Jonathan Wilson
The perfect end
The best retirements require struggle, one last victory over the forces of entropy, the century made from unpromising beginnings through teary eyes
Jonathan Wilson
18-Nov-2013
Tommy Smith made his 600th appearance for Liverpool in the 1977 European Cup final against Borussia Mönchengladbach. It was, in a sense, the perfect story: the local lad, the image of the toughness and industriousness that characterised the club through the sixties and seventies, drafted back into the side because of injuries, for a farewell that became perfect as, with the score at 1-1 and 20 minutes remaining, he headed in a left-wing corner to set Liverpool on the way to their first European Cup.
Except Smith, who had already agreed to take on a player-manager role at Wigan, decided not to leave, and rather than the grand finale there was a slow drift into obsolescence. I thought of Smith this week as Sachin Tendulkar departed the stage in a farewell that felt a little too stage-managed. Yes, it was his 200th Test, but how much better would it have been if his final innings, rather than being an easy 74 against an attack that was at best mediocre, had been a gutsy game-changer against top-class opponents?
Not that it really matters for a player of his genius. He could have got a pair and it wouldn't have made a scrap of difference to his legacy, but for those lower down the scale, the leaving of a career does make a difference. Steve Waugh's 80 in his final innings earned a draw against India in Sydney. Nasser Hussain hit a match-winning century at Lord's*.
Full postWhen Dad's Army did cricket, wretchedly
Television dramas have been historically poor at depicting cricket. Exhibit A: an episode of a well-loved British sitcom
Jonathan Wilson
04-Nov-2013
I like Dad's Army. I like it a lot. It might not have been funny (sitcoms of the period focused far more on the situation than the comedy) but it was warm and gentle and clever in its way. More than that, it reminds me of going as a kid to have tea at my gran's on a Saturday afternoon and popping along to Roker Park at 20 past 4 to sneak in to watch the last quarter of an hour of Sunderland's match for free when they opened the gates to let people out.
Over the years I thought I'd seen every one of the 80 episodes that were screened between 1968 and 1977 (or at least those that still exist; three have somehow been lost), but last week a chance conversation about how bad television dramas are at depicting cricket led to the revelation that there'd been a Dad's Army episode featuring a match between Captain Mainwaring's Home Guard platoon and a team led by his bête noire Hodges, the ARP warden. Wikipedia says it's one of the "most repeated" episodes because of "its simple plot", yet somehow I'd missed it. So I did what anybody who could get away with watching a 43-year-old sitcom and calling it work would do and looked it up on Youtube.
This is one of the saddest paragraphs I've ever had to write. I wanted to like it. I wanted it to be gently whimsical, to feature Mainwaring pompously making a fool of himself and being bailed out by the elegance of Sergeant Wilson, the well-meaning fluster of Corporal Jones and the cunning of the spiv, Walker. But it's awful. Desperately, unremittingly ghastly. Yes, Mainwaring is as self-important as ever; yes, Wilson saves the day with his unflustered class, and there's even a cameo from Fred Trueman, but so much is wrong that it's almost impossible to watch without howling at the screen.
Full postDo team-mates have to get along?
Dressing rooms are, after all, workplaces. Do you really need to make friends in there?
Jonathan Wilson
20-Oct-2013
There is often an assumption among fans that team-mates are all great friends. After all, whenever we see them, they are forever hugging each other or high-fiving, and most of them are incapable of getting through a post-match interview without talking collectively of "the lads" or "the boys", and insisting that "the spirit" has never been better.
Our own experience of sport, whether it's a frenetic five-a-side on a Thursday night or a leisurely 35-over game on a Sunday, tells us that the people you play with, while there might be the odd niggle - "Why will Mike not stop hitting it long?", "When did Tom last buy a round?", "Will Steve ever stop banging on about that trial he had with Leicestershire in 1972?" - are essentially people you quite enjoy having a drink with afterwards.
Ricky Ponting's comments in his autobiography on Michael Clarke come as a reminder that among professionals those niggles are often far more serious. "Away from cricket, he moved in a different world to the rest of us," Ponting wrote. "It never worried me if a bloke didn't want a drink in the dressing-room, but I did wonder about blokes who didn't see the value in sticking around for a chat and a laugh and a post-mortem on the day's play. This was the time when we could revel in our success, pick up the blokes who were struggling, and acknowledge the guys who were at the peak of their powers. Pup hardly bought into this tradition for a couple of years and the team noticed."
Full postHarmison of Sabina and elsewhere
His unpredictability could be frustrating, but perhaps the truth of his career and his personality was that he was somebody at his best out of the limelight
Jonathan Wilson
06-Oct-2013
When you cover a sport other than cricket, you often find yourself missing chunks of action you would otherwise have loved to watch. I've written before here about my frustrations during the Edgbaston Test of 2005, trying to keep up to date on the Saturday while reporting on Wycombe v Carlisle, and finally getting the result on the Sunday morning by text as I sat on a train going to the Community Shield in Cardiff. The occlusions can have an odd effect, elevating certain moments or suddenly delivering an outcome stripped of context.
The news that Steve Harmison has retired brings to mind perhaps the
most absurd of those moments when, expecting an update, you're suddenly presented with a result. It was March 14, 2004, and I'd been at what was then still the City of Manchester Stadium for a ferocious Manchester derby in which City had beaten United 4-1, a result that effectively ensured United would not win the title.
At the same time, England were playing a Test in Jamaica. Overnight, West Indies had been 8 for 0 in their second innings, leaving them with a deficit of 20. When I got to Piccadilly station to get the train back to London, there'd been time for perhaps four hours play that day. I rang my desk to check my copy had got through and, almost as an afterthought, asked what the cricket score was - these being the days before such things could easily be checked on a phone.
Full postStop the treadmill, I want to get off
There's never any time to enjoy the triumphs because you need to look ahead to the next game
Jonathan Wilson
23-Sep-2013
When you're young, it all seems so easy. At school and university, the year has a clear cycle: the introductory days, the slow acceleration of work, the slog of revision, the finale of exams and then the end of term, when you have a few drinks (or perhaps more accurately, a few more drinks) and wind down. Somebody else makes the decisions for you: this is when you're meant to work, this is when you can stop, this is when you're allowed to celebrate and/or take stock.
Real life is different, of course. It doesn't run in easy cycles. There's no point at which you and all your mates and everybody around you all collectively go, "Ach, that's it" and get drunk with a clear conscience.
There's always a consequence, always something else to do. You can't go for a few drinks tonight because you have to be alert for that meeting in the morning, or because you're taking the kids swimming, or just because the day-to-day business of life means there's no slack in the schedule. Or you can go but Charles can't. Nasser can do Friday but Ian would prefer Saturday and Mike's away and Andrew can't stay after nine whenever you do it: the lives of adults rarely run to the same rhythms.
Full postWhy does cricket not lend itself to the novel?
It could be because literary description of sport is almost impossible because of our over-familiarity with the language of reporting
Jonathan Wilson
09-Sep-2013
On Saturday I was on a panel at the inaugural Words & Wickets festival at Wormsley (a genuinely brilliant day out that allowed you, in the space of five minutes, to see a first Folio of Shakespeare, a first edition of Thomas More's Utopia and the actor Damian Lewis being bowled by the novelist Nicholas Hogg; if it is repeated next year, as it hopefully will be, it's definitely worth making the trip - although if I'm on at 12.30 again, you should probably skip that to join the burger queue early).
There were several panel events throughout the day, all generally considering the interaction of cricket and literature. Ours - I was on with Tom Holland, Sandy Balfour and Robert Winder - was supposed to be a discussion of our favourite cricket books but, as is the way of such things, talk veered off down various tangents, perhaps the most interesting of which was why cricket (or sport in general) so rarely makes a productive subject for a novel.
It's a theme that has niggled away at me since - particularly watching the rain fall over the pretty ground at Fernhurst yesterday, leaving me stranded with a batting average of 63 for the summer (2.27 higher, I note with some satisfaction, than the Test average of Herbert Sutcliffe, who was briefly married to a great aunt of mine; yes, it's inflated by a number of not-outs, but it's hardly my fault if they can't get rid of me).
Full postPondering Camus
The complex relationship between sport and morality
Jonathan Wilson
26-Aug-2013
When you've written a book, strange things happen. A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by a Belgian literary magazine about The Outsider, my history of the goalkeeper, by two journalists who, while thoroughly charming, knew little about football. I ended up, I'm afraid, emotionally arguing that Jim Montgomery's save in the 1973 FA Cup final was the zenith of human achievement to date.
What I've thought about most since, though, was the question I was asked about Albert Camus, who kept goal for the University of Oran, and his line that all he knows about morality and the obligations of men he has learned from football.
It's such a familiar quote as to be a cliché; no British sportswriter would ever dream of citing it directly in a piece - I felt, I confess, a shudder repeating it here - and yet does anybody really think about what it means? Put on the spot, confronted by the question, "What did he mean by that?" from somebody from outside the sporting milieu, it's not actually that easy to answer.
Full postKeeping score
For some, there's a particular satisfaction derived from generating league tables and scorecards
Jonathan Wilson
10-Aug-2013
I've become used over the past few weeks to standing alongside Jon Hotten in this section of the ESPNcricinfo site. Last Sunday I did it for real, fielding at backward point as he stood at gully in a game for the Authors CC away to a team made up of teachers and other hangers-on from Eton College. Earlier in the day, we'd shared a stand of 100 - he watchfully, chancelessly elegant; me lucky and frenetic - to rescue the Authors from a perilous position of 22 for 4.
I realise I said about two months ago that I suspected I'd never pick up a bat again, but my cricketing career has had a sudden and unexpected resurgence. After an eight-year hiatus, I've played three games this summer, been on the winning side in all of them and, thanks to the vagaries of statistics in the face of not-outs, I'm averaging an implausible 57. Much as I'd like to describe every dab down to third man in my epic 39, each nurdle off my pads, each hoick through the leg side, I recognise that would be self-indulgent even by my standards, so I'll confine myself to the implications of an exchange that took place with the score at 117.
I'd checked with the umpire what the score had been when we'd come together, and as I chatted to Jon at the end of the over, I mentioned that we were just five from the century partnership. "Like batting with bloody Boycott," he muttered (it really wasn't, unless Boycott has developed a dominant bottom hand, a propensity for swishing at wide ones and a habit of charging ten yards down the pitch every time he hits the ball before actually looking to see where it's gone), at which I was confronted, once again, with the realisation that not everybody is as obsessed with statistics as I am.
Full post'How's the Test going?'
Try to follow the game outside the cricket-playing world and its bewildering complexities might alienate you from the locals
Jonathan Wilson
29-Jul-2013
A couple of months ago, agreeing with the theory Martin Kelner sets out in Sit Down and Cheer that football began to supplant cricket as the prime sport in the English national consciousness as a result of the 1953 FA Cup final, I cited Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 film The Lady Vanishes. In it, the two comic characters on the train, Charters and Caldicott, ask every English person they meet how the Test is going. The modern equivalent, Kelner suggested, would be, "What was the United score?"
At the time I thought he was right, and in terms of his general point I still do, but over the past couple of weeks I've begun to reconsider. I'm in Argentina at the moment and, during the Lord's Test, I found myself regularly discussing with people how the Test was going. The tense, of course, is the significant issue. There are only two hours in which a football match is going, after which it has gone. That doesn't stop discussion, of course, but it does take some of the urgency out of the conversation.
This is one of cricket's great beauties, one it shares with cycling's grand tours and perhaps nothing else: for all the people who go to a game, or sit and watch it avidly on television, there are many thousands more for whom it goes on in the background. The nature of the game lends itself to that: you don't need to know what happened in each of the 540 balls of a day's play. You don't need to know every cut or drive, much less every defensive shot, merely that Joe Root played watchfully before tea and then opened out on his way to 178 not out by the close. His dismissal to a ramp shot the following morning probably will be remembered - for what it said about his selflessness, the modernity or his play and his fearlessness - but it is rare in that; cricket is essentially a game of summaries and statistics, and that makes it ideal for idle discussion when you're away from home and haven't actually seen any of it.
Full postAre England sloppy or have our expectations been raised?
After the grim nadir of the '80s and '90s, England fans have become used to their team winning again - and that, paradoxically, can be frustrating
Jonathan Wilson
15-Jul-2013
Peter Alliss, once the heaviest baby born in Europe, then a Ryder Cup golfer, and now an amiable buffer in the commentary box, isn't necessarily somebody I'd usually turn to as a source of wisdom, but he did once say something profound about the nature of perspective and expectations in sport. He hated playing against weekend golfers, he said, because he would come off the course having hammered them, only to find them beaming and describing in detail the two good shots they hit in their round of 90, while he dwelt on the two bad shots he'd played in his round of 70.
It's true of everything, of course. If Manchester United beat, say, Whitley Bay 4-1 in the FA Cup, they would fret about misplaced passes and the goal they conceded, while Bay would revel in having scored a goal at Old Trafford. The pathetically low standard of cricket I play means that the odd ball that turns or the occasional crisp drive stands out above the long hops that are battered for four or the ugly hoicks caught at midwicket. And it says much for the improvement in English cricket that the pervading mood, even after the euphoria of Sunday, seems one of frustration.
We spent much of the eighties and nineties grateful for any slight crumb of comfort. We remember Mike Atherton and Jack Russell's resistance in Johannesburg in 1995 and conveniently forget that England were thrashed by ten wickets in the fifth Test to lose the series.
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