The Summer Field

192 Chapter Twenty-Three To The Present and Beyond ‘Peter and Simon had a lively reception of cheers, jeers and cat-calls when the crowd saw them wearing new-style pads and skirted jackets, not unlike a Robin Hood jerkin. The same air-bubble cloth, coloured belt and badge, with a coloured choker around the neck – to hide a throat microphone. Also worn in the ear of each batsman, but invisible to all except those who knew where to look, was a tiny receiving set.’ Gary Sobers, Bonaventure and the Flashing Blade: A novel about cricket (1967) Most imagined futures of cricket by sportswriters have been mere satires on the controversies of the day. A cartoon ‘Fifty years hence’ in the Leicestershire county jubilee book in 1929 had batsmen dashing to the wicket by aeroplane, members watching from a balloon, and ‘a giant rain cloud absorber’, like the horn of a gramophone record player, sucking in clouds to prevent rainfall. The Cricketer in May 1930 imagined a county match in the year 2230 under a glass roof, at an empty Lord’s, because you could watch at home on television. The electronic scoreboard read a ‘remarkably small’ 962 for seven; 6000 was more like a good score. The magazine was having fun – well-guessed fun – at large scores and boring draws. Serious wishes or predictions age less well. Sir Ian Botham’s many ideas in The Botham Report (1998) did not include T20. Strangely, one of the best sources for the future of the game remains that 1967 novel for young men, by Gary Sobers, or under his name at least. * Bonaventure and the Flashing Blade was no more great literature than Maiden Over . Sobers opened the story only to introduce his fictional cousin, Clyde St Joseph Bonaventure, south Londoner and ‘star student’ who gained a place not at Oxbridge but Tunsted, the campus outside Birmingham of the Star Computer Company. As a project, at cricket nets he fed one of the company’s giant £2m computers with punch cards – it was 1967 – of data from bats ‘fitted with secret instruments’ and balls with speed meters inside. Clyde trained himself and his fellow students, from Ireland, Canada, India and Australia (presumably to interest overseas readers) as cricketers, faster and better than normal coaches could. Other students brought their own inventions, of clothing, boots, bats and pads (that ‘encased the legs … from ankle to thigh’), besides throat microphones and ‘ear radios’, so that they carried out batting, fielding or bowling ‘plans’. Understandably, as such programming had not happened yet, the novel was short of detail; in the words of one journalist, ‘They’ve taken cricket to pieces, put it through computers and found amazing answers’.