The Summer Field

209 Vane-Tempest, having lost his hat, tried to enter the ground again. When a police sergeant tried to stop him, Vane-Tempest said ‘Get away, you cad’ and hit him in the face. And when the sergeant took Tempest by the arm, the aristocrat said ‘let go’ and (how unsporting!) kicked him on the shin. Magistrates dismissed the case. Cricket itself was indifferent to you: if you behaved too badly, you were out, whoever you were; it was for magistrates to excuse Vane-Tempest in an outrageous example of class injustice. Nor did cricket care who was watching – you could be any age or colour, someone who saw every subtlety or none – or why you came, provided that you paid the right money and were not that rowdy. Cricket as an institution, like a church, would take you in, no matter how you felt inside. By contrast, players and followers would look down on the less skilled and the ignorant. ‘Cricket is a game of compassion,’ Keith Andrew wrote at the beginning of his 1984 book The Skills of Cricket . Few echoed him. In an appreciation in Northamptonshire’s 1989 yearbook, Patrick Murphy praised the batsman Geoff Cook as one who ‘never lost sight of the fact that it is only a game’. According to Murphy, Cook was ‘an old-fashioned cricketer, minus car phone, briefcase, pocket calculator, agent and the ideological baggage beloved of so many modern right-wing cricketers’. So much since – the English game’s selling of itself to a satellite television company, its embarrassing embrace of the American fraudster Sir Allen Stanford – has shown that the English game has a right-wing (you could hardly call it businesslike) bent. So have the pro’ players, with their self-centred coaching jargon and relentless talk of ‘opportunity’. And yet, as Keith Andrew suggested, there is room in cricket’s house for another way, the way of co-operation, not competition. If English cricket in the 21 st century looked blindly commercial, without history or a sense of stewardship, and everyone in the game seemed out for what they could get, they were only copying wider society; it was only a passing fashion. Cricket always had a place for compassion, and not only compassion on the field for the less able. Edwin Smith in old age recalled the West Indian tourists at Chesterfield in 1957. Their fast bowler Roy Gilchrist gave the Derbyshire bowler and tail-ender Cliff Gladwin a bouncer; Gladwin waved his bat at Gilchrist. According to Edwin Smith (who presumably was batting with Gladwin) the West Indian captain Clyde Walcott said: ‘Gilchrist, if you can’t get 9, 10, 11 out without a bouncer, put your sweater on.’ Off the field, cricketers gave respect to the old, and the failures, so they could receive respect when their turn came. In an appreciation of the batsman Philip Mead in the 1959 Hampshire handbook, Desmond Eagar wrote: ‘The modern Hampshire team knew him and loved him.’ In the dressing room of Dean Park, Bournemouth, ‘that big and modest man’ sat ‘quietly in his favourite corner seat. We knew him as a man who never complained of his great affliction’ – he was blind for his last ten years – ‘a man who was never heard to criticise the modern game or its players’ – which implied some did – ‘and we knew him as a greater player than any of us’. Into The Void