The Long Handle

I was returning from my annual pre-Christmas expedition to Harrods yesterday when I happened upon a throng of theatregoers in Shaftesbury Avenue. Nothing unusual there, you might think, but this particular mob of citizens was arrayed in a circle, roaring with laughter at some unseen source of titillation.

My curiosity piqued, I plunged into the fray to establish what all the commotion was about. As I did so I was assaulted aurally by what on first hearing appeared to be a cockerel with a sore throat imitating Gilbert and Sullivan. Imagine my surprise upon reaching the front row to find the ICL’s own Jason Gillespie the centre of attention.

“I feel pretty!” he was roaring, “Oh so pretty and witty and gay. I’m so pretty. That I hardly can believe it’s me…”

The clan Hughes has been synonymous with the sport of bat and ball since the Viking king Harold Hughdrada brought back a spherical shrunken head and a granite bat from the Pacific island of Crigit in 405AD. But the extent of the Hughes contribution to the great pastime has remained unfathomed. Until now.

Back in June I assembled a panel of experts (myself, my great aunt and her secretary Lavinia). We met in the gazebo, with just a bottle or two of Bollinger, a platter of cucumber sandwiches and a picnic hamper full of dietary pills to aid us. To be frank, Lavinia is 97 and not as nimble-fingered as she used to be but she has at long last finished typing up our deliberations. Here then, is the all-time Hughes XI.

1. Phillip Hughes My aunt had not come across this young man, so for her benefit I tried to illustrate Phillip’s idiosyncratic technique by vigorously brandishing a sponge finger whilst hopping backwards into the begonias. She announced herself unimpressed but was persuaded when I reminded her that he played for Middlesex.

I was resting in the tea room yesterday afternoon, savouring a slow-sipping amontillado and watching the November rain lash down onto the herbaceous borders when I was surprised to hear a heavy rapping on my front door; surprised because my pack of Japanese fighting dogs usually intercept any visitor long before they attain the sanctuary of the portico.

I was even more surprised to see Jeff Thomson standing on my doorstep, holding a World Series Umbrella and a bulging plastic carrier bag.

“G’day, yer Pommie bastard,” he greeted me, “Can I use yer fax machine?”

Sunday morning is a tricky test for the cricket watcher and I’m afraid that, confronted with the glaring South African sun this Sabbath past, I flunked it. You see, I’d had rather a heavy week, cricket-wise, and was suffering from a bout of post-Ahmedabad fatigue. So with due apologies to the Right Hon Strauss, I excused myself from the televisual revels in Centurion and sloped off for an hour or two’s recuperation at my club. All I required was a plump leather armchair and the sports section of the Times and all would soon be right with the world. Alas, it was not to be.

“It’s a damned disgrace!” spluttered a voice from the armchair opposite. Stirred from my meditative state, I fetched Atherton’s latest piece from atop my weary visage to see Colonel Thrashem-Harde, his cheeks the hue of the West Indies one-day jersey, jabbing a stubby finger at his copy of the Telegraph.

“That’s a little harsh, Colonel,” I suggested, “Yer man Pringle’s doing his best.”

In a world of fast-food cricket, there is something just so about the menu for England’s tour of South Africa. First up was a serving of Twenty20 bites, a frivolous snack to pick at while everyone settled into the affair; then comes a modest portion or two of the 50-over stuff, followed by the main course: a big, fat, filling Test series with lashings of hot controversy and helpings of steamy tension, and the extended postprandials, including victory cigars, a selection of hard cheeses and bitter grapes and, if we are particularly blessed, a pungent slice or two of Bob Willis. Gosh, I am hungry! Excuse me while I pay a visit to the pantry.

Ah, that’s better. Sadly, I missed one of the Twenty20 appetizers as I was making my biannual pilgrimage to the WG Grace Memorial Rest Home in order to pay obeisance to my great aunt. She isn’t as up to date in matters cricket as she should be, a state of ignorance that can be partly ascribed to the fact that she is currently the only person on the planet legally constrained from taking out a satellite subscription, following a particularly belligerent letter to the Sky Studio. In her defence, I must say that David Lloyd’s slacks were distressingly beige and that a man who treads such a fine line sartorially must expect to receive a death threat or two during the course of his working day.

As ever, she was anxious to hear the latest news. I explained to her that the great Sachin Tendulkar was approaching 30,000 international runs. She absorbed this information with great solemnity, nodding several times.

Life, friends, is a complicated, unsettling, sometimes dangerous business. We have to cling to what we know, to look to those truths that we can depend upon, which may not be for ever but which serve as useful beacons on the misty seas of 21st-century life. Fortunately there is one human foghorn in particular whose utterances always steer me in the right direction, away from the jagged rocks and into calmer waters. I am talking, of course, about Giles Clarke.

In the decades that have passed since he became ECB Chunterer-in-Chief, I have benefited enormously from his wisdom and even formulated some simple maxims to sum up his teaching. For example, Clarke’s First Law Of Cricket is a cornerstone of the English game. It states that if Giles Clarke declares his admiration for something or someone, then you can be sure that person or object is bad for cricket and entirely worth avoiding.

Hold the front page! Saddle up your high horses and head for the moral uplands. Our old friend the cricket scandal is back in town, barging into forums and message boards across the cyber world, banging a metaphorical fist on a virtual table and demanding our attention. Yes, to the sound of several hundred million people tut-tutting in unison, it was revealed earlier this week that MS Dhoni and associates had been “partying” just hours after a cricket match that they’d had the appalling bad manners to lose.

When I first heard the news, naturally I was horrified. How dare they, I thought. What kind of heartless, selfish, irresponsible reprobates go out “partying” whilst a nation is still weeping over a defeat at the hands of Australia, a catastrophic event almost unheard of in the history of Indian cricket, certainly since the last one.

At first I resisted the temptation to click on the link inviting me to goggle at the sordid pictures of these debauched playboys getting up to all manner of disgraceful things. To click or not to click, that is so often the question. But after a millisecond or two spent weighing up the ethical issues involved, I decided to click. Invariably, I find it is better to have clicked and regretted it than never to have clicked at all.

As a mere humourist, an amateur dabbler in the mysteries of cricket writing, I make it my business to study the greats. I have, for instance, catalogued every one of Gideon Haigh’s shopping lists from the autumn of 2005 onwards, and when I am particularly in need of inspiration I fetch them down from their place on my shelf next to Mike Atherton’s Notes to My Milkman 2002–2008 and pore over them for hours.

Cricket is like a soap opera and if you don’t watch every episode, you’ll find yourself failing to recognise some of the characters. For instance if you were one of those heathens who put your hands over your ears, closed your eyes and made “La la la la!” noises during the Champions League, you will find yourself at something of a disadvantage during the current 50-over bash in India.

Of course, some of the old characters that you know and love are still around. There’s grizzled old Punter, who is always grumbling but secretly has a heart of gold; saintly Uncle Sachin, who listens to everyone’s problems without ever complaining; and the villainous Bhaji, who is pretending to have turned over a new leaf, but who everyone knows is bound to do something despicable any day now.

But now that our Australian chums are starting to come apart like badly assembled action figures (these plastic Paines, Clarkes and Lees might look sexy but they just don’t have the staying power of those clunky old Aussies you got in the seventies), the selectors are being forced to reach deeper into the back of the domestic-cricket fridge, past the leftovers and those on the turn, to see if there’s anything they can use. As a result, for the casual non-Australian cricket watcher, parts of the scorecard might as well be written in Klingon. Henriques? Bollinger? McKay?

After the sweaty, rustic charm of the Champions League, the resumption of international festivities has brought about a welcome elevation of tone. Wednesday’s clash of continents was full of good things, and whilst Sunday belonged to Australia, India struck back to stir the sediment of our jaded imaginations with the enlivening possibility of a genuinely suspenseful series. Dhoni, of course, was immense but it was the reinvigorated Ishant Sharma whom I most enjoyed watching, his angular, bent-forward lope to the crease putting me in mind of a velociraptor, ball perched between claws, intent on savaging the batsman’s knuckles (battered and swollen metacarpals being the tell-tale sign of an Ishant attack).

And with two of the game’s greatest batsmen on the same field of play, it was an ideal opportunity for the collector of cricket images to acquire more pieces for the memory. The batting displays in the Tendulkar and Ponting wings of my mind’s museum are already pretty crowded, so during the current series I have been on the look out for cameos, intriguing Tendlya or Punter-related items of sentimental or curiosity value.

A good collector has to be patient and wait for the right moment. On Wednesday it came in the 62nd over, when Lord Sachin was called upon to take human form and intervene at square leg. His stooping, tumbling dive was the everything-falling-out-of-pockets scramble across the platform of a portly businessman whose briefcase has become trapped in the door of a departing train. Yet he reached the ball. Returning the offending item to his captain with underarm disdain, he dusted down his suit and reassembled his composure. It was Tendulkar encapsulated: successful yet free of swagger; whole-hearted yet dignified.