Cricketing Kaironauts – Exploiting The Game’s Perennial Plasticity

The Squire was in the Club Library trying to re-write the third of Eliot’s Four Quartets, while Third Man was in Dressing Room No7* across the bridge in the old pavilion, struggling with 7 across in the quick crossword in the Mirror, when the bell of the telephone rang.

“Get across here right away, Third Man, I’m stuck.”

His Grace has been battling with The Dry Salvages for at least seventy years, ever since he’d railed against Tom’s adoption of the river as a metaphor for time.

“How can anyone who has only ever travelled in one direction through time, know anything about it? typical of a wrist spinner who never could master the Bosanquet.”

It is the Squire’s considered view that Cricket itself is best understood as a product of retro-plasticity, the undoing as well as the doing. People generally detect an illusory  evolution of cricketing technique from Timeless Cricket, to Test cricket, through shorter and shorter forms to arrive (in the present era) at T20. But His Grace considers this the inevitable product of social beings imposing some ideology, some morality, some politics onto the way the game is played.”

“Where is the time source? Where is the collapse? Where the star formation? What is it like to travel faster than the speed of light? Why is it not reversing?”

“Because it takes dry hands, your Grace?”

“Dry Hands! Now that would have been a better title,” declared the Squire with just the faintest of glances towards the kairometer he wore always around his wrist, as if checking for the opportune moment when time was indeterminate and everything was happening.

“Those exposed to the highest standards of T20 are the true Kaironauts of the age, TM. They are selected for what Wolfey (kool-aid medium strength) rightly termed the ‘right stuff’ and have had created for them a better culture in which to hone their skills.”

“Did you say Care-for-noughts, Your Grace?”

*Despite the many so-called improvements that have been made to the facilities of the historic pavilion at Dark’s, which have seen the conversion of Dressing Room No 6 into a lavatory for members unable to make their way down into the basement facilities, and No 5 having been turned into a physio-room, the old pros have managed to keep the existence of their beloved retreat, Dressing Room No 7, a secret from various Club Secretaries and Chairmen of the Estates Committee, for many years, and “mum” must remain the word or there would be no place for old cricketers to hide from the Present Day.

England Win GoldenTicket, India Go Under at River Crossing – Test 3 Day 1

Once upon a time Birmingham was Chocolate City.  A couple of miles south of Edgbaston, where the third Test between England and India began yesterday, is the model village of Bourneville.  It’s a model village not in the sense of a miniature village built to scale, but in the sense of an ideal village built to a concept.

In the case of Bourneville it was the idea of the Quaker and chocolate making Cadbury family that made its fortune adopting the receipt of Sir Hans Sloane for drinking chocolate milk and later producing the first milk chocolate bars in England to rival those made on the Continent. 

As an ideal village, readers would not be surprised to find that Bourneville had a model cricket ground, constructed also in the ideal sense, and played on twice by Worcestershire and later from time to time by Warwickshire IIs.

Today Bourneville is also the site of Cadbury’s World, ‘where chocolate comes to life’ and where visitors have the chance to live the life of a Charlie in a Chocolate Factory.  

The India cricketers probably wish that they had spent the day at Bourneville and enjoyed a ‘fun chocolate day trip’.  

Instead the side that at Lord’s and Headingley had been dunked as thoroughly as the Etruscans crossing the Tiber turned up at Edgbaston to find the same river continuing to flow fast and furiously before them with no idea how it could be crossed. 

They lost the toss, were compelled by England to cross the torrent first, were dismissed for 224 and, then, watched helplessly as the their opponents crossed the stream as if it were a babbling brook, scoring 80 without a single loss on what appeared a benign surface. 

Yes, it was England who, as well as winning the toss, looked to have won Willy Wonker’s Golden Ticket.

Good batsman are seldom bowled, but yesterday Gambhir, Dravid and the lost soul Raina were subject to this dismissal.

Sehwag, the usually extravagant, returning from surgery, but batting ‘like a patient etherised upon a table’, endeavoured groggily to drop his hands under the steeply rising first ball he received and ‘gloved’ to the keeper.

Tendulka, who is finding August as cruel as July, was wasted by Broad after scoring just one run in his brief innings of eight balls.

At 111 for 7, Dhoni and Kumar, like ‘Dry Salvages’, launched a counter attack.  (After the day’s play the Indian captain confessed, “I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable.”)

But you cannot bridge a river or win a Test match from 117 for 7.

A lucky catch by Cook ‘under the lid’ at silly point brought the innings to a close with the dismissal of Sharma but otherwise every wicket was either bowled or caught off the edge.

Third Man asked back in December whether 80 is the new 90 . The England attack is faster than that of India which seems as soft as a Cadbury’s Chocolate Eclair, but the trio of Anderson, Broad and Bresnan each averaged 83 mph during their combined 58.2 overs. 

It is the ideal speed and England have built their attack around this concept.  Allied to precise seam position, it maximizes the opportunity for the ball to move late in the air and off the wicket.

Cook and Strauss, who reached fifty shortly before the close of play, batted as if they were enjoying a net before their real innings would begin on day two.  That maybe so, provided rain does not spoil things.

This was therefore an ideal day for England, continuing their domination of an India lacking spirit and renewing the World Champion’s acquaintance with the implacable god of cricket.

A large mug of hot chocolate made to Sir Hans Sloane’s formula may be just the ticket, however it is more likely that India will not escape the wrath of the river god until the team is on the plane home.

The BCI would do well to heed Elliot’s warning in the third Quartet that the river once bridged …

The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget.