Jon Hotten on the small but long-lasting humiliations of playing sport…
It’s funny how a small and insignificant incident in a game can send you off into a reverie, a time-trip back into the long-lost, half-forgotten past to a moment when something similar happened, a distant event that somehow triggers another sense-memory which surfaces from that place in the brain where it has lingered and never quite left…
There I was watching Kevin Pietersen bat in the Twenty20 when he wandered off to the edge of the pitch, outside the line of the ball, and managed to top-edge it into the grill of his helmet, a sort of vertical flip-sweep that would have cost him his pearly-whites had it not been for the lid, and I felt a little tingle in my bottom lip, where there is an inch-long, pale-white scar from many years ago when the same thing happened to me… It wasn’t exactly the same sort of shot – how could it be – but it was a sweep, played to a gentle off-spinner who I didn’t think could get me out, so I got down on one knee and swept hard, but the ball must have just popped a little from the dry midsummer wicket and taken the edge of the bat before flying up into my mouth…
…There was a bit of gash, but it didn’t seem like much and it didn’t really hurt, just stung a little, so I carried on… I have no memory now of how long, or how I got out or how many I scored or whether we won, or any of those things… what I remember is getting home and trying to eat a chinese but giving up because by then it felt like I had a tennis ball in my mouth, and of the next time I played when I noticed that there were some bloodstains on the inside of one of my pads that stayed there for years (loved those pads, had to retire them gently in the end, like laying down a favourite shield)…
…That sent me off to another match on the same ground, fielding at slip to another off-spinner and watching the batsman go for a cut and then coming round on the ground because a top edge had flown up and hit me in the forehead, to the great hilarity of everyone that saw it – no health and safety in those days – oh, the embarrassment of that… and then another game, again on the same ground, where I got done by an outrageous slower ball that seemed to take forever to get down the pitch and bowled me – another laugh then, that time from their wicket-keeper – and then yet another game when I almost got shown up by a dolly catch at mid-off that I got too far underneath but just managed to grab with a jump and a fingertip…
All things that I’d forgotten, or thought I’d forgotten, but that came back in an instant after KP flicked that ball into his face, and then he laughed and the bowler laughed too, and we all thought yes…. this is the game… this is the game…
Jon Hotten blogs about cricket at The Old Batsman.
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For me whenever I watch a rugby match and see them ‘rucking a player’ I always have vividly horrible memories of the numerous times of being kicked hard in the teeth with metal studs on a cold winters day. CLANG! Lovely.
My most humiliating school cricket memory was being clean-bowled first ball of the match. A Diamond Duck, they call it, one step up from a Golden Duck. Fearful stick from my so-called team-mates – very unfair as only those who bat at number 1 are vulnerable to the dreaded DD.
Couple of dropped dollies I still recall with cringes, too.
Reminds me of how much I hated playing cricket (rugby I quiite liked).
Most tedious activities have at least the merit of being quite safe and comfortable; and most dangerous activities have at least the merit of being to some degree interesting; but it took the peculiar genius of the English national character to devise a sport that is at once completely dull and fraught with physical danger. It’s the stuff that built the Empire I suppose.
There’s a great bit in one of John Cowper Powys’s autobiographical books where he talks about his way of keeping himself cheerful through a lifetime of mental and physical trials (hideous duodenal ulcers, spectacular daily enemas, you name it): “at least,” he would tell himself, “at least I am not playing cricket.”
I couldn’t agree more or put it any better.
Our school cricket training was enlivened by putting the smallest member of the team inside the enormous communal kitbag and leaving him in there. Cricket does strange things to people.
Ah, wonderful memories of the greatest game, Jon.
I blame a fast bowler named Pat Crawford for my most embarrassing and painful cricket experience. In 1956, my older brother took me to Old Trafford to watch Lancashire against the touring Australians. Lancashire batted and at some point Crawford bowled. My ambition to bowl fast was fired by the sight of the big Aussie in his delivery stride. I had never seen anything like it – poetry and power gloriously synchronised in a fleeting moment. That evening with my left leg thrust out, Crawford style, I all but demolished my Dad’s solitary rose bush (the stumps) with the fastest bowling ever seen in our garden.
Two years later I was opening the bowling for the School Xl – Crawford inspired, naturally. We played an away game at Sale Moor – on a concrete pitch, part-covered by a flimsy mat. Wonderful, I thought; the keeper will have to stand in the next field. I’d taken 6 for 9 when the rain came. It stopped after ten minutes and away we went again. Unfortunately, I lacked the nous to realise a wet concrete wicket presented a danger to a tearaway fast bowler. In quick time I ended-up performing what seemed like a backward somersault before crashing into the strip, then limping away with a damaged coccyx, and without an ounce of sympathy from the opposition, who were reeling at 18 for 8. Concrete wickets? Ridiculous! An injury that nags to this day, and all Pat Crawford’s fault.
I endured a variety of cricketing wounds – two teeth knocked back by 90 degrees after a catch slipped through my fingers, for example – but my most humiliating experience came when I took my Dad’s squash shoes instead of my proper trainers. On my first or second ball “in” I went for an elegant cut behind square. I missed the ball; slipped and went arse-first into my own stumps.
Ah, memories…
The comment above by Jonathan Law raises the question “Why does anyone play cricket?” It’s a good question. The vast majority of time is spent waiting to bat, waiting having batted, or fielding, and nobody enjoys fielding.
Bowling and batting are the only interesting bits. The former is largely frustration and angst. The latter largely fear – of getting out, or getting hurt. People do it therefore for the ‘pleasure’ of getting wickets or runs. But there are never enough runs to be had, so you have to be a strange person to be a batsman.
At school it’s worse because the best batsmen and bowlers are usually the same boys, so there is a large ‘rump’ on each team made up of specialist fielders – a miserable way to spend a Saturday.
On the other hand, for most of its participants it’s excellently suited to the sustained drinking of lots of beer.
I think John H. has answered all questions as to why we play…