The Summer Field

193 Clyde’s team of Bonaventures thrashed a snooty Tunsted works team. Their ‘computer cricket’ was a sensation. In a frankly unsuspenseful break in the action, Clyde and his Welsh teammate (called Taffy, naturally, as it was 1967) were kidnapped briefly by two stereotype-foreign industrial spies. To advertise the team’s inventions, the company sent Clyde and his team to exhibition matches. In another twist, a girlfriend of Clyde’s turned out to be an agent who delivered him to Sorensen, a stereotype-Texan businessman, in a Brighton hotel room. Sorensen tried to entice Clyde to join his company; Clyde rather immaturely punched Sorensen on the jaw. Star Company men dashed in – they’d been spying on the room. A better book would have asked if the British company was any more moral than its rivals. Instead, Sobers entered the story again. The Star Company had asked him to captain an all-stars team against the Bonaventures in a one-day game (single innings, not limited overs). Sobers said: ‘I had the feeling after a time that they were reading the bowler’s mind and so knew exactly what type of ball he was going to send down. But how could they?’ As Sobers added, a skilled batsman and bowler learned (and, as important, recalled) the other player’s weaknesses and used them: ‘But the Bonaventurers had never faced our bowling before today.’ Being a boys’ adventure story, the match ended in a tie (when will a cricket novel have a one-sided match?!). The novel ended with Clyde meeting two Soviet visitors who wanted to introduce cricket to Russia. This Cold War fantasy of the rest of the world taking up the game regularly cropped up in this era, as Britain’s standing slumped. Lyle Blair closed a book he co- authored on the 1950-1 Ashes Tests by claiming ‘that cricket is just about the best translator of peoples that has ever been found … What a pity then that the Russians and the Americans could not learn to play the game.’ To The Present and Beyond Leicestershire, 1900s, captained by Charles de Trafford.