The Summer Field

189 instance at Bristol City FC in 1980. The first, Essex against a West Indies eleven at Chelsea FC on Thursday, August 14, 1980, sounded experimental; Essex secretary Peter Edwards admitted afterwards that the umpires’ blue coats were ‘raided’ from the football club’s stores. The synthetic pitch was slow and the boundary as short as 35 yards. Though played under 40-over Sunday league rules, and watched by 12,000, players did not take it that seriously: habitual Essex comic Ray East ran onto the field from a football dug-out with a trainer’s bucket and sponge. BBC commentator (and Essex follower) Ralph Dellor reflected that ‘as a novelty occasion it worked’. Matches under lights, like players wearing helmets and clothing coloured other than white, dated from the Packer games in Australia in 1977-9. Perhaps innovation came easiest when it came from Australia, because if any idea did not succeed, no-one English had to take the blame. To explain the Packer years briefly, the Australian broadcaster arranged his own international matches when Australia’s cricket authorities would not let him screen Australia’s internationals. The two sides did a deal before either suffered too much, and each side got what it wanted. Packer made money from Australian cricket; cricket made money, as it had to have someone as broadcaster, and kept the inventions. The English game found itself well able to take back men who had chosen Packer over the England Test team, just as it did when others toured apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. English cricket learned that it was a business; as with any business, if a larger concern ever took a fancy to it, the smaller business would find itself out-spent on staff, marketing, lawyers and political influence until it, too, had to do a deal. ‘Cricket has been desperately vulnerable, and Mr Packer has proved this,’ Colin Cowdrey wrote in Country Life in April 1979. * Just as an empire had to win at least some of its wars, anyone in business had to win – the next sale, the next argument at the boardroom table, the next court case (as Packer did in 1977, so that English players could work for him in the English winter). The Warwickshire captain Andy Lloyd told Shropshire Magazine in 1990: ‘As professionals we find great emphasis is laid on success, on winning. If we are not successful, money does not come into the ground.’ Because who in business would pay to put their name next to failure? Between winning and losing, ‘the margins are so small’, the former Derbyshire captain Luke Sutton recalled in 2013. ‘For winners everything goes right. Someone comes up with runs. When you want it to rain, or not rain, it does.’ The fewer the overs in a match, the more (like a good businessman) you had to account for every run. Over three days, a misfield or a boundary not cut off might not matter. In a 40-over match, let alone a T20, a few pieces of good or bad fielding or of wayward bowling might amount to several per cent of a team’s total. Better the dependably straight medium-paced bowler than a leg spinner or fast bowler. As Tony McCarthy wrote in New Society in August 1970, cricket was ‘in a stranglehold of its own making’. Yet slow (not necessarily spin) bowlers kept doing at least as well as others; in the first Sunday league season, the most perfect possible figures of eight overs for no runs were by a Somerset spinner, Brian Langford; and Modern Changes