The Virtual Stoa

For much of the Summer I’ve found Test Match Special pretty hard to listen to; yesterday and today I’ve been hooked. It could just be that the compellingness of TMS directly correlates to the compellingness of the match, and when the cricket’s not that interesting, then all the reasons that make you think, “God, the commentators really annoy me” come to the fore and you switch off the radio. Or it could just be that they haven’t had Geoffrey Boycott on this morning, so it’s a lot less irritating than usual. Does Boycott not work on Saturdays? Or have they realised he’s really annoying and sacked him?

Also - why on earth is the final day of Test cricket this Summer  Monday 11 August (assuming the game makes it to the fifth day)? That’s preposterously early. Grr.

Paul Collingwood’s just hit a century, in what’s turning out to be a smashing Test Match.

Norm has posted on Eric Hollies’ dismissal of Don Bradman for 0 in the latter’s final Test Match at the Oval in August 1948 — you know, the duck that ensured that he only averaged 99.94 over the course of his international career (YouTube over here) — and he discusses the phenomenon of inherited cricket memories, of events that took place before you were born, or that you couldn’t possibly have experienced firsthand yourself, but of which you possess the most vivid of memories. And this example and this phenomenon makes me think of my dad.

As it happens, he was in the crowd at the Oval during that match as a twelve-year-old, though he didn’t see Bradman bat (not that he batted much), and I think his only memory is of Bradman fielding on the boundary.

(Australia, as it happens, didn’t need Bradman’s runs, as in the first innings England had been all out for 52, with Lindwall taking 6 for 20; Australia replied with 389, with 196 from Morris; and England only managed 188 in the second innings, with Hutton top-scoring with 64, Australia winning by an innings and 149 runs.)

But I thought of my dad more because I’m going to hazard a guess that his is the generation that is most familiar of all with powerful memories of cricket matches it never saw, owing to the Second World War. Men in their seventies now were boys during the war, when there was no significant domestic cricket and certainly no international cricket to follow. So they read up about games that had been played before the war, and very possibly about games that had been played before they were born, and can now talk about them as vividly as I can remember Test Matches that I saw on TV when I was younger, and above all in the early 1980s, with the England team of Ian Botham, David Gower and Bob Willis.

And I think this also helps to explain just why Dennis Compton’s runs in 1947 were quite so celebrated, or why the visit of Bradman’s Australians in 1948 was quite so exciting. During the war people could only read about past heroics, and here were the heroes finally playing again, and heroically, too.

So I’m not sure I’ve got any severely inherited cricket memories. I think I just belong to the wrong generation. The 1970s moment I’m most familiar with is when Fredericks hit Lillee for six but then trod on his stumps in the 1975 World Cup Final at Lord’s, but that’s just because that was the best game ever to screen highlights from during rain breaks in TV broadcasts in the 1980s. (It’s the third ball in this clip, coming after less than a minute.)

Readers! Any inherited cricket memories of your own? Or just cricket clips from YouTube you want to recommend? Fire away in the comments.

England v India, yesterday.

It’s been done three times before, by Gary Sobers, Ravi Shastri and Herschelle Gibbs.

Over here:

30th over: West Indies 115-7 (Bravo 18 Taylor 0) Keith Flett rears his hairy head from the Beard Liberation Front’s overgrown bunker long enough to shout: “HIRSUTE ENGLAND INTIMIDATE WEST INDIANS WITH FIERCE APPEARANCE: The BLFront, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that with a seam and pace attack of Harmison, Plunkett and Sidebottom amongst the most generally hirsute England bowling sides of recent years, it appears that West Indies batsmen are being intimidated to lose their wickets, rather than losing them to good quality bowling. Pioneered in modern times by Australia’s Merv Hughes the intimidation is quite within the rules of cricket and amounts to little more than looking somewhat fierce and as if you and ought to take wickets.”

Hero of the Stoa.

It’s at times like this that I suddenly recall that my nineteenth-century forebears had names like Kalaugher, Kelly, Driscoll, O’Reilly, McCarthy, MacGuire and McAuly (not to mention plenty of eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish Brookes), and I feel more Irish than I actually am…

… although it looks as if you have to be called O’Brien to play for the Irish cricket team.

(Similarly, one of the minor pleasures of watching Wales beat England is the affinity provided by the knowledge that my great-grandfather Alfred Mathews took the field for Wales against Scotland on 9 January 1886. It was his only cap, and Scotland won on the day, but it’s enough for me. It’s interesting to be diasporic in an almost entirely non-diasporic kind of a way.)

In my world, the letters “TMS” can refer either to Test Match Special or to the Theory of Moral Sentiments. So far the different bits of that world have stayed sufficiently distinct from one another that I don’t think I’ve ever made myself horribly confused, but I’m sure the day will come when I muddle them up (and I’m also confident that the day has become closer now that I’ve become self-conscious about the possibility of that confusion).

Over here.

(Ireland 80-4 off 27 chasing 132.)

It’s half-time during France vs Scotland in Paris, and there’s a distinct possibility that Ireland will end the day Six Nations Champions, if Scotland can hold on, and that the Irish cricketers may beat Pakistan in the World Cup: Pakistan are 73-6 off 22.3 overs. My goodness.

I’m trying not to get excited by the World Cup, because one-day cricket is a silly game (unless it’s 20-20 cricket, which pushes silliness to the limit, and becomes sensible, again, or something), but there’s been a satisfying amount of drama for a competition that’s still only a few days old.

UPDATE [5.15pm]: Bugger. Still, Pakistan are 112 for 8 (34.2 overs).

UPDATE [7.20pm]: Still, I always like it when Wales beats England.

Over here.

(Don’t Ireland get to win by virtue of having lost fewer wickets, or something? Gah!)

Einst, o Wunder! entblüht auf meinem Grabe,

Eine Blume der Asche meines Herzens

Deutlich schimmert auf jedem Purpurblättchen:

Adelaide!

Friedrich von Matthisson, made famous by Beethoven, over here.

From tehgraun, earlier this morning:

“This feels like watching England’s footballers take penalty kicks,” says Erik Hogstrom.

They’ve left out Panesar, again. Ho hum.

From tehgraun’s OBO, as the England 2d innings begins:

If Freddie pulls this off, it will be his greatest feat as a captain so far, but then the only competition for that title is his use of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” to motivate the team into coming back to win the final Test in India earlier this year. I wonder what Johnny Cash tune he’ll be playing now? “How high is the water mamma? three feet high and rising” that is the best the man in black has to say about this sorry business.

Readers with long memories will recall that Enkidu became interested in cricket almost immediately, after coming to live with us in the Summer of 2005. Here and here, for example. And now that the Ashes are being contested again, Enkidu’s interest has reawakened.

I’ve been leaving the radio on at night, very quietly, so that I can fall asleep while Justin Langer is scoring runs, wake up while Ricky Ponting is scoring runs, lucky me, and if I drift into consciousness in the middle of the night I can easily register the latest score before drifting back into sleep. And after finding alternative places to sleep for a month or more, Enkidu chose Wednesday night, the first day of the Test Match, to come and settle down at the foot of my bed again: he was there at the start of play and still there at the close, and I don’t think he went anywhere else in between. So that’s a lot of Test Match Special that he got to hear.

He slept on my bed last night, too, though he had pushed off by the time the England batsmen were starting their innings. And here he is, later this morning, watching the highlights being streamed through the BBC website:

Richard Williams, in tehgraun:

If they go on to lose this series, that first ball will inevitably come to be seen as a bellwether - a term deriving, incidentally, from the ancient rural practice of placing a bell around the neck of a castrated goat chosen to lead a flock of sheep.

MORE: I liked this comment on one of tehgraun blogs from only1elvishammond:

Bottle of red wine then listened to the first hour not a good idea. Have to say Aggers description of the first ball was great. Although when he said “its gone straight to 2nd slip” I almost fell off the sofa - didn’t realise the guy hadn’t actually hit it.

See above. It’s not complicated.

The press are suggesting that Trescothick going home somehow means no place for Panesar in the England XI. Awful if true. More likely, as a colleague suggested to me, Fletcher prefers Giles because it’s easier for Jones to catch the ball when it isn’t spinning. Grrr.

UPDATE [22.11.2006]: Don’t miss Chris Dillow on Monty Panesar and Market Failure.

Presumably the only thing that could make the cricket saga funnier than it is already would be the disclosure that Darrell Hair had placed a large bet on the recent Test Match being finished inside four days.

I kept wicket for sixty overs yesterday, and for the first half of the morning it’s been pretty difficult getting down the stairs. When I bent over to feed the cats, I made an involuntary strangulated miaowing sound, which took them a little by surprise, but not so much to put either of them off their breakfast.

The Royal Mail is issuing three commemorative stamps to mark England’s victory to win back the Ashes. One of them will be a 68p stamp — the cost of a letter to Australia…

Michael Vaughan says:

“As a team and players, we had a lot of self-belief that we could turn things around, and we also have a lot of self-belief we can do very well in the World Cup come 2007 - that is when we will be judged.”

Bollocks. The World Cup in 2007 doesn’t matter much. It’d be a nice bonus to win it, but that’s all. England’s cricketers will be judged by sensible people (i.e. me, and people who think like me) far more by how they perform against Pakistan and India this Winter, against India and Sri Lanka next Summer, and, above all, in the Ashes series of 2006-7 in Australia.Actually, I like Michael Vaughan a lot. He bats well, and is incapable of disguising his mood when he’s on telly.

I still think we should have a Twenty:Twenty world cup, though, played over a week or so with each country playing twice a day. That’d be fun.

Can it possibly be true, as my copy of last year’s Wisden that my mum gave me last week suggests, that the West Indies aren’t touring England again until 2010? That’s disgraceful.

Presumably one of the issues facing the selectors for the Winter tour is to find ways of including Ian Bell and Geraint Jones in the squad — since it’d be tricky to drop players who featured in all five Ashes Tests — but then come up with excuses not to play them in the Test Matches, so their replacements can be settled in the side in good time for next Summer’s Tests? We really shouldn’t be playing people who look like twelve year-olds in the side, especially when they aren’t good enough at what it is that they are supposed to be doing. Maybe when they’re bigger.

When I was thinking about what I’d do if I were Ricky Ponting last night, I thought I’d aim to declare when scores were about level, in order to have as long as possible to have a bowl at England. But then I thought that Ponting’s shown himself to be a pretty unimaginative captain this Ashes, and he’s unlikely to want to do that. Now I see that, with the light improving, England are going into bat with the scores about level and a lot of time left in the game. Have England’s bowlers - with Flintoff leading the way - been doing Ponting’s work for him?

UPDATE [2.20PM] OK, so the light wasn’t improving.