The Virtual Stoa

Around the same time that we acquired two small kittens, we also decided that would get a daily newspaper delivered, too, and after discussions, we settled on Le Monde. On the whole, it’s been a good read, surprising me from time to time with in-depth features on, for example, Tom Jones’s Sex Bomb, and with far more coverage of Martinique, French Canada and parts of North Africa than you tend to get in the UK papers. The great lack is that there hasn’t been much on the Ashes this Summer, which you would have thought any major journal of record would have wanted to cover at some length. But no, nothing — until today’s paper (or, rather, the paper with today’s date on it, that was published in Paris around lunchtime yesterday). Now, on the front page we can read about the “exploits d’Andrew Flintoff, star de la batte, qui a chassé le footballeur David Beckham de son piédestal” or Kevin Pietersen, with his “tatouage sur le biceps des trois lions de l’équipe d’Angleterre”, and learn important details about the game, such as the fact that a wicket is “une sorte de trépied”, which isn’t how I’ve ever really thought of it, but I suppose it makes sense. It’s all very fine, except for this detail: cricket, we are told, is a game “proche du base-ball”. Grr.

I hadn’t realised that, among his many other correspondents, Keith Flett spends his time writing to Test Match Special. While waiting for play to start at 11, after morning rain, the commentators have just read aloud his recent missive, which challenges the opinion of BBC weatherman (and, if memory serves, beardie) John Kettley. Apparently he has argued that the ball swings largely owing to meteorological factors, but the BLF insists that the ball swings better when heavy humid overcast conditions are combined with hirsute bowlers. “John Kettley has given only half the story”.

“There’s nothing to do right now but grow a beard”, says one of the commentators, possibly Graeme Fowler. Let’s hope play starts soon, and that the Aussies don’t go off when a cloud passes over the sun, if there’s any sun. (Test Match cricket in September in England is, in fact, a stupid idea. Presumably the assumption when the fixture was arranged was that the Ashes would have been decided by Old Trafford, and what happened after that didn’t really matter.)

The BBC TMS commentators are chatting away about how the Oval was once kitted out as a prisoner-of-war camp (though never actually used as one). The New Orleans Superdome and the Houston Astrodome have recently been used for disaster-relief. General Pinochet found alternative uses for the Santiago national stadium, the Taliban used to hold public executions at the Kabul football stadium, and the French police used the V�lodrome d’Hiver for the mass round-up of Jews for deportation in July 1942.

Please post other examples of historically interesting, important or disturbing uses of sports facilities in the comments.

Only ten minutes into the final Test match at the Oval, and Geoffrey Boycott has already told us that this is a really good pitch to bat on about four times too often. If he carries on like this, it’ll be grim.

I’m pleased to report that Andromache trotted in from the garden at exactly 10.30am, and sat on my lap to watch the first over being bowled by McGrath — though after two balls she wandered off again to do something else. I don’t think she has the patience yet to enjoy Test cricket.

I say Collingwood.

England have four more-than-decent bowlers in Hoggard, Harmison, Giles and Flintoff; with Collingwood and Vaughan (who should bowl more often, in my opinion), they will still have plenty of options; and it’s well worth having a bit more depth in the batting in the middle of the order. Jones on present form is irreplaceable, so why try?

The press tells me that cricket-mania is sweeping the country, and I now have a datapoint of my own to prove it. This morning, for the first time, I’ve heard several cries of “LBW!” coming from one of the gardens just down the road from us — and, weirdo that I am, I find myself wondering whether the ball might just have pitched outside Channel Four’s “red zone” on the leg-side. I should have thought that the gardens round here were too small for a good game of cricket, but I think the people playing are quite small, too, so that may make a difference.

(I also found myself explaining in some detail the rules about substitute fielders the other day. That’s not a regular feature of life, either.)

A rain delay after lunch on the first day of the fourth Test means I have time for a bumper edition of TKB. Here we see the kittens despairing of the Australian bowlers’ problems with no-balls:

Enkidu has found himself an advantageous perch at the top of the stairs:

A fearsome mouse…

And finally: Andromache pauses on her way down the stairs:

More to come…

But Geraint Jones’s catch to dismiss Shane Warne was sufficiently good that I’m going to promise not to be rude about his ability as a wicket-keeper for, I don’t know, maybe ten days or so.

The kittens are settling in, settling down, and getting quite a bit bigger already. We’re trying to sort out minor problems to do with fleas and diet and whatnot, and everything’s going smoothly right now. And I seem to be projecting an awful lot of ideas about gender onto these kittens.

Here, for example, is Enkidu, the boy-kitten, settling down to watch the start of the Test Match earlier this morning:

His sister (who is keeping up her aura of mystery by remaining nameless, at least for the present), by contrast, is not interested, even as Marcus Trescothick races to his fifty:

(Warne’s just got Strauss for 48: 112-1.)

With a six off the first ball of the final over and an apparently-suicidal single off the second, the Bangladeshis have just beaten the Australians by five wickets at a place called Sophia Gardens, which I’d never heard of before today, but which is somewhere in Wales. Tremendous news.

I haven’t really been paying attention to this, either (and I’ve never been to a match), but when I first heard about this, I thought it sounded like a good thing, and the first England vs Australia match of the Summer is being piped through the radio behind me and sounds quite fun (especially since three four Australians have just been dismissed in the last three four minutes or so, and any form of cricket in which you can dismiss three four Australians in three four minutes would seem to have something important going for it. So if more knowledgeable people could tell me whether 20/20 is any good or not, or whether it’s just the usual one-day crappiness and that I’m letting optimism trump good judgment (again), that’d be useful.

UPDATE [9pm] Hmm. These Australians don’t seem to be very good at this, do they?

UPDATE [16.6.2005]: And there’s more.

Norm has a link to a splendid cricket joke, and then quotes a sceptic — “You can accuse me of having a short attention span, but I find the whole concept of playing a game for FIVE DAYS to be just the other side of lunacy” — and then comments:

“No, that is the entire secret, and the beauty, of Test match cricket; it is what makes it matchless in all sport. I could go on: speak of unfolding drama, epic quality, individual character on display.”

He might be right, and he may very well be right for Test Match cricket at its very best (which is quite rare). But “matchless” is too strong.Test Matches go on for five days. The Tour de France goes on for three weeks, with a venue even more magnificent than Lord’s — one of the greatest countries in the world, and the only one with both Alps and Pyrenees — and, in a good year (which isn’t uncommon) possesses these rightly celebrated elements of (i) unfolding drama, (ii) epic quality and (iii) individual character in whopping great truckloads. And — just like Test Match cricket — it goes on for hours and hours at a time, can’t be compressed at all adequately into a half-hour highlights show in the evening, and is utterly baffling to those who will never understand.

The World of Blogs is well-equipped for enjoying cycling these days. Blognor Regis has recently been covering the just-finished Giro d’Italia, Backword Dave is a fan, and the Tour de France blog is always useful. This year, the last mountain stage in the Tour is on 19 July; the First Test Match begins on 21 July. So cricket fans have no excuse this year for not paying attention.

The fools who read the Observer think that Nick Hornby’s somewhat engaging and mildly interesting Fever Pitch is a better sports book than C L R James’s imperishable classic Beyond a Boundary (and scroll down to #3). This is idiocy on a large scale.

I’ve recently started reading the excellent cricket blog, the Corridor of Uncertainty, which has recently had on it a couple of splendid photos, one old, one new.

The old pic’s of Dennis Lillee bowling to nine slips:

And the new pic’s of May Day fun in Parliament Square yesterday (full story here):

I approve of cricket in South Africa, which seems always to start around 8.30 in the morning, which is a very good time to have cricket on the telly. And the last hour’s been great fun: five wickets, two chances that really shouldn’t have been missed (Jones dropped catch, Vaughan missed run-out) as South Africa have gone from an overnight score of 184-3 to 222-8 dec. This hour of incompetence shouldn’t stop them winning the match quite comfortably, unless something very surprising happens, but, as I say, it’s been fun to watch.

Right: time to go to the library.

What will be the outcome of the 2005 Ashes series?

He’s just become the first England player to opt out of the forthcoming tour of Zimbabwe. Over here.

More on Zimbabwe, incidentally, over here at Class Worrier, who’s just re-relocated to South Africa, from where we can expect quite a bit of SA/Zimbabwe blogging over the next few months.

Since the whole point (well, a substantial part of the point, anyway) of having the West Indies play Test Matches in England is to watch Brian Lara make bucketloads of runs, I wish he’s stop getting out for low scores.

Bugger.

So there was some discussion of the Greatest West Indian Cricketers while I was away, over here especially.

I’m too young to have anything coherent to say about any of the great players before 1984, except to repeat whatever it is that C. L. R. James says about them in Beyond a Boundary, but I just wanted to enter the controversy about the absence of bowlers from the approved list to say that if I were to draw up a list of the best five or the best six or whatever West Indian cricketers of all time ever then Curtly Ambrose would be somewhere on that list (along with everybody else’s choices).

Now the press tells me that he’s playing the bass guitar in a reggae band. Good for him.

I’ve been rereading C. L. R. James’s Beyond A Boundary, and it’s just as good second time around.

It has a couple of good blurbs on the back of my paperback, which I’ll just spit out here for fun:

[1] “Great claims have been made for Beyond a Boundary since its first appearance in 1963: that it is the greatest sports book ever written; that it brings the outsider a privileged insight into West Indian culture; that it is a severe examination of the colonial condition. All are true.” [Sunday Times][2] And, my favourite: “A mental landscape triangulated by literature, socialism and cricket represents an ideal we should all aspire to, and this ennobling and beautifully written book should be read by anyone with the slightest interest in any one of the above.” [The Guardian (Matthew Engel? Or someone else?)]

But the question is a straightforward one: are there any other sports books that are remotely as good, interesting and intelligent as this one?(Note to avoid misunderstanding: the question isn’t asked because I think sportswriting tends to be bad, uninteresting and unintelligent. There are lots of good sports books. At least, I think so. The question is, whether there’s anything else quite this good among the ranks of the better ones. And if anyone has any candidates, I’d like to know what they might be. I suppose they’re most likely to turn out to be about baseball or boxing.)

Oh to be in Antigua yesterday, not just for the usual reasons, but also to watch Brian Lara making an astonishing 313 Not Out against the English bowlers who have, improbably enough, had the better of the West Indies batsmen in the first three matches in this surprising series. I don’t think there’s anyone in world cricket that I would rather watch making a triple hundred. (Sachin Tendulkar, perhaps, but I’m not sure he ever will.)

The one time I saw Lara bat — on the final day of the Oval Test in 2000 — I’d have happily watched him bat all day and make a lot of runs. But then he was out for 47, and the England bowlers went on to win the game after that reasonably efficiently.

(This was also the day on which two other greats, Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, appeared for the last time in Tests in England, and received the standing ovations they deserved. So it was a memorable day to be at the Oval, even in the absence of a Lara century — or double century, or triple century…)

UPDATE: He did it: 400 Not Out. What a hero.

Online cricket archives are getting better and better.

This page gives an elegant summary of my grandfather Wilfrid Kalaugher’s first-class career, 1928-1931, with links to the scorecards of the eight matches in which he played, including the one in which he played against Wilfred Rhodes and got Maurice Leyland out and the one in which Kent scored far too many runs.

Chris Bertram is spending some of his time writing friendly criticisms of my various personal preferences over at Crooked Timber here and here. I’m now spending more of my time justifying my choices back on this blog. Yesterday I dealt with the Marxists (though read on for some second thoughts on the matter), and today I’m turning to the altogether more complicated Question of Sport.

So, beginning towards the end of his post with his double misplacements, I’m entertained to learn that when he cheers for England against Scotland in football or rugby he feels himself able to play (if necessary) the postcolonial card against the memory of Colley’s beastly Scottish imperialists… On the second misplacement, I’m not at all sure that I agree that “the displacement of the Union Jack by the Cross of St George in the hands of English sporting fans represents if not an explicit rejection of Great British colonial nationalism, at least an adaptation to something less jingoistic and aggressive”. But that may in part be because the only time I’ve experienced my own College bar as a less than fully welcoming place was the time there was a group of usually intelligent male (did I have to say that?) undergraduates with the Cross of St George painted on their faces singing, um, jingoistic and aggressive songs about how the Argentinian football team’s fondness for gay sex was grounds for asserting the superiority of the English. (Somehow I don’t think that this particular poisonous triangle of English nationalism, homophobia and football is unique to Oxford University.) One anecdote certainly does not a theoretical argument make — and I’m not going to pretend for a moment that the older Union Jackshirts never expressed similar attitudes — but I hope Chris will forgive me if my inclination is to respond to these expressions of this Cross of St George English nationalism by wanting to have nothing to do with it, rather than by launching a campaign of my own to try and contest and resignify the meanings of national symbols in sport. There’s certainly a disidentification here (though it’s a far stronger disidentification with nationalist expressions of support than with the object of support, the English football team, which I sometimes do support, as I did in that England v Argentina game), but as I’ve described it so far this disidentification has nothing straightforwardly to do with either postcolonial guilt or the romance of the Celtic nations, the two explanatory factors to which Chris draws attention.

Some people do have a policy of not supporting England. Dennis Skinner is one, and it was his use of the phrase, “Anyone but England” which provided the title for Mike Marqusee’s fine cricket book, which I was glancing through again last night. (C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary also reminds us that the complex relationship of cricket, social class and national politics is a spur to the very best writing on the game: I’m half regretting not voting for James and Fred Engels in Josh Cherniss’s poll, replacing Benjamin and Habermas on my list, but I don’t know whether he’ll let me submit a replacement ballot.) I don’t hold to “Anyone but England” as a policy or principle, and often I do find myself wanting England teams to win the matches they play, in football or in cricket — though quite often in cricket it’s obvious to me that my desire for the English cricket team to do well in part stems from my desire to have a competitive match: good Test cricket is one of life’s great pleasures, but when the English middle order collapses and the bowlers are crap, as has been known to happen, that’s very unlikely to take place. Cricket really is the sport where postimperial questions are quite inescapable, since the international game is entirely a product of the British Empire and matters of immigration and apartheid have done so much to shape the game, but I’m not going to try to talk about them here (go and read James and Marqusee if you’re interested) — except to say that when I experience feelings of postimperial guilt with respect to Test cricket I think that it doesn’t so much concern my feelings about the England team in particular, so much as the pleasure I derive from the entire spectacle (which we should understand here to include the Test Match Special radio commentary).

So, what of the rugby World Cup?

The two World Cup games I’ve enjoyed most were Wales vs New Zealand and Ireland vs Australia, in both cases because spirited performances by the Northern sides showed that the gap between (most) Northern and (most) Southern hemisphere rugby was narrower than it’s often taken to be. And watching the first game made it very easy to support Wales wholeheartedly against a dull and in some respects disappointing England the following week. It was a thoroughly good choice: Wales were the firm underdogs before the tournament began, in a sport where underdogs rarely win (look at both the quarter-final and semi-final lineups); and in their quarter-final they scored three tries to England’s one, played some great attacking rugby, led at half-time, and would have remained competitive right to the end if only that penalty kick had gone over in the 74th minute (or whenever it was). England won because Wales conceded way too many penalties, Jonny Wilkinson’s a good kicker, and their levels of personal fitness and discipline remained quite a bit higher. But those aren’t reasons for feeling terribly excited about their performance or their team. A dozen years ago I used to enjoy England’s ten-man rugby, but that was when I was a back-row forward myself, and I enjoyed watching England’s pack play well. Now it’s almost exactly ten years since the last game I ever played, and I find that I much prefer watching the open running game which I’ve seen Wales and France play in this World Cup better than England have managed to do — and that makes me want sides like that to do well. (I’ll certainly cheer for England if it’s an Australia vs England final, though, and that fact does say something about the ineliminably agonistic construction of national sporting identities.)

Chris writes critically of the “people who are plainly acculturated as English” who “seek to identify as �really� something else (on the grounds that this or that ancestor was Irish, Scottish or Welsh)”, but he seems to me to get things only half right here (at least in my case — though I have reason to think he was thinking of my case when he wrote those words). I’m “plainly acculturated as English”, but the point of cultivating a memory of where my ancestors came from in the context of sporting contests (in my case Ireland, Wales, England, New Zealand and Denmark) isn’t to stake an implausible claim to an authentic national identity that overrides my thoroughgoing Englishness. (What could that possibly be?) The fact of my grandmother’s Welshness, for example, and the fact that her father played rugby for Wales around a century ago doesn’t make me Welsh, but it does provide the right kind of elective affinity or affective attachment which makes it easier for me to cheer for Wales (or Ireland, or New Zealand, with reference to slightly different facts) than it would be to rustle up any real enthusiasm for, say, Australia, Scotland, Canada or Uruguay. (I’ll stop there before I start talking about interpellation and the way in which the universal does not hail. Don’t worry.)

Chris raises the further question of whether this “displaced allegiance [is] welcome or irritating to the recipients”. I don’t know. I imagine that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t, and that that depends on the context: there’s more than one public for sport, that’s usually a very good thing, and the problem he raises is not unique to matters of national identifications: what do local supporters of Liverpool and Manchester United make of the southern middle-class kids who fetishise those teams? Or, closer to my home at least, what do the supporters of Oxford United make of the small number of university students who go to the games, and would they like there to be a lot more of them, such that the overall character of the fan base were to change significantly in its social composition? I’m sure many Irish and Welsh fans would find my occasional support for their rugby teams ridiculous and not especially welcome. But I also suspect that if I were to go to Lansdowne Road with my Irish uncles-by-marriage for Ireland v England (not an implausible possibility), they would both want me to cheer for Ireland and reserve the right to take the piss out of me as a representative Englishman where appropriate — and that seems entirely reasonable on their part.

There’s only one sports team about which I feel thoroughly and uncomplicatedly partisan, and that’s the Boston Red Sox. I was very surprised that I became interested in baseball at all, and after first going to a game at Fenway Park in 1996 my interest has continued to grow, and has (so far) survived a migration back from New to Old England three years ago. It’s not always easy to be a Sox fan on this side of the Atlantic (the internet — which, among other things, streams the WEEI Red Sox Radio Network — is invaluable), and I don’t quite know how I’ll feel about the Sox when all of the players I used to go and see or watch on television — Nomar Garciaparra, Pedro Martinez, Jason Varitek, Tim Wakefield and a handful of others — are no longer playing for the club. But I do enjoy being a Red Sox fan, enjoy hating the Yankees, and right now all I’m thinking is, Wait till next year!…

… Except that before next year, there’s next week-end, and the matter of who to support in France vs England. Well, I have an aunt who lives in Normandy…

376 not out.