Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

twenty years. The future of cricket is a three-hour game and cricket needs to make that adjustment, even if purists hate it … nobody’s got the time [for five day matches]. Asked whether my biographical piece could be entitled ‘Charlesworth says Test cricket is doomed’, he replied: ‘I think it is!’ Already a sign of adaptation to social change was the rise of women’s cricket, a phenomenon he’d become particularly aware of during his two years in New Zealand. A game of skill without physical contact was a good one for women to play. ‘But they don’t want to play all day – they want it on Saturday mornings or afternoons and then go out at night.’ Insisting he was not being a male chauvinist, just pointing out a reality, he said the attitude was true of all young people: ‘they don’t want to spend all weekend playing cricket.’ This doom-laden prediction about the future of the longer game may seem at odds with the contributions he had made in support of New Zealand Test cricket and the roles he might well have played at different times in both the Australian and English games. But they were, after all, the comments of a man who had always preferred hockey, a game played over a short period but one that allowed the best players – and nobody was better than Ric Charlesworth had been – to play hundreds of international games. Epilogue 97 Unintended percipience, referring to our subject’s hockey careers, on a road sign on the edge of the Derbyshire village.