The Summer Field

196 Mark Butcher and Paul Collingwood better batsmen than Frank Woolley. The athlete turned historian of athletics Peter Radford has queried if runners are in fact going any faster than men of past centuries – and records of timed races go back to the 1700s. Are any gains in speed purely due to better diet, and training, or flatter tracks? Despite Sutcliffe’s belief in progress, surely we cannot run ever faster, or hit a ball further and further? We have an overlap between athletics and cricket in throwing the ball – a record listed in Wisden until 1980. Plainly there is a limit to human ability, as no-one can throw for miles. Radford has challenged the comforting assumption that we – or rather our elite athletes – are performing ever better. If we only bring on a few of the most promising sportsmen, and ‘hot-house’ them like tomatoes in a greenhouse, and many become injured, might players do less than their forefathers? The elite few may fall short mentally also. ‘I wonder sometimes,’ Sir Len Hutton wrote as early as 1989, while England were losing to Australia, ‘whether we have reached the stage where players are over-managed.’ In 2014, the former Warwickshire captain Andy Lloyd wrote: England have so many support staff now to instruct where to go, when to go there, what to wear and what to eat that I’m not sure players think for themselves enough. England need to get more out of the players. How can they develop captains when none of the players are doing any thinking? Sir Len Hutton, likewise, in 1989 spoke of asking himself of any young cricketer, ‘Is he thinking?’“That is why so many reach a certain stage and go no further.”’ As Andy Lloyd hinted, international players were not having to think about any part of their working life. They went from one glamorous-looking hotel, airport and stadium to another, that spanned four continents yet looked much the same, in an all-year routine that soon lost novelty. To become unhappy at such an unnatural and unhomely life, as some England players said they did, was, you could argue, the healthy reaction. Some even gave the life up. We can sympathise with Marcus Trescothick and Mike Yardy, to name only two Englishmen who turned against touring abroad, and journalists (who share the same numbing round as the players) for writing or broadcasting a pro’s woes. Yet an outsider might ask how hard the pro’s life was. For one thing, someone had to be away sometimes, if someone else was to play at home. Many conservatives sneered at Kerry Packer’s ‘World Series Cricket’ of 1977-9 as a circus; John Woodcock, for example, wrote in Country Life in February 1978 of ‘Mr Packer’s highly-paid troupe’. In truth first-class cricket, like other pro’ sports such as tennis, looked like ‘a travelling circus’ as Ted Dexter’s Cricket Book put it in 1963. Others had to leave their families behind for work: salesmen, soldiers, seamen and, indeed, real circus people. As for cricketers complaining of overwork; would any of them swap with the cooks, barmen, and stewards that served at stadiums (and gyms), paid by the hour, hired shift by shift, on their feet all day, ignored or mocked by the ignorant and drunk? Lyle Blair and Rex Warner asked a waitress in the Tavern at Lord’s in 1950 what the score was. ‘I don’t know, To The Present and Beyond