The Three Stigmata of Sachin Sangakkara

Third Man woke disturbed and psychotic somewhere in the middle-watch of the night, over-consumed and under-entertained.

Flicking the VidiScream into a parody of life, he engorged immediately the intensity of Melbourne, its glare and 23 degree warmth irradiated the chilly room.  He bathed vicariously.

No one in the stands, but Ponters reassuringly in the old Green Baggy spitting into his hands and rubbing his palms. Rahual staying leg side and settling to his task reminding him; this dark, howling night when he knew outside the ‘tronic birches bowed as the ceaseless gales scythed the Martian ‘scape; of his own summer long ago on Terra.

Where in the narrative were they?  Into which fairy tale were the ExPros shaping that game?  The Hero with a Thousand Faces scratched his guard, again and again. Faced the unknown debutant going for his Michelle while Harvey and Just What Was His Name Didn’t He Once Play For, as tonight’s shapesetters competed again, this time to explain better than the other: old warriors hacking for the Corporation about the Empire, elucidating, enlightening.

But “It wasn’t enough.”  TM knew, “it wasn’t enough” no matter how they vizi-shaped it. Falsity, entertainment, contentless content.  He’d paid good skins for this. He went to flick it off.

The vidifon rang.  “This is the Adjustment Bureau calling.  We just saw you went for the off-button.  Was there anything wrong with the content?  Are you finding the payment schedule difficult to keep?  Have you thought of taking another package? Would more ExProMax help? We could courier it to you tonight. It’s what the ExPros use. It enlightens and brightens”

He wouldn’t miss a minute, he resolved. “Send it now!”

Satiated, he dozed and woke in Durban. No one in the stands but Smith reassuringly in Proteans Green spitting into his hands and rubbing his palms. Sangakarra, blade-sharp, compiling a fairy tale century for the first time in this land by the ocean, unconquerable, facing the foe whose guile and dark arts sought to entrap, wheeling the rotations like a spinner, darkly: the Trickster. 

But Sangakarra, marked for life, made it … then succumbed to inevitability.  Like life, you will pass.  In heaven you will sit like Corkie and Rampy competing to explain, hacking for the Corporation about the Empire with Sachin by your side, a logo on your light blue cotton oxford shirts,  identical ties, the same enthusiasm: the three stigmata of the ExPro.

He went to flick it off.

The vidifon rang.  “This is the Adjustment Bureau calling.  We just saw you went for the off-button. Was there anything wrong with the content?  Are you finding the payment schedule difficult to keep up?  Have you thought of another package?”

He’d paid good skins for this.  He wouldn’t miss a minute.  He swallowed more ExProMax. It really enlightens and brightens, he thought.

“This Marchant Pattison looks the real thing, alright.” Or was it James de Lange? (Did it matter?)

“Yeh, he’s got the intensity to go far for a long time to come.” 

Satiated Third Man dozed and woke in Dubai or was in Abu Dhabi ( did it matter?) like a batsman, high and castled.  Ubikitious cricket.  It is what he paid for.

He dreamed one day of being there in person.  How many skins would he need. 1,485 plus a single supplement of 269.

Do ExPros dream of electric runs?

The vidifon rang.  “This is the Adjustment Bureau calling.  We just saw you missed the final day.  Was there anything wrong with the content?  Are you finding the payment schedule difficult to keep up?  Have you thought of another package?”

The Martian gales erode the superlatives.  These, here  and here, have been epic, magnificent, great, good, exemplary, quality, professional Tests.

“So, why flow my tears,” the watchman said.

VALID?

The puzzled may find a bridge into this piece here. There is a lot right about big match cricket today as the two Boxing Day Tests have displayed in Durban and Melbourne but … The Three Stigmata of Sachin Sangakarra endeavours the communicate the ‘but’.

“C.K. Why don’t you just smack it?” – from Tavare to Sehwag in four balls

Viewed from the past, modern cricket isn’t unrecognizable. 

All that stuff about how the game has changed beyond all recognition is a load of codswallop.  You could argue that cricket just went through a Dark Age during the seventy years between 1930 and 2000. 

Sure, it may be all a bit unfamiliar to those who earned their living at the game in 1950, but to someone who played in the 1700s and the 1800s much less would seem to have changed.

Third Man’s license to travel through time forbids him from carrying passengers from the past ‘back’ to the future, but if he did ever smuggle one on board the first he’d invite would be C.K.Nayudu.

There is C.K., above, second from the left, fag in hand, making himself comfortable on the bumper of Baroda 34, one of Pratapsinhrao Gaekwad’s splendid coups de ville.

That’s the Maharaja on his right, forerunner of all the super rich owners of today’s IPL franchises.

On C.K.’s left are Sardar Ghorpade and Syed Mushtaq Ali also enjoying the Bollywood lifestyle in their stylish high waisted  ‘bags’ (1920’s slang for Trousers).

C.K. not only lived the lifestyle of an IPL superstar, he played his cricket like a modern.

Well, strictly he didn’t to begin with.  As a youngster he was a blocker … until his Dad took him along for his old pal Ranji to have a look at him in the nets.

CK was tall, had a good reach and quick feet – an obvious athlete – but was utterly unadventurous, patting back each delivery.

“My friend,” said the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar and one of the two most exciting and innovative players that the game had by then produced, “why doesn’t he smack the ball?”

Great advice from Ranji, though even from a hundred years away you can hear the hint of frustration and ennui in the Great Man’s words.

Later, Dad put his arm around the kid and said, “You want to play cricket, right? You’ve got to learn to hit every bowler on every pitch. Get out in all weathers, make yourself hard.”

The new self-confident C.K. emerged on debut at the Bombay Quadrangular in 1916.  With his side reeling on 79 for 7, he walked to the wicket to face that canny and highly experienced Australian leg-spinner, Frank Tarrant.

If you listen carefully you can hear the banter as the lanky, gawky twenty year old walked to the wicket, took guard, and looked up to see Tarrant flicking the ball from one hand to the other, pure cunning menace.

“Four to come. Play.”

The ball tossed high came to C.K. with an audible buzz, dipped and bounced spitefully.  He played it with care back from where it had come.

Tarrant, soon at his mark and anxious to give the youngster no time to think, approached once more.  Again came the buzz, the dip, the bounce and again the careful defence.

A laugh or two broke out among the fielders and Tarrant skipped to his mark and turned without hesitating.  More laughter as silly mid-off retrieved the ball from C.K.’s feet.

As the ball made its way back to Tarrant, C.K. heard Ranji’s voice in his head, “Just give it a crack young man.”

As the fourth delivery flew above his eye-line, C.K. animated and eager, his bat lifted high about his head, jumped out, landed with perfect balance and smacked the ball high and handsome.

There was a moment of absolute silence as the ball soared over the boundary and as the crowd and players took in what had happened.

Then, their tension released, there was a roar of appreciation.

Fielding In the Deep

The Squire has long believed that God is a cricket tragic.

“And a bowler, Third Man.  Quite obviously a bowler.  You have only to look at the wobble he puts on the orbits of his planets.  Superlative deliveries eon after eon.”

This conversation comes around annually just as our own fair planet moves towards the December solstice.

“Look at that seam position, TM.  23 degrees and 26 minutes. Precision.”

Of course, as a founding member of the Royal Society and an old team mate of Sir Isaac Newton, His Grace might be forgiven for shunning the implications of the Quantum Theorists with their pajamas, white spheres and artificial lighting, but he has a theory for that.

“All came about after The Master retired from the First Class game, TM and started thinking about it instead of just turning at the end of his run, storming in with that perfect glide and bowling the thing.  Too much thought can be a dangerous thing – over complicating matters. Once you start thinking of fermions and photons and bosons, it becomes a very different game.”

The Squire and Third Man were taking a turn about the hothouse looking at the progress of the pineapples destined for the coming seasonal celebrations.

The silence was eventually broken when the Squire admitted, “I’ve been thinking a lot about Iris and of course about dear, dear John.”

By whom he meant Iris Murdoch  and John Bayley .

“They liked their cricket, didn’t they TM.  Bit of a fuss getting them here.  The Bentley and the travel rugs and all the paraphernalia they insisted on bringing. Do you remember?”

“But they loved it when they were here Your Grace, hats and caps and deck chairs.”

“I once scored an effortless century when she was watching, Third Man. In 1978, I think. From the very first delivery, the ball just came off the bat perfectly. Iris gave me a stone by which to remember the day.  Still have it in the Library.  And a copy of ‘The Sea, The Sea.’.   Just published I seem to remember.”

“A difficult book that one, Sir.”

“But rewarding, TM.  I struggled over the first few paragraphs.  Put it down.  Picked it up again and away it went … love, loss, myth and magic.”  

All cricketing themes too, Sir.”

“Yes, indeed, love, loss, magic and myth. And vanity, jealousy and self-deceit.”

“And that old fellow Shakespeare hovering in the background.”

“Like batting at a packed Lord’s in the fresh of the morning with the good Doctor next man in, sitting on the balcony and scowling through his beard, the crowd reserving their full concentration until it was his turn to bat.”

“Started talking like this to Her Grace last night.  Want to know what she said, TM?  ‘And to think, twenty years later and that mind, that personality, that potentiality lost in the transubstantiation of Alzheimer’s disease like the particles in a drop of rain returned to the ocean.’”

Thallata! Thallata!

“Even if readers claim that they ‘take it all with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’.”  That conceited bugger, Charles Arrowby, in The Sea, The Sea, p 76

Virender Sehwag – Rara Avis

Those for whom the bleep test is an approaching nightmare, the yoyo a yearning easily ignored, the skin-fold measuring device as welcome as a dentist’s drill, the press conference a void to be avoided and foot movement a distraction from the job of laying bat on ball, Virenda Sehwag is an idol.

Well, he may not be as fond of full-fat ice cream as Samit Patel, but he looks as if he enjoys food, doesn’t enjoy exercise and could be a computer salesman off the cricket pitch with short sleeve shirt and chinos rather than one of the world’s most exceptional batsmen.

But mark well, there is a great deal of technical skill and discipline on show when Sehwag bats.

In a game that takes place in the four dimensions of in/out, up/down, here/there and time, the odds are far better if the batsman uses either a perfectly perpendicular or a perfectly horizontal bat – anything in between increases the difficulties of meeting the ball at the batsman’s choice of contact point. 

In fact, it is more important that you hold to the straight and the horizontal than that you use the full face of the bat. 

Sobers and Lara both had the knack of applying the same swing but varying the amount of the face that was applied to the ball.  They could ‘slice’ and intentionally reach the straightest or finest of third man and fine leg boundaries.

Ditto Virender.

This special technique can only be built upon a spectacular pair of eyes but when these rare things come together you have master batsmen who can drive a ball in an arc of over 270 degrees, all along the ground, over the in-field or across the rope, whichever they choose.

This gives them so many relatively safe scoring directions from an identical ball that they pierce the field at will.

The early Ben Hollioake looked to have the same skill, but cricket was robbed of the chance to see how he would use it.

The remarkable thing about Sehwag is that this precision eyesight normally decays with age requiring a mid career change of technique.  Even Sobers and Lara found it harder and harder as they grew older and made adaptions, but Virender treated the world to a superb display this week in his 219 in 149 balls with 25 fours and seven sixes at the age of 33.

 

The conditions and the opponents were ideal but it was still an awesome display.

While the new religionists in cricket put their novitiates through the Inquisition of their gruelling torture physical conditioning, making them more injury prone on the way, they must have to shield their eyes from the heresy Sehwag preaches. 

His creed is sacrilege and all the more full of heavenly wonder for that.

And his calling and running between the wickets? 

Well that is in the Compton class of absolute entertainment.

2012 ‘What’s Your Price’ Lecturer Announced

Third Man likes Tony Greig.  What you see  – all six foot six of him in a world populated by the vertically challenged – is what you get.

Tony has enlivened many an evening below stairs at the Great House, his huge frame, similarly oversized hat and immense Scottish brogue filling the Butler’s pantry as the staff enjoyed the scraps and dregs left by those who inhabit the world above stairs.

“My advice to the lot of you is to grab your share, not down here in the shadows but up there in the full light of the candelabra.”

It is this colonial approach and the freedom from humbug that is most admired by those stuck in the Old Country ways.

A night with Tony is like a visit to see Dick Wittington at the Royal Theatre, Bath.  For Tony, there is no business like show business and there is no show business like cricket. 

“You should have seen their faces when I told them I didn’t want their f**king captaincy any longer. They went down the list of alternatives. ‘Already got him signed up,’ says I. ‘Him to.’ ‘And him’. ‘Got the bloody lot of them.’ ‘Going to be the greatest show on earth and no thanks to yous lot.”

Once Tony brought Richie Benaud with him.  Now there was a human calculator, ‘Five Brains’ Benaud.  He knew the form and odds, alright ol’ Richie did.

At the time when the Squire, who has a little vineyard in the Hunter Valley, introduced Kerry Packer to Benaud, he told the magnate, “You only meet a Richie Benaud once in your life. Make the most of it Mr Packer. That’s what I say.”

That may have been the origin of Kerry’s famous remark about Alan Bond, to whom in 1987 he sold his Channel Nine business for A$s 1.05 billion before buying it back from him three years later for A$ 250 million.

“You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I’ve had mine”.

Packer was as good as the Squire for turning a phrase and no mistake. In 1976, his opening gambit with the Australian Cricket Board was, “There is a little bit of the whore in all of us, gentlemen. What is your price?”

Which is perhaps why, when the MCC (or the Premier Visa Club) wanted a snappy name for their series of events to honour those who have demonstrated special service to the business of cricket, it called them the ‘What’s Your Price?’ Lectures.

Headquarters phoned the Squire last night to give Him advanced warning that the 2012 ‘What’s Your Price’ lecturer will be none other than Anthony William Grieg.

It’ll be good to see Tony back at the Great House next year, though those below stairs will have to put up with a liberal sprinkling of mockery for still ‘knowing their place’ in the system.

MCC president Phillip Hodson told the press: “Fiercely competitive on the field and hugely insightful off the field, Tony Greig has had a wonderful career in the game. Never one to shun the limelight or shy away from voicing his opinion, I am sure that his MCC What’s Your Price Spirit of Cricket Cowdrey Lecture will be in keeping with the way he played the game.”

“Tony’ll make them grovel, Third Man.  Mark my words,” speculated the Squire.

The Situation in Cricket – Why the Spectacle is not the Game

Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s School days, was notoriously hard of hearing – even in his youth.  The famous occasion when he sent back and thus ran out his senior partner at the crease, Flashman – starting their relationship off on the wrong foot entirely – was put down to this disability by those who witnessed the incident. 

“Didn’t you hear me, Brown?” becoming his nickname thereafter.

On another afternoon at Rugby School, the Squire, who had been called in by Dr Arnold  to advise on improvements to the square, was talking with a well meaning master while watching a game take place on the troublesome turf.

“A noble game,” quoth this young Mentor, seeking to ease the conversational path.

“Isn’t it?” replied the Squire. “But it’s more than a game, it’s a situation.”

Hughes obviously misheard the conversation which he later wrote up, with the Squire’s quote now coming from the mouth of his hero, Tom B, in the following form:

“But it’s more than a game, it’s an institution.”

Had Hughes heard the Squire’s perspicacious utterance correctly the whole history of cricket, the Empire and modern society, no less, might have been very different.

As it was, cricket went down another road towards the commodity it has become.

But the Squire seldom cries over spilt milk for long.  He straps on his pads, takes up the gauntlets, adjusts his beaver and gets back into the field, Third Man following with His inners as best he can.

The point of this story is that it was retold by the Squire at a dinner following a match played at the Great House in the season of 1957 when the visitors were a scratch side playing their first fixture together.  They included Ralph Rumney, who at that time was working on this painting called The Change, and others such as Attila Kotányi, Hans-Peter Zimmer, Heimrad Prem, Asger Jorn , Jørgen Nash Maurice Wyckaert, Guy Debord, Helmut Sturm, and Jacqueline de Jong .

A very promising unit as they would now be described, but as yet without a name for their emerging club, which they said was open to all those who feared that, increasingly, people were no longer participants in their own lives but spectators, and that reality was being replaced by images in what they called the ‘spectacular society’.

“Each cricket match is the construction of a situation for the fulfilment of those necessary human desires which we now find increasingly suppressed by the advance of capitalism,” the Squire declared to general murmers of agreement.

And so were born the ‘Situationists’, a cricket club of which the Third Man’s benefactor  is proud to be the first and so far only Patron, although the membership is dwindling and with it the fixture list.

The club’s leg spinner, who derived exceptional drift from his action, and who for many seasons was its rather autocratic captain, Guy Debord, clarified much of the thinking behind their motto – The Spectacle is Not the Game – when he defined the concept of a cricket match as “a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events.”  (TM’s italics)

Every match from the great Test matches to those constructed on a village green, from those played in school playgrounds or on the drab and dusty public spaces such as  the urban landscape above are experiments, each and every one of them, that make possible fulfillment of authentic human experience.

Through a game of cricket, those four young people, or twenty two (or more if anyone is watching) can come together and, in authenticity, express their deep desires.

As the Squire said on that night over fifty years ago, “That’s why we play it.  That’s why we watch it.  That’s why we relive and reflect on it.  Write about it.  Dream about it. Hate it.  Love it. Are bored by it. Fascinated by it.  Enslaved by it.  Liberated by it.”

“We were fanatics,” ruminated Ralph Rumney, who died in 2007. “But we weren’t wrong.”

Membership application forms for The Situationists can be obtained by emailing Third Man.

Image above published under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License by Saadat .