The Summer Field

197 sir,’ she replied. ‘I’ve never seen a cricket match in my life.’ The more rewarding and responsible a player’s work, the less happy it made him. Luke Sutton recalled his first one-day final at Lord’s in 2006, keeping wicket for Lancashire: That’s the first time I really thought, please don’t make a mistake. I spent 43 overs thinking, ‘do not make a mistake’. There was no enjoyment about it. Sutton took three catches and made one stumping, but Lancashire lost. He did, however, look back on his years at Lancashire as a ‘great time’. Likewise, Colin Cowdrey could tell East Riding umpires in 1978: ‘Cricket has been fun and may it be so for the next 100 years.’ The 21 st century game lacked the sense of history, a perspective beyond your lifetime, that Cowdrey showed. Broadcasters had no commercial interest in publicising a past that they did not own on tape, let alone a past before any recordings. The young, whether as watchers, players or consumers of advertising, may never have cared for any time except their own. Yet a place in history – a greater story that included men like yourself now old - offered existential belonging. Without ever putting it into words, you saw that you would grow old and others yet unborn would take your place. If you had an open enough mind, insight came, thanks to a slower pace of travel. Before the 1960s, sea voyages to and from Britain offered international cricketers weeks of rest, besides a chance to see some of the world, usually as welcome guests. The Australians of 1961, for instance, on their way to England had half a day on the Maltese island of Gozo, where H.E.F.de Trafford lived. His father Charles was one of Leicestershire’s team that beat the Australian tourists of 1888. De Trafford wrote to the Leicestershire historian E.E.Snow in 1969: ‘And the whole team came to my house for drinks. I showed this snuff box to Richie Benaud and he was most interested particularly as it had all the scores on a sheet of paper inside.’ Benaud may only have shown the interest of a dutiful guest in the engraved silver snuff box, made to honour a match 70 years before, ‘which I am not prepared to part with’, de Trafford wrote to Snow. Great deeds, and pride in family and other memories, plainly mattered to some. An interest in life, even of lives outside cricket, and a sense that life still had more to offer, even when you had achieved more than most, made for happiness, and taught you that good work had meaning. In New Society in June 1976, Tony Gould quoted Benaud in an article on cricket broadcasting: He says he is learning all the time and the more experienced he gets the less he talks – you are inclined to think that you have to talk, to justify your fee – you do, but not all the time. Benaud had the wisdom that some things, including silence, were more important than anything he possessed. Some learned mindfulness, a sense that the game was like a church – it had physical buildings, and a congregation of believers – and, as, in a working marriage or good friendship, you gave as well as took, even into extreme old age. In Wisden in 2012 Peter Gibbs told of batting for Staffordshire in 1964, watched by To The Present and Beyond