The Summer Field

84 Journalism and reader, perhaps with their land’s wider history. W.G.Grace was also ‘the champion’ or ‘the big gun’; the Nottinghamshire bowler Alfred Shaw was ‘Alfred the Great’. This style and content of writing grew up while newspapers had the field to themselves. They had to respond to the challenge of the more immediate media of radio and television. To return to that August 1875 innings of Grace, the Western Daily suggested he gave two chances to the wicketkeeper, ‘but questions of this kind can only be decided by persons close to the wicket’. Televised games put everyone close to the wicket; while radio was quick to show itself even at the most local level. In April 1938 the BBC’s Midlands region was trailing a feature once every three weeks called ‘Cricket Interval’, ‘during which eyewitness [as if there are ear-witnesses!?] accounts of certain Midlands matches will be given’. The broadcaster asked clubs for their fixtures, ‘especially of a local derby nature’. Newspaper reporters faced competition even inside their office. Photographers by the 1920s could capture the cricket (and tennis) ball in the same frame as the bat or racquet or broken wicket, though the ball might look blurred, oval, or double. * Whatever the writing styles of the day, reporters had a choice. They could keep to the facts, as news agencies did. Agency articles could fit any style of newspaper, and took skill. When Worcestershire were all out for 77 before lunch at Ashby on Saturday, July 21, 1928, the Sports Mercury reporter ‘The Cardinal’ wrote: ‘Events happened with such bewildering rapidity that the business of apprehending them and placing them on record was no easy task.’ The drawback was that some, unfairly, criticised agency reports as lacking style. If you wanted to make your name, like Cardus, you sought an individual style. A charming voice, or handsome face, would help put you on radio or TV, though if you were too odd you might repel as many as you pleased. You could safely ignore readers, listeners or viewers, even rivals; but not who recruited and managed you. Individual style implied individual views. In May 1926 the cricketer turned umpire and columnist Frank Sugg noted that the newly-arrived Australians had had ‘a fine press’. ‘There’s far too much of this gush stuff,’ Sugg complained, not seeing the irony that he was adding to the ‘gush’. Whether cricketers or anyone in the public eye were having a ‘good press’ was, like so much in life, a matter of opinion. It only added to the potential for falling-outs, or long-held grudges, spoken and unspoken, between journalists and cricketers. The balance of power between the two groups shifted, as the speed and means of doing journalism progressed; and as the market for news and the very definition of journalism changed, so the private lives of sportsmen, actors and anyone on TV (including TV journalists) became classed as news. The relationship, that reporter and reported-on needed, endured. When Ian Botham in the 1980s turned on the press, the journalist Henry Blofeld in his 1988 book My Dear Old Thing protested that the press had ‘done double somersaults to protect him from the authorities’. Tellingly, Blofeld did not then go into detail; that need to stay on the right side of contacts