The Summer Field

59 another Yorkshireman, Johnny Wardle, who played for Cambridgeshire against Austin (‘I batted against him for a while; the air was blue’). Tom Austin granted the ‘odd sarky comment’ at the wicket from people he knew. He had no time for what he called ‘sledging nonsense’: ‘There’s so much noise in the middle, they are shouting and sledging and carrying on. In my day the shouting was in the bar.’ That reminds us of the ‘unbecoming behaviour’ (as the Australian authorities’ rules put it) in June 2013 when the Australian David Warner hit the Englishman Joe Root in a Birmingham bar. Leaving aside what Clarke and Warner did – the internet has the sordid details – these examples show us how easy it is to take affairs on the field off it, and on again. The Leicestershire wicketkeeper-captain John Shields recalled how at Bradford in June 1911 C.J.B.Wood was on the field all three days, having made a not out century in each innings. ‘George Hirst came into our dressing room and said, “Mr Wood, when we come to Leicester for the return match I will bring a pistol and if we cannot bowl you out, we will shoot you.”’ Shields did not have to point out that Hirst made his point as a joke, and a compliment; besides, Yorkshire had won. All these cases were in company, and had a theatrical flavour. What if someone from a team wanted to give a message to someone from the other team, without the other players knowing? The batsman Will Jefferson recalled how, while at Essex from 2000 to 2006, he was in and out of the first team, and – once having been left out at Hove - was running on to the field with water when the gateman opened the gate for him and stuck out his hand ‘to shake my hand. He left a piece of paper in my hand and as I ran up the steps it was Mark Robinson’s mobile number.’ That was Sussex’s director of cricket – which probably dates the event to the two counties’ 40-over game on August 14, 2006. The note, Jefferson recalled, said, ‘Give me a call, we would like to speak to you.’ Whatever the upshot, Jefferson never played for Sussex. This ingenious effort at recruitment showed the gate as the place, symbolic and real, that cricketers had to pass between the player-only field, and the pavilion and dressing-room – all places where players had each other under surveillance. If Robinson had known Jefferson’s mobile number, he need not have done the espionage. Mobile phones can send texts (or photographs, or live recordings) without anyone knowing; hence the rule banning mobiles from international dressing rooms in case (as in horse racing) bookmakers or gamblers seek to give orders to corrupted men. Sometimes, in the name of cricket’s integrity, cricketers have to give up some of their privacy and liberty. In the dressing room cricketers, physically and metaphorically, can be naked in front of each other. Outside, any weakness is best hidden. Though inelegantly put, England captain Alastair Cook was voicing a truth of centuries in January 2014 when he said: ‘Confidentiality and stuff like that – what happens in the dressing room stays in the dressing room.’ Players needed a place to air disagreement among themselves and anger at the opposition; to admit the physical and psychological bruising from the field. Everyone in the room had to trust everyone else to respect their privacy. The Yorkshire spin bowler Ellis Robinson said of Herbert Sutcliffe: Private Life