cricketer with an academic qualification in the bag, just in case.

It is difficult to believe, though, that individuals who demonstrate ‘The Right Stuff’ and who put together interesting performances in all or some of these tests and match these with good performances at Under 17, Academy and Second Team cricket next year won’t be drafted in.

Similar programmes are already well established in other test playing countries, so England is considered to be lagging behind, as recent performances in youth World Cups tend to confirm when England talent has lacked temperament.

The whole process is overseen by the ECB’s Head of Development and former Chairman of the Test Selectors, David Graveney.  It is clear that Graveney has a sharp vision of what is required, has sold that vision to the people who hold the purse strings or worn their resistance down, has put together a strong support team and is determined that England will catch up fast in the field of temperament as well as talent identification and development.

But, just as individuals and their parents have had to make difficult choices, so the culture into which they are being welcomed has itself been the subject of selection and development.   “What is that culture and is it the right one?” are questions that Third Man would like to … well … to assess.

The painting above is Young Spartans exercising by E. Degas whose CRB check is pending.

Cricket Being Played Today … if we can get the ruddy tractor off the field

Third Man spent Sunday beneath the gaze of Belvoir Castle.  The Chequers at Woolsthorpe by Belvoir was recommended as a pub with a cricket field ‘at the back’.  In fact the ground is at the side and not in view from its pleasant south facing frontage. 

“Cricket Being Played Today, Do Not Park on the Verge” a notice board warned patrons.   An advanced guard of Woolsthorpe Cricket Club were struggling with a recalcitrant tractor that had given up the ghost thirty yards from the wicket, 20 minutes before the scheduled start of their match with Barkby.

Safely parked up, Third Man withdrew to the pub and, resisting Greene King’s Old Speckled Hen that had tasted so well the night before, ordered an Americano. 

The outside of the inn is painted in the fashionable French Grey, a colour which is neither French nor grey.  The planting also tries to bring the South of France to good old English Woolsthorpe.   Thankfully the sun shone warmly enough to strengthen the Mediterranean illusion. 

Another helpful sign notifies patrons that whereas any dog is welcome only well behaved children are. 

So quiet were the home fielders and beguiling the September sun that TM missed the start of the match and Barkby were 35 for 0 from 5 overs when he began to climb the steep slope to the top of the ground to get this view of the match, the village and the Castle.

When you are bowled at Woolsthorpe you are well and truly castled.

 

The charm of cricket is that it is played wherever it can be.  Grounds have no pre-determined shape.  They follow the contours and ancient land uses, in this case falling away heaving and swelling like the rolling Atlantic with an appealingly asymmetrical perimeter defined by lane, fence and berried hedges. 

Probably an Anderton or a Mitchell, used to the perfection of Old Trafford or the SCG, would find it impossible to perform here, which may also excuse the difficulty the Woolsthorpe attack was having with the Barkby openers.

Earlier in the day during a circumnavigation of the Castle, Third Man had also spied the home of Belvoir Cricket Club just outside of the hamlet of Knipton.  Now, leaving the Woolly bowlers to their toil and driving down the hill from Harston, he was delighted to see so late in the season not one match in progress but two.

Belvoir Colts were taking on The Stragglers and the youngsters were putting the old fellows to the sword with the catching of the wandering side letting down their large hearted (and large girthed) bowlers. 

Over on the big pitch, the Belvoir Sunday 1stXI were dishing it out to their visitors from Barnstone with opener Tommy Neville planting the ball in the next-door stumble field with the monotonous regularity of a young Graham Hick. 

In the foreground the senior professionals look after the cricketing education of Belvoir Colts. Behind them Barnstone fail to get to grips with the Belvoir Sunday XI. And in the background Belvoir Castle surveys the scene. Just how many cricket grounds can be seen from the battlements?

Barnstone were rueing the fact that they had dropped Neville when he was in single figures.  “I think I was standing too close.  He hits it very hard,” a rather shamefaced Barnstone boundary fielder admitted to a sympathetic Third Man.  

They rued some more shortly afterwards when genial John on the midwicket boundary put him down again when he was in the nineties and, in a reaction that must touch every cricketer who has ever spilled one in the deep (and that is all of us), tore off his cap, flung it on the ground and almost jumped on it in his rage and embarrassment.

At Headingley, England might have continued to ask questions of their supporters despite another win, but in the Vale of Belvoir the afternoon confirmed that the game is alive, well and continuing to tease us with its ability to frustrate and encourage in equal measure.

Well, you see after all they did get that tractor going, the Woollies did get rid of those openers, the Barnstones eventually did catch their man and young Olly of the Colts did make some runs he’ll never forget … and that’s why they’ll all be back for more of the same next year.

A SIDE DISH:  Clitheroe CC ended the season Champions of the Ribblesdale League when their home match with Salesbury this weekend was washed out and Read lost to Great Harwood.  Over the Hill, the Lancashire League was won by Ramsbottom.

Hypnotic Away Swing

We left a happy Bob Massie lying back in the comforting warmth of one of Lord’s old roll-top baths after taking 8’fer in the 1972 Ashes Test.  He is no doubt not too worried to languish there passing the time puffing on a cigar and sipping a few tinnies with his bowling partner Dennis Lillee spilling over in an adjacent bath.

They have left the field of play in triumph, the applause of members in the Long Room clinging to them even as their sprigs clatter up the staircase to the away dressing room and the archway to the balcony where the debutant sits in bewilderment, as the ‘it hasn’t sunk in yet’ photograph above  clearly shows.

“Who said this Test cricket was hard yakka?”

Down below it is now the turn for the England bowlers and although without the lethal swing of their injured Arnold, two wickets fall for only 7 runs.  This serves simply to bring the young Menelaus to the wicket to join his brother Agamemnon – viz. Greg and Ian Chappell.  The later and elder is, in the noblest fashion, intent on counterattack, hooking Snow and Price with thrilling unconcern. 

One sixer narrowly evades the patrician MJK Smith fielding unusually for this master of the short leg position out in the deep [Diogenes ;-)].  But Captain Illingworth’s tactics are soon rewarded when bespectacled Smith takes a wonderful catch running in to reach the ball and rolling ignominiously head over heals to bring Agamemnon crashing down for 56 out of 84.

Greg who had remained doggedly defensive with a technique honed during time served at Somerset – not scoring a boundary in the first three hours of his remarkable innings –  rises to the challenge like a true brother and single handed with bat, will-power and a divine off-drive pulls the game back towards Australia.

Time travel shatters Third Man’s long held recollection that Chappell’s had been a Saturday hundred, for actually the Gods remain with the Australian when in poor light he seizes the chance to reach his century off the second to last ball of the day.  An evocative commentary of this and other snippets from the match can be found here.

At the start of play on Saturday a packed Lord’s watches haplessly as Chappell, seeming to defy mortality, moves his score on a further 31 runs, each one making England’s hopes of a first innings lead look less likely. Then d’Oliviera smashes through the batsman’s defences and in a heady mixture that flies from aggression, to relief and then admiration 31,000 roar their response.

Thanks to some blistering hits in a 50 by Marsh Australia take a lead, but the afternoon brings more than the England openers.  The atmosphere turns heavy and unreal under thick clouds through which the enclosed heat cannot escape, like the batsmen whose fate is fixed in the caldron of this arena.

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make look silly.  Boycott padding up to Lillee is bowled when the ball runs up his body over his shoulder and lands on the off bail.  A wretched Luckhurst is humiliated, then, dispatched to Hades by Lillee’s pace and England are 16 for 2.

Third Man has taken one of the old and far from comfortable white slatted garden seats in the front row of the pavilion looking over second slip’s shoulder.  The seat has as many coats of paint as it has seen seasons of cricket but this seat and the scores like it that line in terraces before the Pavilion have never before witnessed what now follows as Massie moves in from the Nursery End.   

In the turgid atmosphere the ball swings late and hypnotically.  There is no other way to describe it.  Like a child following the movement of a watch on a chain, England’s finest batsmen are entranced and mesmerised, and reach out to it.

They know they must leave alone this tantalising object hurtling towards them as if on a golden thread.  But they can’t.  They have it covered.  They are playing as late as they dare.  It cannot move from here.  They are wrong.  It must be played.  They are wrong.  It swings sharply away.  Again it comes, again it moves, again they reach for it and again it finds the edge to be caught first by Marsh, then Edwards, then Chappell G, then Chappell I, then Chappell G again, then Stackpole, then Marsh once more. 

31,000 of us, dazed and confused, stumble to our buses, tubes and cabs, hardly able to believe what we have seen.  England 86 for 9, seven of them to Massie. 

The next morning the Western Australian duly takes his eighth wicket when Price is caught by Chappell G. 

To compound the sense of unreality that must always accompany stories of this Test, Massie with at that time the best match figures for a Test debutante, 16 for 137, hardly takes another Test wicket and within a couple of years cannot even win a place in his state side.

Lillee later says that in this Test Massie’s wrist and seam position were immaculate.  He also thought that the young man from Subiaco had managed to put a great deal of back spin on the ball which increased the swing. 

The story is of a few fleeting days of technical perfection finding ideal atmospheric conditions, that justifiably but disproportionally took the lime light from one of the finest Test batting performances.   Funny game, cricket.