Rob's Lobs

Sod the Tebbit Test. Take the Bob Marley Test. How many Brits out there were rooting for Shivnarine Chanderpaul to prod and plod for another two hours? I know I was, and I can think of at least two and threequarter London-based friends who feel similarly disloyal to St George. I know this because I asked them the same question last week while the man with the sponsored eye-bags was threatening to pull off the greatest chase in Test annals. The final score was two “absolutelys” to one “almost”.

They were all too aware of that unpalatable but rapidly encroaching truth: cricket with an uninspiring, passionless West Indies is akin to soccer blighted by a charmless, defensive-minded Brazil – a sport incapable of fulfilling its potential. Now he knows how much he is missed (as if he needed any reminder), will Brian Lara’s hints at the speediest unretirement since Frank Sinatra bear fruit? Let’s hope so. For all his selfishness and untold other flaws, his countries need him. They are certainly not better off without him, as their selectors calculated. Nor is cricket.

Given cricket’s uniquely radical transformation over the final third of the 20th century, it is perhaps only to be expected, and certainly forgiveable, that worthwhile innovations have been hard to come by of late (don’t get me started on powerplays or any other pointless attempt to make life even easier for those spoiled-brat batters). Which is why the current umpiring revolution warrants a good deal more than three cheers.

If cricket were a normal sporting obsession, we Englishmen would be celebrating right now. June 4, after all, marked the 50th anniversary of Peter May and Colin Cowdrey’s fourth-wicket stand of 411 against West Indies at Edgbaston, still the highest stand for their country in Tests. For heaven’s sake, it almost inspired the second post-follow-on triumph in Test annals, pre-empting ’81 And All That by nearly a quarter of a century. Lordships have been awarded for less. Instead, the birthday passed with barely a whisper.

There were exceptions. While researching an article about the alliance, I thought I’d check out Cowdrey’s autobiography to elicit some first-hand reflections. Astonishingly, for all the extensive memory-riffing in May’s memoirs, the cupboard was as bare as that hearteningly cynical chapter in Len Shackleton’s autobiography about football club chairmen, which comprised a single wordless page. Do we assume that, reminiscing and writing a couple of decades after the fact, Cowdrey and his ghost, Ian Wooldridge, experienced a collective hard-drive crash? I rather doubt it. In which case, the only other option, from where I’m sitting, is embarrassment.