Oedipus Lex

…I love it. There, said it.

As I sit in my grey office on a grey day in a grey suit there is a light. It comes in the shape, or rather sound, of TMS (Test Match Spe­cial for the phil­istines) play­ing via the BBC on my PC. Cricket obvi­ously has its detract­ors, I am con­stantly mocked for my unhealthy obses­sion with a game which can go on for five days and still end in a draw. A game that stops for drinks and lunch and tea. A game that doesn’t seem to move that quickly and is just the same repet­it­ive action played again and again. Yet I and count­less mil­lions love the game. Why?

For me, and I warn you this is sen­ti­mental, cricket is more than a game it is a way of life, it is some­thing pure. As I crouched behind the stumps on Sunday I saw an oppos­i­tion bats­man hit a lovely shot which was applauded by our team. Where else, but on the cricket field, in today’s fast paced com­pet­it­ive world, would you see that? Where else would the incom­ing bats­man be clapped and wished good luck? As it happened we man­aged to beat the other team in record time. So the day wasn’t wasted and in an attempt at offer­ing them some redemp­tion from igno­miny we played again. We then de-camped to the pub, together.

I’m not naive enough to sug­gest the spirit of fair play and decency extends into all levels of the game. I have no doubt that those with actual tal­ent are as com­pet­it­ive as in any other sport. I am sure that WG Grace was a ruth­less bas­tard, but at the ama­teur, rank ama­teur level, things are dif­fer­ent. That said, even in today’s game there is a faint whiff of a myth­ical, old world where noth­ing more than a stiff upper lip and Cor­inthian spirit were needed to run an empire. There is a fair argu­ment that cricket was developed to fur­ther the Chris­tian ideals of the moth­er­land to the colo­ni­als yet cricket with its Silly Mid Offs and Deep Back­ward Square Legs and Cor­ridor of Uncer­tainty, for me, con­jures images of some­thing warm and fuzzy. When I listen to TMS in my office I feel like I should be wear­ing flan­nels and tweed rather than a suit and listen­ing to it on an old Roberts rather than a PC. There is a strange part of me that likes the ritual of tun­ing an old radio to Radio 4 LW, hear­ing the other sta­tions fizz­ing in and out until the gen­teel sound of mass clap­ping fills the airwaves.

I love the stats and, for a man with no head for num­bers, the obses­sion with fig­ures. I’ve just heard a com­ment­ator stat­ing that this is the low­est score by an Eng­land team bat­ting first at Head­ingly since 1953 — depress­ing yet glor­i­ous. A friend of mine has kept a spread­sheet of every ball bowled and faced since he was 11, he can reel off his bat­ting and bowl­ing fig­ures on request without blink­ing. As I said, some think cricket is noth­ing but a man bowl­ing a ball at another man end­lessly for 5 days. They’re wrong. This simplistic view fails to take into con­sid­er­a­tion the end­less per­sonal duels, the traps, subtle changes of flight, and line and length.

Cricket will never replace foot­ball as the game of the masses, I wouldn’t want to it to. I sup­pose there is a part of me that enjoys being one of a self-selected band who huddle together in pubs selling real ales dis­cuss­ing obscure ele­ments of a ran­dom game. This sums it up for me. It’s a game that even those of us who have been play­ing and watch­ing for years don’t fully under­stand — most foot­ballers can explain the off side rule but how many people know the pen­alty for a cricket ball hit­ting a hat placed on the floor by the field­ing team? We don’t under­stand it, we’re not very good at it des­pite invent­ing and export­ing it — how won­der­fully British.