The Summer Field

198 the 91-year-old Sydney Barnes. Gibbs vividly described his and his team’s youthful fear of the ancient man, knowledgeable still and with formidably high standards. The tragic-comedy – all the greater because Gibbs seemed blind to it, a lifetime later – was that the respectful but anxious players could not see past the forbidding front that Barnes showed to the world. A man in his nineties did not have to accompany his old team to Walsall on a Wednesday. Barnes was there for the company: he was there out of love. Younger cricketers have picked up some habits from past players all too well; their ambition made them self-centred, and the rewards made them materialistic. Everything – stumps plucked from the ground after a match, win or lose; medals, an autograph – had a value. Like politicians and generals, each rising generation saw there was money to make from memoirs (written by a friendly journalist paid for the work), or simply your name and face. In the 1900s C.B. Fry endorsed Zam-Buk, a ‘famous healing balm’ and remedy for piles and ‘bad legs’; in the 1980s Botham starred in television adverts for a make of breakfast cereal; in the 2010s, Alastair Cook modelled Savile Row suits, Kevin Pietersen watches. Sportsmen earned money from the space on their chest and front of their cap, or as a grandly-titled ‘ambassador’. Part of the deal was that they would only speak to the press if an advertiser was credited. Conflicts of interest abounded, though seldom admitted, between advertisers, players and their agents, and broadcasters. * Cricketers, like other sportsmen, and politicians, soldiers, actors, journalists and many others, were forming professional classes. Sons (and daughters) were following fathers (and mothers). Unlike the old days of amateur clubs when you got a game ahead of professionals if you had an important enough father, you did have to earn your place. Asked at Derby in May 2013, the Derbyshire bowler Mark Turner said the main thing was hard work; you might not make an international, ‘but you do the best you can. You get to the highest level you can and work the hardest you To The Present and Beyond Bernard Hollowood drawing of Richie Benaud as Australians’ 1961 touring captain.