Grim pique of the MCC diehards (26 Mar 1998)

26 March 1998

Grim pique of the MCC diehards

Sarah Edworthy

THE Oscar ceremony coincided with the denouement of the final Test against the West Indies and the question arose: if a great film were to be made about English cricket, what would it be like? Baseball has Kevin Costner's touching paean to the bond between father and son, Field Of Dreams, and cricket has . . . well, you have to go back to Hitchcock's heyday to recall Charters and Caldicott chasing a murderer through the crowds of Old Trafford in The Lady Vanishes. (Now there's a title to win MCC approval.)

Judging by my mailbag last week, the sad conclusion is that only David Lynch could do justice to a drama based on cricket obsession. The Twin Peaks director, whose speciality is to reveal noir-ist impulses behind white picket-fenced respectability, could script an epic with the aid of those who penned a response to a column I wrote for the Editorial Comment page of this newspaper about the dented image of the men based at Lord's. They directed letters, not to the editor with relevant points for further debate, but to the writer personally. In one case, I was harangued as a four-letter word beginning with s, ending with g, with the initials of the Oscar-hosting city in between, by someone signing himself Jack D Ripper, SS Barracks, Aldgate, London E1 (postmarked Canterbury, Kent).

That correspondent also included a cartoon entitled Net Practice at the ECB, which showed - in reference to the Theresa Harrild sexual discrimination case - a woman being struck with cricket bats by men who congratulated themselves ("Good shot." "Well played, sir!") while an ECB official drinking at the bar explained that this was a DIY abortion to save them £400.

Sick? And he spent time on it. It would be restorative to brush this scribbler off as a freak, and hope that the medical men in white coats will give him out as far as his innings in the freedom of civilised society goes, but there are others - with valid addresses and telephone numbers - who write about the bile of "wimmin" interested in cricket, about "the female imperative insisting on intruding into the male domain", about little girls stealing little boys' toys and continuing when grown up, about "tarts" ensnaring men, and calling upon the "authority" of the Fuhrer and Jesus Christ and the MCC to make their points. Pass the anti-bacterial hand-wash, please.

These are all either typed or written in an educated hand, sprinkled with learned allusions and debating know-how. The puzzling thing is that the original piece that tapped this warped sub-stratum of cricket fans had merely recapped public perception of the separate incidents that collectively had embarrassed the hierarchies - the MCC vote to exclude women, the Harrild dismissal case - and asked whether it was as serious as implied by Teresa Gorman MP, who had called for the intervention of John Major.

The most outrageous line was the suggestion that Rachel Heyhoe-Flint be appointed an honorary important cricketing person. Hardly Wonderbra-burning stuff, and yet another reader wrote to register "the shock to the system . . . thought my Mr Patel had sent me The Guardian by mistake . . . and to think we will have to endure more of this as other wimmin scribes pile in . . . "

Friends who are MCC members, even ones who voted to exclude women, as they had every right as members of a private club to do, were not roused to fury. Rather the opposite. So why this vindictive outpouring?

A distinguished former broadsheet cricket correspondent maintains that cricket is unique in the number of lurking weirdos. "Cricket creates such strange passions. Every ground has its madman and the most dangerous are the ones who have no interest in anything else, who sit in attics all winter playing Howzat, looking through the Internet, waiting to come out in the summer with their plastic bags. There is also a misogynist element there," he says.

One wonders what MCC members make of such letter-writers, who are riding caboose on their no-women bandwagon with enthusiastic spite. It might prompt them to open the doors to women, to abandon their exclusive retreat for men in the hope of sweeping out the lunatic fringe. Somehow I do not think that is how David Lynch would choose to end it.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)