Moneyball or Moneybat? Revaluing Cricketing Assets

Today sees the release in the UK of the film Moneyball, by the makers of the Oscar winning film, The Social Network, and featuring Brad Pitt as another modern American hero, the Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane.

It’s based on the book of that name by Michael Lewis subtitled, The Art of Winning An Unfair Game and tells of Beane’s attempt to put together a baseball club on a budget by employing sabermetrics,  the analysis of in-game activity developed by Bill James.

James was a baseball tragic who looked long, hard and with fresh eyes at why baseball teams win and lose.  His ideas were so ‘left field’ that he had to publish his own books in a bid to reach an audience.

Beane, who felt that in his own career his true talents and potential were never properly made use of was drawn to James’ theories and insights which valued a player untraditionally, focusing on the players real contributions to winning and, importantly, not losing.

Rather than look at pitchers in the conventional way, he looked at which allowed runners to steal the most bases.  Rather than concentrate on runs scored he concentrated on runs created.

His concept of the ‘Range Factor’  turned appreciation on its head from over-valuing attack to revaluing a player’s defensive contributions.

His ‘Defensive Efficiency Rating’ showed the percentage of balls in play that a defense turns into an out. And his ‘Pythagorean Winning Percentage’ produced statistics explaining the relationship of wins and losses to runs scored and runs allowed.

Using sabermetrics, Beane was able to spend his pint-size budget signing players from the draft that the big teams were overlooking. The Oakland A’s dominated baseball … until the big shots started using the same approach.

Perhaps the biggest lesson that cricket could take from James was his refocusing away from runs scored onto runs allowed.

As the motivation behind the organisation of cricket moved from gambling to Arnoldian  Muscular Christianity  and the virtues necessary for those capable of administering an Empire, the spot light, the laws and the glory were focused on the ‘art’ of batting – you know – bowling is indeed a manly activity but batting is gentlemanly.

Even the full professionalization of the game has never really exorcised that Ghost in the Game.  Limited overs cricket has increased the appreciation of the value of fielding.  Modern tail-enders who were once encouraged to have a swipe and make way for the main action are now expected to contribute runs. 

But the glamour remains with the top order batsman.  Sides must have six of them AND the keeper must be able to bat even if he misses the odd catch and is unlikely to stump an opponent unless trips over yards down the track.

Hardly fair? 

Regular readers will know that Third Man, who started his days when the Squire and his fellows paid him to bowl at them on club practice nights at Hambledon and remembers, as if it was yesterday, the Varsity cricketers coming down in the summer and taking up the batting places in the precursor to the County Championship, is always vexed when the Man of the Match award goes to the batsman getting 174 out a total of 600  on a ‘road’, when a bowler in the same match who has taken ten wickets is left to enjoy a beer in the ice bath.

No one can deny that a ‘fifer’ is a tougher ask in Test cricket than a century, yet both secure a coveted place on the honour’s board.

For many cricketers, it’s an unfair game, where the opportunities and the subsequent rewards don’t necessarily go to those most able to contribute to winning.  In cricket, its Moneybat … until that is someone comes up with a formula for calculating the true worth of a player’s contribution to winning. 

Unless the Squire is planning economies among the staff at the Great House, this task may account for His recent preoccupation with a thick tome entitled, Human Resource Accounting.

Scaling the Heights, Balancing the probabilities. South Africa v Australia Test 2 Part 2

It was high drama in the Bull Ring as the action careered towards its arresting conclusion, a cliff to be scaled to its consequence; to fail and fall or prevail and glimpse the belvedere.

Drama is a product of prize and doubt, its venue the edge, its permanent state imbalance.

The prize for Australia, as the second Test in this mini-series reached its conclusion, was a win to draw the series, a foundation lain for national renewal, no less.  That for South Africa, with a win or a draw, was victory over their opponents in a series for the first time since readmission into the Test playing family ten long years ago. 

The doubt was supplied by rain that washed out the extended morning session’s and the uncertainty of the light that had foreshortened each earlier day’s play – the heartbeat accelerated by the manner in which these two teams have gone at their tasks like old explorers anxious for honour, short of their former strength, but intent on clawing themselves to the summit in conditions that made batting as precarious and provisional as ice climbing.

In fact there were more spectators on the terrace of the Hotel Eiger to watch the first ascent of the North Face than there were yesterday in the un-populated expanses of the Wanderers Stadium where, in true cliff-hanger style, all four outcomes were possible.

When play began Clarke’s top-rope severed, cut through by Philander, sending his off stump crashing to the valley floor.

Shortly there after, stubborn Ponting, rationing his concentration for all he was worth, tackled another pitch but, weighed down by a rucksack of misgivings, edged Philander to slip.

The starting goal of 168 meters runs with seven in hand had, in a flash, moved up a grade or two to 145 with five remaining – an overhang to climb.

Hussey and Haddin roped up and belayed securely to the rock face, dismissed time as of no consequence, and resolved to get there one handhold after another.

In the match ’til then, only four pairings had held the hazards at bay long enough to lift the score by three figures and more. Each had threatened to make the break through to the uplands only to fall.   Now, a fifth such partnership would bag the peak prize.  Or two of half a hundred?

With the score advanced by exactly fifty , Hussey, became another casualty, the ball pitching one third outside leg stump but two thirds within the line of the stumps struck him in front like a falling stone – such are the margins between safety and downfall.

Haddin, slipshod of late, continued the ascent, with surer feet, hand over hand, hold after flaking hold, with Johnson roped tightly to him.

After tea (energized by Kendal mint cake), Brad and Mitch untied themselves, and climbing free, sped across the difficulties, scoffing at the objective dangers, the ice towers and the avalanches.

Almost immediately after reaching his half-century and with the summit in sight,  Haddin became Philander’s fifth wicket and the issue steepened for Australia.  The lurch to the precipice continued as Steyn removed Siddle, bringing Cummins to the crux – 18 more strides, one for each year of his young life, gasping for oxygen, two wickets intact.

A month ago Cummins would have been batting No 8, skipping across the lowland approaches to Test cricket in the under18s.  He now climbed into the attack as if he was still down there, unencumbered by a Ponting’s rucksack of doubt, his mind untroubled by vertigo.  Only a reckless drive that slipped through the outstretched hands of Steyn caused a moment of hesitation. Then on and up.

Thus to Cummins, standing at the pinnacle, fell the honour both of planting Ivor Ivan’s flag which he did with a fearless boundary off Tahir, and to him also the acolade of Man of the Match in his first Test.

This was a great five days of cricket.

To the embarrassingly few who were there in person to watch, it will last in the memory, arguably, long after Test cricket has gone the way of all things, buffeted by the jet stream.

There was much talk and a number of banners mocking the greatly exaggerated news of the death of Test cricket. But …

Great as this match was, the question remains, for how long will this minority occupation continue to hold the support of those who directly and indirectly cross-subsidize it?  Perpetually eroded by sibling rivalry from the shorter forms of the game, could Test cricket withstand twenty years of austerity?

With more doubts than prizes, is this form of the game on the edge? That questions remains in the balance.

Australia won by 2 wickets

Maximum Altitude, Maximum Attitude: South Africa v Australia 2nd Test Part 1

55 cm or close on two feet.  That was the distance by which Bob Beamon,  competing in the 1968 Olympic long jump final in Mexico City (altitude 2240 meters above sea level), smashed the world record. 

The jump was of such unanticipated length that it was beyond the range of the optical measuring mechanism and an old fashioned tape measure had to found to record the distance of 29 feet, 2.5 inches.

That day, no other jumper got near Beamon and his record stood for 23 years.

Johannesburg, where the second Test in the two match series between South Africa and Australia began five days ago, is located on the high veld at 1750 m.

At these heights the air is thinner and resistance lower.  Hits go further, balls go quicker and they swing later. But as the Beamon jump indicates, the effects of altitude are neither consistent nor predictable.  It’s cricket with altitude.

Things are made even less easy in November as patchy weather can make it difficult for groundsmen to get their preparations right and changeable cloud coverage add to the potential for sideways movement.

No surprise then that 33 wickets have fallen in four days and that there have so far only been four significant partnerships in the match – one per innings.

In SA’s first innings of 266, de Villiers and Prince put on 112 runs and their last six wickets fell for 15. Australia’s openers Watson (88) and Hughes (88) posted 174 but the remaining batsmen could only muster 122 more to them a slender lead of 30 runs.

In the third innings of the match, Amla (105) and deVilliers (73) scored 147 together in the side’s total of 339 which asked Australia to make an extremely competitive 310 to win.

The visitors were in deep trouble at 19 for 2 before Khawaja (65) and Ponting (not out 54) set the match up for a gripping final day with a partnership of 122.

It has therefore been a match of four partnerships interspersed between calamitous conditions – matching the comings and goings of sun and cloud.

Only now on the fifth morning has play been disrupted by rain and, with an hour needed get the players on the field once the rain stops to, Australia’s time to get the 168 runs they need to level the series is shrinking as fast as a woollen vest washed on Programme 8 – Stubborn Steyns (sic).

For spectators now inured to fielders throwing in on-the-bounce to scuff the ball for reverse swing, the clue has been that not a single throw from anywhere, from any player of either side has bounced before being carefully pouched and buffed in the specially designed soft kidskin-covered gloves of Boucher and Haddin.

Back in the hands of Steyn (career strike rate of a wicket every 39 balls – someway better that that for any other bowler having taken over 200 Test wickets), Philander (who in 2006 when playing for Rishton – altitude 75 m or 250 feet – in the Lancashire League made very little impression but who, at 5741 feet above sea level, is bowling beautifully), Morkel and Kallis, the Kookaburra has swung and seamed to the consternation of the batsmen.

For the Australians,  Cummins, the 18 year old debutant playing in only his fourth first class match took 6 for 79 in 29 overs in a spectacular third innings performance to realise the promise held out by his highly creditable 1 for 38 in 15 first innings overs.

Siddle has beaten the edge on numerous occasions and even Johnson using a very short run and bowling in the 130s was able to make life difficult for the batsmen.

But to the credit of the groundsman, the wicket has also helped the spinners with Lyons (an in-drifting off-spinner) taking important wickets in both innings, the under-bowled Clarke picking up two wickets and Tahir, after a nervous start, demolishing the Australian tail in the first innings and breaking a potentially matching winning partnership when finding Khawaja’s outside edge with a googly the left hander hadn’t read.

So … everyone waits for the rain to stop and for what could be a suitably competitive end to a match-up as compelling as any Olympic final. 

It’s been cricket at maximum altitude with maximum attitude.

Basil D’Oliveira and the Lost Sons of South African cricket – Still Climbing In to Watch – Part 2

On a white washed wall outside of Newlands cricket ground in Cape Town hangs an oxidizing metal sheet with a hole punched through it by a bronze cricket ball.

It is the work of Donovan Ward commemorating a ‘shameful incident that shone a spotlight on apartheid’s interference in sport’ – the exclusion, by his home country of the ‘Cape Coloured’ Basil D’Oliveira from a list of touring England cricketers allowed entry into that country and the subsequent cancellation of that tour by the MCC.    

The cricket ball and chain stands for the impact of that popular and dignified cricketer on the system of apartheid and provides symbolically a permanent place there for ‘the lost son of South African cricket’.

Yesterday  we left Basil D’Oliveira, his wife and two children distraught with the disappointment of having been left out of the 1968 MCC touring party to South Africa despite that summer topping the England batting averages and, factually at least, coming second in the bowling averages.

As http://basildoliveira.com/worcestershire-ccc/   recounts he took his wife out to dinner that night ‘resigned to the fact that the matter was now out of (his) hands and unaware that tons of newsprint condemning the England selectors were being assembled in Fleet Street printing presses for the next day’s papers’.It was a perfect story for a late summer media storm. 

The headlines would write themselves.  A victim of apartheid, a hero of a rearguard action against the ‘old enemy’ at the Oval, ditched by bumbling, timid selectors, secretive political machinations by one of the last bastions of the Establishment in cahoots with apologist  ‘friends’ in apartheid South Africa; the story had everything.  Members of Parliament protested and the public responded with their ‘hearts’. Within the space of four days, d’Olivera received 2,000 letters, only one of which criticized him.

Answering questions from the press, the Secretary of MCC Secretary, S.C. Griffith, said “Nothing else was discussed at the selectors’ meeting other than cricketing considerations”. 

When questioned by journalists, Doug Insole, Chairman of Selectors, who we met and admired here a month ago argued that D’Oliveira, wasn’t one of the best 16 players in England at that time, and that the decision was based purely on the cricketing grounds that he was considered “from an overseas tour point of view as a batsman rather than an all-rounder.  We put him beside the seven batsmen that we had, along with Colin Milburn whom we also had to leave out with regret.”

Much was also made by those seeking to justify the decision that D’Oliveira’s form had dropped after his omission from the Test side.  Yet by the end of the season he was top of the Worcestershire bowling averages with 58 wickets at 15.74 each.

These explanations were further undermined when subsequently Cartwright, a bowler, withdrew from the party and D’Oliveira was selected to take his place albeit,  friends of the decisions explained, at a time when the other possible ‘all-rounders’ Knight and Illingworth were unavailable.

The prevarication and confused clarifications by the selectors gave the South African Premier the luxury of the excuse that ‘his country was not prepared to receive a team which had been forced upon her by people with certain political aims’. 

MCC formally cancelled the tour on September the 24^th.  It was a significant advance in the movement for a universal sporting boycott of apartheid South Africa – an advance that was made all the more persuasive and pressing by, “the great dignity which Basil d’Oliveira (…) maintained throughout the whole business” to borrow the words of MCC’s President R. Aird.

South Africa had been was suspended from FIFA as far back as 1963. The International Cricket Conference imposed a moratorium on tours in 1970.  The IOC formally expelled South Africa from in 1970.  The Commonwealth leaders accepted the Gleneagles Agreement in 1977. The Davis Cup excluded South Africa in 1970. Rugby to its shame dragged its feet.

For twenty years the exclusion of South Africa from most of the world’s major sporting opportunities rankled with a sports obsessed white power base and its supporters.

As Abdul Minty, the South African exile and member of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement said, “We understood, as South Africans, the significance of sport for white South Africa. It was like a religion. And if you hit them hard, then you were really getting the message across that they were not welcome in the world as long as they practiced racism in sport.”

Sporting bodies rapidly ended their boycotts with the fall of apartheid.  Sport which had done so much to bring down the old regime now helped to build a united country.  It is fitting that the prompt and principled action by FIFA should be followed 53 years later by the selection of that Rainbow Nation, South Africa, to hold its World Cup this year.

Nelson Mandela: “Sport is very important for building character because when you’re involved in sport your individual character comes out, your determination, your ability to be part of the team and the acceptance of the collective effort is extremely important in developing your country as well as patriotism.”

Wikipedia concludes its page on Basil D’Oliveira with this reference, which includes words uttered at the unveiling of the memorial at Newlands on behalf of the family by Frank Brache, whose sister is married to D’Oliveira.

“The D’Oliveira family is very grateful for this honour. It is just such a pity that Basil, who lives in the UK and suffers from Alzheimer’s Disease now, will not be able to appreciate it himself.

“On many occasions we had to sneak in and climb over fences to watch the games from the segregated enclosure. Basil used to dream of being able to play here – it’s a dream that was never realised.”

As the TMS photograph at the top of the page shows, in 2009 they are still climbing in.

Let freedom reign.

Originally posted June 2010

South Africa and the Debt owed to a Special Cricketer Part 1

Back in June 2010, Third Man published this post to celebrate the start of the World Cup in SA.  The news this morning that Basil D’Oliveira has died is sad, but there is perhaps a silver lining in his release.  He was the best there was at seeing silver linings.

On the fly-leaf of his autobiography, he wrote, “In many ways, coming into the game as late as I did has been lucky for me … You find your appetitie for good things wonderfully sharpened when you suddenly discover that you haven’t missed them after all as you thought.’

In that sentence, written when the country of his birth was still an appalling tyranny, he spoke unwittingly for the New South Africa.

The post is in two parts.  The second will appear tomorrow.

More than forty years ago cricket played a small part in the long train of events, sacrifices and acts of bravery that have eventually made this ‘dream’ become possible – in particular the resolve, the humility and the dignity of one man – Basil D’Oliveira.

Bas back in S.A. in the winter of 1966 talking cricket

Over the August Bank holiday in 1968 Worcester played Sussex at home at New Road.  D’Oliveira made a fine 128 in the home side’s first innings.  He then took 3 Sussex wickets for 36 to help make Sussex follow on and ultimately lose the match by an innings. 

Back in the dressing room D’Oliveira put up his feet and waited for the announcement of the England team to tour South Africa that winter.D’Oliveira’s fine form in that match had followed a superb 158 batting number six for England against the Australians in the final Test at the Oval the week before. 

This was the famous match when a cloudburst at lunch time on the last day all but robbed England of victory and the chance to square the series.  But remarkably, as Wisden reports, “the groundsman, Ted Warn, ably assisted by volunteers from the crowd armed with brooms and blankets, mopped up to such purpose that by 4.45, the struggle was resumed.”

Third Man had been one of those volunteers, hopping over the fence in front of the Ladies’ Pavilion grabbing a blanket and working to dry up that lake.  As the water gradually disappeared and the umpires agreed that play could continue, we knew two things for certain; Underwood would take the remaining five Australian wickets and Basil d’Olivera would, in a few days, be announced as a member of the MCC side to tour his native South Africa.

Neither prediction turned out quite as we expected.  At first, Underwood gained no response from the wicket – it was too wet.  Only when the late afternoon sun cooked up the wicket did he make the break through, becoming unplayable and winning the match.

Secondly, a few days later, as D’Oliveira waited in the Worcestershire dressing room to hear if his name would be announced for the forthcoming tour to South Africa, tension grew.   The list lengthened without him … until he had to accept the awful fact that he had been excluded by the MCC selectors.

You could have heard a pin drop in the room.  Tom Graveney, swore bitterly.  “I never thought they’d do this to you Bas.”

All this had not come out of a blue sky.  Almost from the moment when D’Oliveira had made his debut against the West Indians at Lord’s in 1966 and begun painstakingly to establish himself as an England regular, speculation mounted about how South Africa would react when, as seemed a certainty, D’Oliveira would be picked to tour the country of his birth, the country whose apartheid system had discriminated so viciously against him.  That state-legitimized and entrenched prejudice had made an exile of him, obliging him to pursue his undoubted cricketing potential first in the Central Lancashire League for Middleton, then in first class cricket for Worcestershire, and finally for England.

Is Third Man seeing things again or is that a Bradman grip that Bas is suggesting? Again from his visit to S.A. in the winter of 1966

In January 1967, Britain’s Sports Minister, Denis Howell, told a cheering House of Commons that the 1968/9 tour to South Africa would be cancelled if there were any moves to ban D’Oliveira from playing.  In the same month, South Africa’s Minister of the Interior said, “We will not allow mixed teams to play against our white teams over here. If this player is chosen, he would not be allowed to come here. Our Policy is well known here and overseas.”

Both MCC and the South African Government were anxious that the tour should take place.  The man who just wanted to play cricket was without intention becoming a game changer on a greater field of play.  He was becoming a cause.

By April 1967, South Africa’s Prime Minister, John Vorster, was hinting that apartheid principles could be relaxed in so far as they affected teams from overseas countries “with whom we have traditional sporting ties”. And in September, a South African Test Selector, told D’Oliveira that ‘he was sure he’d be allowed to go on tour if selected’.

In June 1968, Wilfred Isaacs, a prominent man in South African cricket, saw D’Oliveira at Lord’s and talked warmly about the forthcoming tour. He went so far as to offer D’Oliveira his flat and hospitality whenever he wanted it on the trip. Yet when Isaacs returned to South Africa a few weeks later, he forecast to the press that D’Oliveira would not be selected.   Had anyone that day at Lord’s been talking out of turn?

D’Oliveira  maintains that later that month on the eve of the Lord’s Test a high ranking official told him that he could ‘get everyone out of trouble by making myself available for South Africa not England’.  D’Oliveira angrily refused.

In August an official from a tobacco company, offered D’Oliveira a £40,000 ten year contract, plus a car and a house, to coach in South Africa … provided he announced that he was unavailable for the South African tour before the Fifth Test.  He declined.

D’Oliveira had spent the 1966/67 winter in South Africa touring the country coaching, giving demonstrations and talks to people passionate to know more about cricket and passionate to see him play.  The effect on cricket among non-whites of D’Oliveira touring that winter as an England player would have been immense.

But on that August evening as a distraught D’Oliveira family sobbed and hugged each other and slowly came to turns with their disappointment it looked an impossible dream. 

That night the T.V. ‘talent programme’ Opportunity Knocks featured ‘a white guy dressed up like a black man’ singing Al Jolson songs.

(To be continued …)

Harold Gimblett, Somerset and England – Embroidered in Black

The death of Peter Roebuck has brought the name of Harold Gimblett to the fore, with many eulogies linking the manner of the deaths of these two Somerset cricketers. Though well intended, the link is frail.  

Roebuck and Gimblett’s paths crossed a number of times, but the causes of their final acts were very different.  For many years Gimblett suffered a debilitating mental illness that, according to him, left him “in a tunnel that has no end – and no light…” and where there was “no point in continuing to struggle against the odds.”

If Roebuck contemplated suicide it was in the same way that Dostoevsky might have contemplated it, that is, as an exercise of hyper-rationalism, as part of the same process that made him the kind of writer he was, seeing and relishing drama where others didn’t, finding things humorous which others didn’t.

Peter will have first come across Harold – the focus of this piece – when, as a thirteen year old, he took a chit for an article of clothing to the school shop, housed in a Nissan hit midway between the coach park and the drive leading to Millfield House.

Inside was warm and cosy.  A counter ran across its width behind which sat a small slightly rounded man in his mid-fifties wearing a cardigan and slippers, and carefully completing one of those paintings-by-numbers, or perhaps sowing, the silk following a traced pattern on the cloth.

The borders were to be kept and lines followed clearly and precisely.  Was this for him some element of keeping to a path in his nightmare journey through a forest where the black dog pounced without warning?

Affability and tranquillity pervaded the shop. A mug of tea steamed on the counter. 

Few would have recognised this figure, taking down some article from a shelf, as a former Test match opener, possessor of the record, in 1935, for the fastest century on debut, scorer of 50 first class centuries and over 23,000 runs.

Young cricketers at Millfield, biding their time during the long, long winter terms when there was only the occasional foray to the primitive indoor nets beneath a stand at the Taunton ground, would pop in from time to time to top themselves up from Harold’s deep reserves of warmth, fellowship and understanding.

Why he sat there painting by numbers was never questioned.  He was their mainstay against winter, against lost form, against authority, against ‘them’ – by which both boys and Harold meant the administrators and, for him, those selectors who had neither understood nor accepted nor accommodated his genius as a batsman and who had done him down.

As Harold told it, he was dropped from Test cricket for hitting a six before lunch on the first day of a Test.  “We don’t do that sort of thing, Gimblett.”  Fancy telling that to Marcus Trethscothic! Or Sehwag!

Harold had an England sweater, but the crown and lions were embroidered in black.  “They” had refused to give him a new one when his was lost. 

He’d taken a plain sweater and a black and white photograph of the crest to a seamstress who had therefore used black thread instead of blue in the design.  The sweater was a repeated reminder,  a symbol of the self-perpetuating persecution by indignity that he dwelt on each time he put it on.

Peter, who was brought into the 1^st XI squad in his first year, would have found Harold supervising one of the nets.  Into Harold’s care, by their own choice, went those struggling for form. 

As the bat juddered in their hands and mistiming jarred the fingers, Harold would pronounce from 22 yards distance, ‘Good shot.’ Shot after mistimed shot would be greeted with this mantra ‘Good shot.’  ‘Good shot’.  ‘Good shot’.  Net over, even the most sceptical would leave convinced that, at last it, was all coming together.  ‘Thanks Harold.’ ‘Ready?’ ‘Ready.’

He rarely watched matches.  The boys never questioned his absence.  They were too busy timing the pants off the ball through extra cover across the fast outfield towards the Tor, or off their legs into the tree that then stood partially within the boundary.

On rare and important matches he would be persuaded (with what inducement the boys did not question) to umpire.  Ken Palmer and Harold would take the field, their white coats long and flapping over brown polished shoes.

What a luxury to be able to pass the time of day with Harold while taking a turn at the non-strikers end.  ‘Am I doing alright Harold?  He’s moving it.’  ‘You’re doing fine young man.’

Once, Colin Atkinson, persuaded him to turn out in some mid-week affair, perhaps to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of a local club or in a cricket week.  A boy or two joining them would have the thrill of seeing from up close Harold bat. 

No wonder he thought every cricket shot was well timed: his were.  Effortlessly the ball purred from his bat and he could not help but smile and waddle self-consciously to tap down a spot disturbed by the ball. 

Even in the tunnel-without-end-or-light that purring sound reached something within him and gave him a moment of relief from his struggle.  Perhaps it was these moments of ability, of ease, of consummate control, of light, that made the long periods of darkness the more difficult to bear.

Harold and his wife regularly visited the Great House and parked their caravan in a quiet spot in the grounds from where they would stroll around the boundary while a match took place greeted by admirers on whom his smile beamed, his jokey way protecting strangers from his inner anguish.

Then he came no more.

“I’m in a tunnel that has no end – and no light. There is no point in continuing to struggle against the odds … The psychiatrists don’t know what is wrong with me and there is nothing they can do in any case. Now I know what my father went through – I inherited it from him. The only thing I could do was play cricket and they threw me back into the first-class game, after my earliest breakdown, before I was ready… I get more and more depressed. The only peace of mind is when I go to bed with a very heavy dose of tablets.” *

* Transcribed from a tape in David Foot’s, Harold Gimblett: Tormented Genius of Cricket

peter@peterroebuck.com – As the Sparks Fly Upwards

Proclaiming what is true does not often make the broadcaster popular.

The Squire and Third Man knew Peter, boy and man.  He was one of a talented and unbeaten Millfield side that came to the Great House in the summer of 1970 at the end of a school season in which they had trounced the Oxford Authentics, come off best in two-day draws with both the Welsh and English Schools XIs and very nearly beaten the visiting West Indies Schoolboys in one of the great school matches ever played. 

The side contained five who would soon be playing first class cricket, four of whom were to win Nat West Final medals and the other of whom was also capped for Wales at rugby.  Another of the team was an England hockey international, another a tennis professional, others played for county second teams and minor counties.

This side might be rated as highly as Altham’s Repton, but in Sometimes I Forgot to Laugh, Peter described them as ‘dreamers unable to pass 30, smokers, drinkers …’  Not for Peter the schoolboy camaraderie with its loyalty, self congratulation and complacency – just searing uncomfortable truth.

Although published in 2004, these lines were written much earlier in 1985 or so when he was captain of Somerset and embroiled in another and more public trial of truth.

The great Viv Richards and Joel Garner had helped turn Somerset into an awesome county contingent, but the grind of championship cricket and the low-key early rounds of three knockout competitions had taken their toll on these two and the other celebrity in their midsts, the instinctively divisive Ian Botham. 

The truth as Peter saw it was that these three were only mentally ‘turning up’ for a handful of matches a season – the semis and the finals.  If the team were to build on its success, and its young talent flourish, Viv and Joel would have to go and if they went it was certain Botham would leave too.

The resulting battle split the dressing room, split the Committee, split the County and split the followers of cricket throughout the land.  Another would hesitate, but for Peter, it had to be done.  There was nothing to put on the positive side of his cold cost-benefit analysis.

This quality, characteristic or condition (depending on the reader’s point of view) made him a Liberal of conviction.  His later writings and actions exposed prejudice, defied dictatorship, challenged convention, attacked arbitrary power, raged against injustice and were consistently intolerant of complacency in any shape or form.

Lovers of the highest qualities that cricket can evince will hope that he will be proved right for example over Ponting and the Ponting Approach. 

It is not about winning at all cost, it is about playing the game as human beings – that is, yes, competitively, individualistically, fiercely, but it is also about playing it socially, not in the sense of a distinction between social and professional cricket, but in the sense that human beings are social animals and cricket is not war.

As with a chivalric code, cricket must celebrate underlying virtues, express respect, enlist empathy and uphold the fundamental equality of human beings.

Within a primate group there will be loners and misfits and aberrants and solitaries and deviants, but paradoxically they are still part of the group.

 However isolated they may become, they are valuable to the group that they shun and never entirely self-sufficient from those that they distance themselves from.  

This produces a tension within the group, within themselves and within others that can  lead ultimately to their destruction, sometimes at another’s hand and sometimes at their own.

It was his inability to live his personal life by the tenets he held high – the abuse of power and trust that was inexcusable and his lack of control – that will have tormented him.  He will not have cared so much about social shame as personal shame.

The tragic flaw repeatedly manifests itself at school, in the club, in life.  It undermines, devastates, tears down but always leaves its trace.

The controversy that therefore always attended Peter is at an end, his campaigns will die as memory dies, but his writings will endure so long as people read about the game of cricket. He gave lessons and was a lesson.

Tuke Can Play

“Tuke, wake up down there and keep your eyes on the game!”

The Squire always had great difficulty when captaining Henry Scott Tuke.

Tuke loved his cricket.  It was probably the only occupation that could draw him away from the beaches of Cornwall, and even so his mind would frequently wander back there to the rock pools, the sailing boats and the young boys, diving and hauling. 

In fact the ruse the Squire had used to induce Tuke to turn out that day was to select Henry Allen for the side.  So, in many ways, admirers of the visual artist’s prolific oeuvre have the Squire to thank for the painting above, Henry Allen in Cricket Whites.

Among Tuke’s maritime paintings is this of a four-masted barque in 1914 which almost certainly will have shortly been sunk like a sitting duck by U-Boat action. So many were.

A painting of the Squire’s yacht Bolivar* is a prized possession in his most private collection and alas cannot be published.

“I think he left some diaries here one day.  Asked me to keep ‘em safe. They’re somewhere in the library, Third Man. We must have a rummage for them. Full of cricket scores I seem to remember.”

Tuke also painted T.E. Lawrence as a cadet tying up his webbing after a dip at Newporth Beach, nearFalmouth, in 1906.

One day, Third Man may be tempted to tell the tale of when young Aircraftman Ross, as he then insisted on calling himself, raced round the orchard on the old Brough Superior after getting a duck in a match in 1922.

* A short explanation as to how the Squire came indirectly to own Lord Byron’s yacht, Bolivar, can be found here.

South Africa v Australia Test 1 Day 3: Do Not Adjust Your Set – Normal Service Will Be Resumed

Yesterday, on the second day of the first test between South Africa and Australia at Newlands, Cape Town experienced a period of atmospheric disturbance that at one time caused the ball to veer erratically to one side or the other at disconcerting pace. 

These abnormal conditions ended as suddenly and as unexpectedly as they had arrived but in that relatively brief period wickets fell like autumn leaves.  And no-one could be sure if or when such conditions might return.

The craving for stability and predictability was palpable, but Day Three was full of omens for both sides.  It was 11/11/11 and by 11 o’clock South Africa needed 111 to win.

Normalcy was a term coined by Warren Harding when campaigning in the American presidential election immediately after the First World War.

It refers to what people call normality when they can no longer take it for granted.

For Australia, normal was once the omnipotence and resilience they experienced for a sustained period – a green and golden age.  This they had appeared to rediscover when, defending a moderate score, they had taken 9 South African wickets for 47 runs in just over an hour after lunch yesterday.

Normalcy, or the new normal, is the Post Waugh/Post Galactics period, which reared back into view immediately after their defiant bowling performance when the Australian batsmen surrendered their ten wickets for 47 runs.

Dropping a straightforward chance from Amla in the gully to the last ball of the day had surrendered a huge psychological advantage and now, as Day Three began in bright and drying sunshine, they dropped him again, this time to first slip’s left.

South Africado not have to worry about adjusting to new circumstances.  They are ‘same old, same old’ and in Graeme Smith they have the best batsman in the world to accept the mission of scoring big in the fourth innings of a match.

Amla, his perfect partner, may not have been many people’s second choice for such a task but given three goes he was not about to let down his captain or his country.

His simple and effective trigger of a small right-footed step-back-and-across followed by a forward press brings him to the pitch of the ball.  He has the same kind of back lift that Bradman is said to have had.  The willow blade journeys out towards gully before circling round and down to punch or drive the ball with exquisite timing. His wrists work like Draavid’s to persuade the ball fine or to meet it full faced.  Today he threaded the field at will.

Where Smith’s innings had the single pace of a metronome, Amla’s accelerated like a toboggan on the Cresta Run.  When he was finally caught by Clarke in the gully he had made 112 and taken his side to within 14 runs of victory.  Soon after, Smith completed his deserved hundred and then struck the winning blow.

Point:  Australia began their second innings leading by the not inconsiderable margin of 188 runs (the old normal) and lost the match by the large margin of 8 wickets (the new normal).  Final Score Card.

South Africa v Australia Test 1 Day 2a, 2b and 2c: Through the Looking Glass and What Australia & SA Found There

The First Test in this mini-series will be over by tomorrow – Day 3.  Yet in many ways it will have been a five day match.

On Day 2a, Australia resumed on 214 for 8. Clarke and Siddall, enjoying the bright day, put on a tenacious 59. Clarke was eventually last man out for a very special 151 having taken his side’s score to 284. 

South Africa duly reached 49 for 1 in the remaining hour of the extended session before lunch: gutsy Test cricket with the Proteas a nose ahead.

On Day 2c South Africa scored 81 for 1.

Third Man realises that this doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that was because in Day 2b not a lot actually made sense – nineteen wickets falling for 94 runs.

As Australia made their way onto the field for the afternoon session it was if, like Alice, they had stepped through a mirror on the way out of the dressing room and entered another universe.

In the post-play press conference Clarke was to explain:  “Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves     Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe:   All mimsy were ye borogoves;   And ye mome raths outgrabe.”

Through the Looking Glass,  Australia proceeded to take 9 South African wickets for 47 runs with Watson jagging the ball sideways and taking 5 / 21 – that is 5 wickets in 21 balls. 

Harry Harris picked up four and Siddell had the joy or running out Morne Morkel (no nickname necessary) with a direct hit.

However, Australia’s key mistake of the day was not finding the mirror to step back through before starting their innings. (TM blames Australia’s lack of a full time manager/coach for this.)

In Looking Glass Land everything is displayed reversed in reflection symmetry.  So it came as no surprise to those few, who were in possession of the facts, that South Africa then proceeded to bowl Australia out for precisely 47.

New boy Mats Vernon Philander took 5 for 15 in 7 overs – an experience he is unlikely to forget.   

At one point Australia’s last pair needed almost to double their side’s score inorder to avoid it being the lowest total in Test history, ever, anywhere, anyhow.

When Smith came out to bat for the second time that day, statisticians had the further  thrill (if they needed one) of witnessing for the third time in Test cricket all four innings of a match taking place on a single day. 

In their excitement they may have missed Smith and Rudolph counter attacking by stepping through the dressing room mirror back into the world that the day had begun in all those wickets ago

Here the sun was still shinning and South Africa were able to move assertively to the close of play, 155 runs behind Australia with 9 second wickets and three fifths of the match in hand, Mr Cricket having dropped a sitter off Amla on the last ball to complete his agony of a day.

It must be said that during Day 2b the bowling was very good; accurate in line and length.  Defensive caution availed not and those like Hussey, Hadden and Johnson, who threw the bat, were punished the first time they did so.

The DRS was used four times in the Australian innings 3 times at the request of the Proteas.  All four decisions went in the home side’s favour which especially pleased Ponting whose duck was the second occasion in the match that third umpire, Billy Bowden, from his little room upstairs raised his crooked finger.

Rationalists will be keeping a close eye on the weather forecast for Cape Town tomorrow – which promises more of the same.  

Irrationalists will see South Africa’s dilemma: do they smash every mirror on the ground and risk the resulting ill-luck or do they accept the hazard of accidentally straying back into Looking Glass Land?

Who said cricket was an easy game?