The Summer Field

37 out of your pitch what you put in; the more you flattened it, the truer it would play. As early as June 1877, Trent College near Derby scored 650 runs for eleven wickets across three half-day matches. Even if the college’s batsmen were good and the visiting bowlers bad, a pitch had to be easy to allow scores of 147 for three, 221 for two and 282 for six. Even earlier, in 1857, the Burton Weekly News report of Burton’s two-day, two-innings win over Shrewsbury showed that men understood that the soil affected the play – and they knew ways of doing something about it. The newspaper excused the byes, despite the ‘good’ fielding and the ‘long stops’ – at least one fielder, in this case, behind the wicketkeeper – on the ‘rough ground behind the wickets’. The sides made fair totals for the time – 151 and 83 for four to 186 and 47 – and the witness noted ‘the fiery edge of the ground had been taken off by watering’. That report gave a rare explanation of one of the words cricket takes for granted: a duck for the batsman out without scoring, ‘as the boys call the sad cypher’. It’s striking how many cricketing terms have stuck since Victorian times, while the English language has seen so many new words and many old ones become quaint or die. A few words have not lasted – large scores or hits being ‘long’, for example – and some Victorian journalism can read oddly. The Sheffield Evening Star , covering Gloucestershire against Yorkshire in the town in July 1875, told how W.G.Grace was out for 111 when he ‘jumped out to a crack ticer’, ‘but the screw licked the champion and Pinder whipped off the bails like a shot’. In his 1905 work The Complete Cricketer , Albert Knight described ‘tice’ as an obsolete word for yorker, short for ‘entice’. Otherwise, ‘butter fingers’ for someone dropping catches or rather ‘chances’; carrying your bat; collaring the bowling; all were part of Knight’s vocabulary. Victorians and Edwardians might call a batsman’s stroke (or a woman) ‘clinking’, their equivalent of the Australian ‘beaut’. Nouns have lasted better than adjectives. We have no need to invent a new name for a ‘duck’ or a six-hit unless, like the broadcasters in the Indian Premier League, we want to be modish (and insert an advertiser’s name). Nouns describe objects, facts; either you are out for a duck or you are not. Harder to agree on – and hence changes in language as men argue – are the judgements about, for instance, the fitness of an umpire or the state of a wicket. Opposing teams, or men within teams, could take opposite views about the same pitch beneath them. In Derbyshire in July 1874, when Wirksworth narrowly beat hosts Duffield, a Wirksworth man was plainly behind the Derby Mercury report ‘that the Wirksworth team were much disappointed with the ground … more than half were bowled with “shooters’’’ – another vivid, surviving, piece of slang. The week after, a Duffield spectator answered: ‘… I heard several of the Wirksworth players, one a bowler, say that it played very true and it is a pity that the Wirksworth club, who possess one of the best teams in Derbyshire, should think it worth their while to send such an unfair report to your paper.’ Maybe, as the man hinted, Wirksworth were blaming their poor showing on the pitch. What Was Cricket Like?