The Summer Field

185 to get them out to win.: Once you take the need to get the other side out, you take the heart out of the game. You have some very good games, I know; but you don’t have to survive any more, you either win or you lose. The bowler is happy if you stay there and don’t get runs.’ This was a voice of club cricket that the ever more separate pro’ game could safely ignore. Others had enough clout to publish such views, such as the former editor of Punch Bernard Hollowood, a good enough batsman to play for Staffordshire alongside Sydney Barnes. In his 1970 memoir Cricket on the Brain he condemned counties for wasting decades on propping up a ‘dying’ game; ‘and now with equal folly’ in 1969 they brought in the 40-over-a-side Sunday league, ‘a jazzed-up caricature of cricket’. Villages and leagues played the genuine article, ‘single-innings matches without gimmicks and unnecessary restrictions’, on a bowler’s number of overs for instance. ‘Bright cricket’, to such purists, was not runs quickly scored – few people liked too many wickets taken early on, as it would finish the day too soon – but skilful batsmen and bowlers doing their best to master the other. Why then has the pro’ game stuck with win-or-lose, and so seldom experimented with ‘winning draws’ (common in club leagues), or bonus points for taking all ten wickets, for example? While win-or-lose has an emotional simplicity, a draw can provoke a wider range of emotion (as in football and rugby), in player and watcher alike: disappointment at a winning position squandered, relief at a recovery; mystery in what might have been. Limiting overs was authority’s only way to make sure that the pro’ gave his all and did not settle for a draw – which all too often was cricket’s equivalent of an unspoken cease-fire in the trenches, between soldiers who were there to beat the enemy, but wanted above all to go home alive. The pro’ player paid the price, as Tom Austin and Bernard Hollowood complained, of a narrowing of possibilities. Once, a bowler running through a batting side could only be thwarted by his need to rest, exceptional batting, or a captain’s whim. In the Sunday league he had at most eight overs; in T20, four. The batsman in the form of his life could no longer bat all day, until he tired. The limited-overs game stunted players just as writing three-minute tunes for the radio would have stunted Elgar. * It’s as easy to exaggerate change in England generally in the 1960s, as in English cricket. While the Gillette Cup – first 65 overs a side, then 60 – was the only one-day competition between 1963 and 1968, even the finalists only played four matches; many counties were knocked out after one, or two if they played a minor county first. The three-day championship routine remained, to be sneered at by the likes of New Society . As a weekly magazine for the reform-minded, university-educated, managers of the welfare state, New Society and its readers hated what county cricket (and the army and Church of England) stood for; even the pride in your locality, that rootless teachers, doctors and the like no longer felt. ‘The present county cricket system seems doomed and Test matches, largely a Modern Changes