The Summer Field

161 bowlers knowing what they were doing. The village game, like amateur dramatics, bred good fellowship. Otherwise: ‘The truth is I have become too sophisticated through too much acquaintance with great cricket.’ The real truth was that Cardus was a snob, showing his contempt for the common man. Cardus’ view matches the way cricket is going in the 21 st century – like opera and ballet, an acquired (and expensive) taste. Cardus, however, was blind to so much of what is human: the square cut or the yorker that the ordinary player can sometimes surprise everyone, even himself, with. Even if you fail, you hope for better days. It is a pity if we cannot enjoy even the plainest field – such as the adult batsman against a young slow bowler, knowing he will lose face if he does not hit the youth for runs, yet knowing he will lose more face if he is out. Only our ignorance may keep us from seeing the intriguing, the humorous and the poignant. In the 1980s I once saw Tim Ward, the former Derby County footballer and manager, who was keeping wicket into his sixties, going into bat for the last ball of an evening game, needing six to win. He pulled the ball for four; would the younger man have won? In fairness to Cardus, the common Victorian could seem easily pleased. When Repton played Swepstone Zingari in September 1849, a wicket- keeper kept the umpire ‘on the qui vive ’, ‘and his running fire of appeals and arguments together with the composed manner in which the umpire refused them afforded immense amusement to the spectators’. In June 1914 a match stopped at Uttoxeter while an aeroplane landed at the town racecourse to ask the way, while on a London to Manchester race (and the pilot signed an autograph for a lady). It was, as the Ashbourne Telegraph reported, an ‘uncommon spectacle’. Players were human, and not machines. They could not do great things every day, any more than footballers, actors or the rest of us (or could Cardus write great match reports every day?!). Some always thought like Cardus and would pay to see the best – even if he only arrived 40 minutes after play began, as W.G.Grace did at Derby on Monday, August 17, 1874, playing for the United South of England against 16 of Derbyshire. The ‘champion’ received ‘a great ovation and play stopped for some time’. The number of people with the money and urge to attend the most prestigious matches – also in golf, tennis, football and rugby – only rose. ‘England is becoming a land of arenas,’ Ivor Brown noted in his 1935 book The Heart of England . ‘Bigger and better grandstands appear, but the more are put up the less, it seems, are we able to get a seat in them.’ Lord’s had the same problem as Wimbledon, Twickenham and Wembley; the biggest matches could fill a stadium twice as large; but was it economic to build so large, if the paint peeled and the wood rotted for the rest of the year? And was the audience for ‘big cricket’ ever that big? The former footballer turned columnist Steve Bloomer in August 1926 pointed out that 40,000 people watched five trial football matches in London on the first day of that summer’s celebrated last Test; 2000 more paid to see Arsenal before the season proper, than paid at the Oval gates. The ‘big cricket’ brigade had their spokesman in William Buckland, whose Watching