The Summer Field

166 bowler. Hiding in an anonymous crowd, a barracker takes courage. Yet a shouted ‘jibe’ might be meant as a pithy, serious point. ‘ Why don’t you play cricket?’ Bruce Harris reported ‘a stentorian voice in the crowd’ yelling, after Larwood hit Oldfield at Adelaide. Such lines implied the barracker was following the game and was seeking a conversation. The ‘Barmy Army’ following the national team from the 1990s onwards was different. It was the latest in a tradition of paying customers who treated the match as a carnival, a place where you could break with the norms of behaviour and do and say things that would earn you a punch on the nose or arrest if you did them outside. Sometimes the carnival-makers lost their nerve, as during the MCC-Yorkshire match at Lord’s in May 1936. Aidan Crawley reported in The Field that some Yorkshire supporters began singing ‘She’s a bad lass’ in four parts in a bar under the grandstand. They were greeted at first with titters, then hush. The singing suddenly stopped, as if the singers were embarrassed. To carry off offences against normal behaviour, you need to feel strength in numbers. * Writing as captain in the Hampshire handbook of 1951, Desmond Eagar noted the slow handclap, ‘an innovation on all grounds, which is the modern form of barracking, presumably’. Comparing the two, Eagar gave credit to the barracker: ‘Your true barracker is a cricket enthusiast and more often than not a humorist. Your handclapper takes little note of the state of the game, the state of the pitch or individual bowling performance.’ As witless as the slow handclap was football-style chanting, which dated from at least 1968. During the Leeds Test the Yorkshire Post reported that when England flagged in the field a corner of Headingley chanted ‘Yorkshire for England!’ and, as nonsensical, ‘Trueman! Trueman!’ Such ‘fans’ showed their thoughtlessness towards others in other ways. As in society outside, grounds became noisier. After that Leeds Test G.R.L. Clarke of Halifax complained in the Yorkshire Post of ‘transistors’ where he sat in the western terrace. He asked: Surely you did not have to listen to the match in front of you? ‘I can see before very long that someone will come along to the Test match with a portable TV,’ he wrote, plainly never imagining giant screens showing replays. He could remember days at Headingley when the public address asked people not to play radios. Ever more things were getting in the way of spectators concentrating on the field. Still, Colin Cowdrey in 1979 deplored the ‘razzamatazz’ of World Series Cricket in Australia, as if England did not have its own raucous crowds with at least one eye on their beer. In Country Life Cowdrey described WSC as ‘spectacular’, as did the journalist John Woodcock in a separate article. That WSC drew - and more to the point held - crowds was undeniable. Who was in the crowds? Hysterical children, who would come to see such entertainment as normal, said Woodcock. Not the connoisseur, said Cowdrey. The former England captain implied that Packer’s hired players were connoisseurs too: ‘The cricketers themselves have not enjoyed it [the Packer tournament], I am glad to say.’ Here lay yet more scope for alienation between the players, as defenders of standards, and the watchers; except, Watching