The Summer Field

78 Chapter Nine Journalism ‘It is impossible from the Press-box to capture the wonderful thrills a player gets there in the middle … a thrill beyond the experience of those who do not know the tense atmosphere and the strain of a Test or the peculiarly ‘matey’ atmosphere of county and club cricket. Cricketers know what I mean.’ Jack Hobbs, preface to The Fight for the Ashes (1934) Was Hobbs right? He was a fraud. Like many famous cricketers, he pretended to write for the newspaper, whereas a proper journalist wrote for him. He sold his name. In fairness, he went to the heart of the challenge for any story-teller. How can you accurately put into words the truth – the sights, sounds, feelings, smells even — of competitive sport? Even if Hobbs – or the journalist who typed for him – identified the unspoken emotions, and found the right words, would a reader understand? Someone who perhaps had never held a bat, and probably never faced Larwood or George Macaulay? Journalists usually worried about more practical things such as deadlines; doubts only got in the way of the job. Ex-cricketers might claim insight that mere journalists lacked; however, that was like saying divorce court reporters and judges ought to have experience of divorce. In any case, most cricket journalists did have experience, if only for clubs, or in their newspaper’s eleven. Except at Test matches, a ‘Press- box’ was not filled with famous former cricketers, but with men (usually men) experienced in journalism, because the work took many talents – and Hobbs, on the bodyline tour of 1932-3, showed he did not have them. * Many people, and not only journalists, want a word with an England captain on a tour of Australia, above all when he has just won the Ashes. You would have thought Jack Hobbs – former England, and still a Surrey, teammate of Douglas Jardine – would have been well placed to have that word, on February 16, 1933, after England won the fourth Test at Brisbane. He was not; Bruce Harris of London’s Evening Standard, was. In an ironic example of lazy journalism, many have repeated Laurence Le Quesne’s unfair claim in his otherwise fine book The Bodyline Controversy that Harris was an inexperienced tennis reporter, part of collectively poor English reporting of bodyline. Harris indeed did report tennis; he missed the Trent Bridge Test of 1934 because he was at Wimbledon. Surely that marked him out as a more able reporter, trusted by his newspaper to cover more than one sport. It’s mere snobbery to assume that only specialists ought to report cricket, or that teachers can only teach one subject. By