Arlott's antithesis

Cricinfo reminds me that today marks a quarter-century since John Arlott's last spell at the microphone, on the eve, of course, of Richie Benaud's valediction, to English audiences at least, at The Oval. Many would bracket them as the essential commentators of their generations: Arlott "the Voice of Cricket" on radio, Benaud "the Face of Cricket" on television. In fact, their commentary careers have been radically different, almost antithetical, each embodying in their own way cricket's evolution and expansion.

Arlott, the policeman, the all-sport writer, the poetry producer, the art collector, the wannabee Liberal MP, did many things; Benaud has been a cricket person man and boy. Arlott loathed travelling, and seldom toured, only visiting Australia once; Benaud hasn't experienced a winter since 1962. Arlott could be a grumpy about modern cricket, once famously desisting altogether from commentating on a Sunday League match for several overs on grounds that nothing worth describing was happening; Benaud is a tireless enthusiast for the game of the present.

They prospered as commentators, no less than cricketers do, by being in tune with their times and their audiences. Arlott belongs to a cricket embedded in local culture and local identity and conversant with its past; Benaud, a specialist and an internationalist, belongs to a game that has become a world of its own, existing in, to borrow Hobsbawm's phrase, "the permanent present". Whoever is the master broadcaster of the next generation will reflect the attitudes of the game and the values of its audience in the same way. Sky must hasten to recruit the members of the Big Brother household: individuals so dull as to make almost any game of cricket positively sparkle by comparison.

Ricky Ponting's complaint about England's use of substitutes is steadily filling the controversy vacuum that the media abhors, and generating more heat than light. But it hinges on a question of cricket ethics that's worthy of remark: who actually determines the `spirit of cricket'?

Ponting has spoken of a shared responsibility: "I think it is an absolute disgrace the spirit of the game is being treated like that...It's within the rules of the game but it's just not within the spirit of the game, which is what we're all trying to uphold." He does not elaborate on who 'we' might be. He could mean cricketers in general; he could mean cricketers in this series; he could mean Australian cricketers, because they have subscribed to a document defining the 'spirit' as they see it; he could, for all I know, be using the royal plural, and arrogating to himself the responsibility for moral arbitrations.

In a press conference at Trent Bridge, Duncan Fletcher implied that he subscribed to the view that defining the spirit of cricket was the prerogative of the ICC referee Ranjan Madugalle. As Madugalle had said nothing, he assumed the spirit intact. Yet, if a fielder claimed a catch on the bounce, a bowler blocked a batsman's path as he ran between wickets, or a batsman feigned an injury in order to obtain a runner, England's coach would presumably know that the spirit had been breached without having to ring Madugalle up and ask him to check the ICC by-laws.

It's hard to feel much sympathy for either position. In fact, the roles could easily be reversed. It doesn't take much imagination to conceive of a situation in which Ponting, say, defended Shane Warne from the charge of overzealous appealing by saying that only the referee's view matters; or, indeed, one in which Fletcher complained that Australian time wasting violated the you-know-what. Morality is a fluid and contingent matter in cricket these days; we subscribe to whatever suits and excuses us.

While her father was touring England with the Australians in 1993, David Boon's daughter became increasingly agitated and fretful. "Where's daddy?" she asked her mother eventually. "He's been away so long - is he in heaven?" Well no, although he had won the Ashes, so perhaps he was close. In the span of a child's life, of course, periods of months can seem proportionally enormous. But in a cricketer's life they can, too.

Ashes tours are the longest of all and, even in this age of transcontinental jet transport and telecommunications, they can creep by: the same company and the same objectives inevitably start to pall. They might be travelling, but always toward essentially the same destination.

Conrad wrote of sailors: "Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them - the ship; and so is their country - the sea. One ship is very much like another and the sea is always the same." I think the same is basically true of cricketers.

If you doubt it, I recommend Glenn McGrath's World Cup diary from 2003, a work as regimented as its author, starting every day with the alarm ("My alarm goes off at 6.30am for our 7am departure"."My alarm goes off at 6.45am"."My alarm goes off at 6.30am'"), and whose most interesting motif is an almost fetishistic fascination with the author's luggage ("After waking up and getting ready, I take my bags downstairs at 8.45am to be checked in and identified". "I wake and finish packing my bags"."I finished packing my bags and put them outside my door"."We're leaving for Port Elizabeth and our bags have to be in the foyer by 8am"). Travel narrows the mind wonderfully.

How to stay motivated under these circumstances? Some cricket might help. Australia, however, do not play again until a two-day match at the weekend against Essex, which suffices as their preparation for the Fifth Test. I understand the origins of the Australians' contempt for county games, but they did give structure to tours, and vary the surroundings and the circumstances. Two-day games, which have been the vogue of this tour, are over before they begin, and amount to little more than a glorified net. They have also been an artefact of Australian arrogance. "No-one is good enough to play against us," it seems to say. "We are better off practising amongst ourselves." The Australians have made this tour more monotonous than it needed to be, and it was monotonous enough to begin with.

Neville Cardus, who combined his duties as cricket correspondent of the Manchester Guardian with those as music critic, once compared the audiences for each genre: "If I said that the Hammerclavier Sonata was the last thing Beethoven wrote, I'd get a couple of dozen letters, 75 per cent from foreigners. But if I said that Sir Leonard Hutton made 363 at the Oval in 1938, I'd get thousands from Yorkshiremen alone." It is quite true: no readers are more eager to enter into correspondence than sports fans. My email bag - apart from the twenty or so I get every day from my club describing our latest committee wrangle or financial misadventure - is far more entertaining than anything I write here. Darren Fogarty, for instance, asked Cricinfo today for my description of Australia's top six: "Personally I'd call them 'six convict rats on a sinking ship' but with his journalistic pedigree he might be able to come up with something much more eloquent." Convict rats, of course, are famously so dim they choose to remain on sinking ships. As for improving on such eloquence, even I have to defer to such pure satirical gold.

Not all emails are quite so daring and ambitious, but I thought I'd share a few others anyway. Many of them are responses to the day's events, such as one from my friend Simon Rae in Oxfordshire, biographer of WG and a pioneer user of the Fate-Tempting-O-Meter, whose response to Vaughan's decision to enforce the follow-on at Trent Bridge arrived in my inbox within minutes: "Oh my God, we're doomed. Australia 643 for 4 declared; England 125 all out. Ashes gone. The fools, the mad fools!" Of course, pessimism is not the sole prerogative of the English. Tom White of the mighty Henty CC - who faxes copies of this diary every day to his oldest son in Walgett - reminds me: "You will be familiar with the thoughts of Guru Bob of `Coodabeen Champions' fame who once said: `I tell the novices at the temple: there are three certainties in life, Death, Taxes and that the English will not win The Ashes back in our lifetime'. So, it looks as though we are back to only two."

A surprising number of Aussies admit to feeling delighted by the direction of the series, including my former club president McFly, whose email this morning describing the bucks' night for our club secretary Rocket, which is not for general consumption, ended with a confession: "I secretly admit to having been barracking for the Poms for the last four Tests but now I'm back to the Aussies for the last Test. All I want is for the series to come down to the last hour of the last day of the last Test - too much to ask for?" He's been barracking for SBS, too, who have enjoyed a windfall from the free-to-air rights nobody wanted: "SBS ratings are through the roof!! Channel Nine will be kicking themselves. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people." Then they shaved off all Rocket's pubic hair... Oh, errrr, forget that bit.

Much of the pleasure arises, of course, from so many predictions being so conclusively confounded. My girlfriend Sally, who keeps me abreast of media activities in Australia, wrote last week: "I wish you could hear the commentators this end - [Dean] Jones and [Greg] Matthews. It's the biggest, most glorious mix of excuses, grovel and crap you've EVER heard. Like the players, this generation of commentators are clueless to explain the loss. All their clichés are in the bin." She nobly refrains from reminding me that I tipped Australia 3-1, but that just shows what a loyal and supportive partner she is.

An editorial in this morning's Independent is the latest contribution to spontaneous theorising about the sudden popularity of cricket in England. It strikes the pragmatic, no-nonsense tone beloved of leader writers the world over: "No doubt this renaissance will inspire cerebral discussions about what lies behind it and whether it constitutes a part of a wider revival of interest in all things English. We suspect it is less complicated. Cricket has become popular again because the English cricket team has rediscovered the formula for success. Quite simply, everyone loves a winner."

At the risk of sounding cerebral - heaven forbid - this suspicion of The Independent's seems utterly wrong-headed. For one thing, what's happened this summer isn't a case of cricket suddenly becoming popular; it's an instance of the discovery, by some poorly-informed people who know no better, mainly in the media, just how popular cricket is. The spectators attending the Tests bought their tickets months ago for a small fortune, and do the same every year: they have merely seen their abiding faith rewarded. If we take Johnny Borell of Razorlight as our representative celebrity espousing a love of cricket and thus epitomising its new fashionability, he discovered the game in 1997 and thus has lived through some very dark summers since, from the horrors of 1999 to the dashed hopes of 2001. There are many easier loves to nurture: if he had simply been looking to latch onto a winner, he'd have adopted the Chicago Bulls. And if winning was all that mattered to sport lovers, all spectators would naturally gravitate to those teams that do - which they demonstrably do not, otherwise the Boston Red Sox would have won last year's World Series amid funereal silence.

The editorial describes cricket as "a once universally loved but now neglected national sport", and contends: "For years it has been a poor relation of football, its decline symbolised by the falling number of children playing cricket at school". Whether cricket was ever "universally loved" and whether it is "now neglected" by comparison both seem debatable propositions. Football has probably been a more truly demotic sport for almost a century; the comparison is, in any case, flawed because it is of a sport where the loyalties are largely tribal with one where the allegiances are mainly patriotic.

What has failed over the last few decades, furthermore, has been not cricket but England's cricket team: there is a big difference. The popularity of cricket at the grass roots is sensitive to a host of other factors before a country's fortunes in the international arena: cricket was withering on the vine in the West Indies even as its mighty Test XI thrashed all comers. And even if we are to accept a decline in cricket in England, at least in visibility, dwindling support for cricket at schools seems less likely to be a "symbol" of it than a contributing factor. Cerebral theorising has its limits, to be sure. But that is no reason to be as utterly uncerebral as The Independent.