Praying for rain at cricket's carnival (5 June 1999)

5 June 1999

Praying for rain at cricket's carnival

Robert Philip

There is no easy way to put this, so I will be brutally honest with you; cricket is a complete and utter mystery to me.

Perhaps my upbringing is to blame. On the council estate where I grew up, more people had enjoyed a Rabelaisian poker session with the Pope than possessed a bat and ball, so Grace, Bradman and Sobers could have been a shady firm of debt-collectors for all I knew.

Thus, when I drifted into sports writing as a trainee on the Sunday Post, I was relieved to discover that the English county scoreboards were interred in miniscule type at the very foot of the results page. On lonely night shifts I would occasionally feel sufficiently bored to take magnifying glass and scan Cambridge University v Worcestershire: alas, the myriad facts and figures could have been written in Urdu such was my ignorance.

I was not alone. Did not Sir Alec Douglas-Home, one-time prime minister, not offer up the heartfelt prayer: "Oh God, if there be cricket in heaven let there also be rain"?

Imagine my consternation, then, to discover that some of my favourite companions have turned out to be members of cricket's freemasonry. Serious food and wine guzzlers like Graham ("Son of Colin") Cowdrey, who dragged me off screaming and shouting to The Grange CC in Edinburgh to watch Scotland cross willows with New Zealand in the hope of bestowing enlightenment upon this lost soul. "The World Cup?" scoffed I. "No one plays it except the English and a few ex-Commonwealth nations. Brazil don't, Italy don't and even the Americans, who enjoy all manner of freak shows in the name of sport, haven't the slightest interest."

"Not true," sayeth Graham, in the kindly tone of a missionary. "Just last week, Mayor Giuliani of New York gave permission for a cricket ground to be built in the middle of Brooklyn. It will have seats for 12,000 with a real pavilion and a wicket specially imported from Australia." That's the trouble with zealots, they will try to convert us atheists with bible-thumping sermons.

And so, on a "spring" morning which would have had Captain Oates muttering: 'Actually, I don't think I'll bother with a walk today', we took our seats. What can I tell you? Scotland captain Graham Salmond lost the toss - inducing a frantic Graham, who works for the spread-betting company Sporting Index, to reach for his mobile phone to impart this earth-shattering news (". . . the toss could be crucial," he whispered to me knowingly).

I had come to the conclusion that cricket was a winter game whilst watching television pictures of Scotland's previous World Cup encounter in Edinburgh, when I spotted the Bangladesh coach, Gordon Greenidge, wrapped up like the Michelin Man in a vain atempt to keep out the arctic wind and rain. Greenidge, I am informed, hails from Barbados, where it is a balmy 80 degrees or thereabouts at this time of the year, and so, as Scottish wickets tumbled with alarming regularity, I idly imagined myself swaying gently to and fro on a hammock between twin palm trees on a sun-kissed beach with an ice-cold beer to hand.

Reality was Edinburgh, however, where the youngest member of Kent's Cowdrey dynasty had promised me dinner if I could sit through the entire match without yawning. "Don't you just love it?" sighed Graham breathlessly. "There is no game in the world like cricket. Someone once said: 'Given the choice between a date with Sharon Stone and scoring a century at Lord's, I'll take the hundred every time.' Never has a truer word been spoken."

Hmmm. . .

As Scotland raced towards their fifth successive defeat in the competition, we repaired to the bar to celebrate New Zealand's advance to the Super Six stage with a bottle of Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc. Cue the voice of Rory Bremner, another cricket nut who had been due to accompany us on our day of fun until an unscheduled television appearance intervened. "Well, what do you think of cricket? Are you hooked?" he cackled through the Cowdrey mobile. "You wouldn't happen to have Sharon Stone's telephone number?" I replied sourly. "OK, this'll cheer you up," returned the boy Bremner. "What do Winnie the Pooh and Alexander the Great have in common?" "Dunno," said I. "Their middle name. . ."

Source :: The Electronic Telegraph