The Summer Field

160 BBC commentator say ‘Somebody’s got a free ticket’, and, Trevor recalled: ‘Somebody remembered we shouldn’t have been there and we should have been back at base by now. Too late. Word had got back to base.’ How to draw in those keen enough to give up their time - even their work time – but not so keen about paying? Micky Stewart writing in the Surrey year book in 1971 suggested Surrey ought to play around the county more, to reach the cricket-loving public that would not come to the Oval. For Hampshire’s 1975 handbook, captain and assistant secretary Richard Gilliat made similar commercial points. The club - owner of six acres in the city of Southampton – had to make its assets work all year: The sad fact is that there are thousands of people in Hampshire who are not members and never come to watch us but during the summer they switch on TV, listen to their radios and turn to the cricket scores to see how we are faring. If only all these people would send us £1 a year I am sure our problems would be solved. Clubs could only urge people to public-spiritedly pay to be members even if they never visited. Though everyone was too polite to say so, whoever got their cricket through the mass media, for nothing, was a parasite. Who were they? The novelist Francis Brett Young’s Portrait of a Village (1937) gave a rare glimpse. He made his fictional Monk’s Norton more truthful than a real place, as he did not have to worry about people’s feelings or libel. County cricket was ‘an integral part of their natural lives’: It is symptomatic, no doubt, of our native frivolity that when ministries fall or embattled powers disagree, or whole continents are ravaged by flood or drought or shaken by earthquakes, Monk’s Norton barely troubles to think what these catastrophes mean; but when Worcestershire, on a crumbling wicket at Kidderminster, beat Yorkshire by eleven runs, the whole village is instantly abuzz with triumphant delight; and while a great poet or statesman may lie on his deathbed without exciting the slightest concern, the state of Harold Larwood’s toe or Bob Wyatt’s jaw is a matter of acute anxiety. Young’s villagers lacked the spare cash or transport to easily see cricket outside the village. Knowing their county’s cricketers by their first names from the radio and evening or weekly paper was a rare pleasure in an otherwise harsh routine. Only through subscription TV in the 2000s did English cricket find a way to tap that constituency of goodwill; and as long as the game guards that stream of money, and satisfies that audience, at least its commercial future is assured. * Television assumes – and presenters and advertisers urge us to believe – that only the elite cricket that it shows is worth your time and money. Even before television you could find some who agreed; Cardus, for instance. In The Field in June 1937 he admitted he was not particularly interested in ‘country cricket’. According to him, most Saturday village cricketers had two strokes, the ‘smite’ and the ‘snick behind the wicket’, ‘the second being the first miscalculated’. Cardus claimed to like fields well-set and Watching