The Summer Field

51 As that memory suggests, might the gifted make sport their living one way or another? In the Sheffield Green Un in July 1911, Albert Knight suggested that cricket genius was ‘much more prevalent than most credit, but it so often misses fire through defects of character’. Rather than a lack of imaginary grit or guts Knight blamed ‘an excessive thirst’ and ‘more frequently an absurd belief in luck or a quaint pessimism as to the value or the sense of effort’. You worked to succeed. Once you did, as J.T.Tyldesley warned in the same sports paper the week after, you should not be big- headed. You had to fit in, as one of the ‘lads’ or ‘boys’; or ‘big boys’, as Luke Sutton put it, recalling his move from a lesser county (Derbyshire) to a Test-playing county (Lancashire) in 2006. Amateur and pro’, captain and foot-soldier: all accepted or used ‘boys’ as a self-image. In The Windsor Magazine in 1909, Sir Home Gordon quoted Lord Hawke, the Yorkshire captain, as saying that ‘buck up boys!’ ‘was the phrase that never failed’ to spur his men (as if they were a horse that needed the touch of a spur to try harder?!). In July 1972, the Australian tour manager Ray Steele admitted unsigned, typed threatening mail had come to Dennis Lillee and Bob Massie from Australia: ‘We didn’t want the matter to be made public because publicity encourages other cranks. The boys aren’t disturbed at all.’ Both those fast bowlers were in their mid- twenties. And in July 2012 at Leicester I watched Steve Harmison bowl in presumably his last first-class match, for Yorkshire. No doubt meaning to ‘buck up’ the former Durham and England fast bowler, the fielders shouted, ‘Come on, Harmy boy!’ or ‘Stevie boy!’ and the like. Harmison was 34, and had travelled the world and achieved more than anyone on the field. Why liken him to a child? While it might suit men in power to label Who Was A Cricketer? Surrey in 1922 – including some arrested at Chesterfield in June 1909.