Culture : Sticky Wicket for Britain’s Cricket Fans

LONDON —  Americans just don’t get it. But Australians do. So do Indians and Pakistanis and even Sri Lankans. And in this summer of their discontent, that’s what’s causing the English what they might call “a spot of bother.”

“It” is the sport of cricket.

Did we say “sport”? Sorry, old chap, make that “institution.”

Generations of Englishmen--yes, women do play but only the men’s game gets national attention--have looked on cricket as an essential part of the national identity, a mirror of English ideals and virtues and a precious piece of the rural heritage that every Englishman claims.

Cricket, broadcaster Michael Parkinson says, “is a part of the English pastoral scene. It represents Englishness. It’s a unique, very psychological, physical, complex and beautiful game, aesthetically and hugely pleasing.”

Cricket holds such pride of place in British life that it has been absorbed into the language. The phrase “It’s not cricket” condemns violations of an unwritten code of upright behavior, gentlemanly fair play and team spirit. Bernard Law Montgomery, the World War II British general, spoke of beating Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps as hitting the Germans “for six”--cricket’s equivalent of a home run. And a “sticky wicket” connotes a tricky, unpredictable and dangerous situation.

Which is where some English cricket fans believe that their favorite sport now finds itself.

Cricket in England is undergoing a crisis, and there’s no end in sight; English cricketers and their fervent supporters are enduring a long period of humiliation.

Last winter, the English national team lost a series of disastrous international matches--”Tests,” as they are called--against India, Pakistan and even lowly Sri Lanka.

Now they have lost the six-match biennial Test series with Australia being played here, suffering four defeats and one draw. (Even though England has already lost the series, the remaining match will still be played later this month, according to cricketing custom.)

England has suffered defeats in seven successive international series. It has not beaten Australia, its traditional rival, in 15 matches.

Imagine how American baseball fans would feel if, year after year, teams of Canadians, Japanese, Venezuelans and Cubans beat the best U.S. players that could be assembled.

George Orwell, writing in a gentler time, believed that the English could keep a stiff upper lip about such setbacks. “Cricket,” he wrote, “gives expression to a well-marked trait in the English character, the tendency to value ‘form’ and ‘style’ more highly than success.”

Poppycock!

English cricket pundits are not taking the current lack of success that well. Acres of print in the sports pages have been devoted to analyzing the decline of the national game. In other parts of the media, social commentators have been busy making dire pronouncements that its sorry state may mark the end of civilization as the English know it.

It seems symptomatic to some critics, political as well as cricketing, that Prime Minister John Major, perhaps the country’s premier fan of the sport, jokes through English defeats at the very time that his standing in opinion polls is at an all-time low.

“There’s no doubt that the current run of defeats represents a crisis of serious proportions,” cricket writer Richard Williams says, “calling into question the game’s standing in national life.”

And social historian Martin Jacques comments: “There is no getting away from the fact that there is a connection between sport and nation. It has a palpable effect on national morale.”

In short, cricket is to England what American historian Jacques Barzun suggested baseball is to America when he wrote: “Whoever would know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”

The two sports do have superficial similarities. For instance, both are bat-and-ball games, in which the ball is hard and leather-covered, the bats traditionally made of wood. But the rules are very different, and so is the pace: Matches can last up to five days, with breaks for lunch and afternoon tea.

To be sure, even in England there are denigrators aplenty of the cricket’s leisurely pace. William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942-44, commented that cricket seemed to him like “organized loafing.” And a member of the House of Lords once described the game as something “which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of eternity.”

Cricket has been played since the 16th Century: The name is thought to stem from the Anglo-Saxon word “cricc,” a staff used by shepherds who played an early version in England.

As long ago as 1787, the Marylebone Cricket Club was established in London to draw up rules for the 11-player teams. Today, the club’s headquarters at Lord’s cricket ground in north central London is also considered the sport’s headquarters and spiritual home.

As Britain’s empire builders spread over the world in the 18th and 19th centuries, its soldiers, administrators and educators taught both the game and its ethos.

In 1984, four years after achieving hard-won independence from the descendants of colonialists, Zimbabwe’s prime minister, Robert Mugabe, showed how thoroughly he had been indoctrinated with cricket’s values, even so far from Britain’s shores: “Cricket civilizes people and creates good gentlemen,” he declared. “I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe. I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen.”

Beyond personal qualities, cricket was also thought to be a democratizing influence.

“If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt,” the British historian G.M. Trevelyan once observed.

In the game itself, the Empire soon struck back. Australians quickly became the most serious rivals to the mother country, winning its first Test series on English soil in 1882. In the 1960s, West Indian cricketers became a force to reckon with, and soon after, teams from India and Pakistan, South Africa and Sri Lanka also proved themselves capable of regularly defeating the English.

English cricket writers are agreed on where the blame lies for this state of affairs. The bedrock of cricket is at the school and village level, and it is there that English cricket is withering, they say.

The village game is cricket at its most idealized, reinforcing England’s self-image that it is essentially a rural society: white-clad figures contrasted against a field of green in summer sunlight, the gentle “thonk” of bat on ball occasionally augmented by a burst of cheering and polite applause, spectators sipping warm beer at the door of the local pub or lolling in canvas deck chairs.

Even allowing for the mercurial weather of the English summer, the reality is likely to be different. Fewer and fewer villages can afford to keep up the local green to the standards English players are used to.

Similarly, few elementary and secondary schools have the funds to maintain cricket fields and thereby to encourage the sport among students.

“Cricket grounds are hard to maintain,” observes one West Indies cricket player. “So kids don’t grow up playing cricket from a young age as they used to--and still do in India, Pakistan and the West Indies.” In those places, young players learn the game under harsher conditions, making do with matting or compacted dirt rather than grass.

A long step above the amateur schools and village game is the county league, in which 18 professional British county teams play through the summer, and a good cricketer can earn about $35,000 a season.

From the county teams, selectors--the group of senior members of the Test and County Cricket Board (TCCB)--choose players to represent the national side, competing in Test matches at home in the summer and abroad in winter. Test players make about $75,000, major stars $150,000 or more.

However, the county league teams now see a shrinking of the pool of young cricketers that should be their great natural resource. And while the major international matches in England still draw sellout crowds, the matches at county and lower levels are usually ill-attended.

Martin Kettle, an expert on cricket, says he believes “that English society no longer produces cricketers in enough numbers, quality or depth to sustain a seriously competitive national side.”

Add to this a cricket establishment that is widely regarded as infirm and inefficient, handicapped by inept managers and a flawed Test selection process, based on the whims of a few senior officials, and you have a prescription for cricket chaos, the critics say.

They cite the omission of David Gower, a charismatic player who has captained England’s team in the past, from the current Tests against Australia. Rigid-minded selectors were believed to have found that his attitude was too casual.

“Flair and individuality in cricket,” wrote author Graeme Wright in his book “Betrayal: The Struggle for Cricket’s Soul,” “came to be seen as a threat to success and were cast aside in favor of the new conformity based on team commitment.”

Wright also complained that the very nature of cricket is changing:

“Shorn of spectators, because its spectator appeal was limited, cricket turned in time to sponsorship for survival, and, appropriately enough in a materialistic age, while the body lived on, the spirit passed away.”

Indeed, the pristine white uniforms have been replaced at the county level by colored sweatsuits; in Test matches, players wear brewery logos on their jerseys; the grounds have been papered with advertising, and the financial health of the game depends on sponsorships of various kinds.

Cricket’s gentlemanly spirit also seems to be growing obsolete. The sport is increasingly characterized by bullying, intimidating behavior on the field. Batters who once donned only leg pads now also wear hard helmets with visors to protect themselves against vicious bowling (pitching) aimed at the head.

Can cricket keep its soul? Can the game in England be saved? For all their carping, the critics offer no solutions.

Die-hard fans seem to believe that no apologies are necessary. They still find the game mesmerizing.

“Cricket can appeal to the athlete and aesthete alike,” says Matthew Engel, the new editor of Wisden, the Bible of the sport. “It can veer between lyric poetry, differential calculus and Thai kick-boxing. No game has such range, such depth.”

For critics such as Anne Boston, editor at Country Living magazine, however, the sport carries its rot in its very bones:

“Cricket is an exquisite paradox of British hypocrisy,” Boston says. “It embodies that most English of vices, nostalgia, as no other game does. It is at once the laziest game ever invented, viciously competitive, and riddled with class, racial and sexual prejudice. It represents in its most extreme form the Englishmen’s capacity for self-delusion and his desire to present himself as he would like to be seen, rather than how he really is.”

Social historian Jacques offers little hope of a revival:

“Cricket is indelibly linked with a failed Establishment,” he says, “with obsolete values, and with the Empire that was. The game is shrinking on the vine, with falling gates and fewer and fewer people playing it.”

Explaining Cricket--Not!

No, we can’t explain how it works. A small British boy once tried. Here’s his effort:

“It’s quite simple; you have two sides, one out in the field, one in. Each man on the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they’re all out, the side that’s been out in the field comes in, and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get out those coming in. If the side that’s in declares, you get men still in not out. Then when both sides have been in and out including not outs, twice, that’s the end of the match. Now do you see?”

Frankly, we don’t. But here’s some lingo we picked up:

Silly mid-on: fielding position.

Wicket: Three wooden stumps.

Bails: Two sticks that rest on the wicket.

Bowler: Player who pitches (bowls) the ball toward the wicket.

Striker: Batter.

Leg bye: A run scored when the ball hits the striker anywhere except on the hands. Sources: British English, A to Zed; World Book Encyclopedia