The knight who had it right
It is 30 years since Sir Neville Cardus left us and his reputation as the prince of sportswriters remains secure, writes Michael Henderson
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For cricket-lovers (and scribes) it is pleasing that he belonged to us. He was `our Neville'. In fact, despite his dazzling achievements, Cardus did not really consider himself a lover of sport per se. Cricket was an extension of his aesthetic life. First came music, of course, then literature, then food and wine, then cricket. In other words he got things about right.
Partly because of that sense of proportion, and partly because he was in no way a relativist, some people have been rude about him. The word `snob' has been heard, which is not far short of a hanging offence in modern Britain, a land that makes such a virtue of inverted snobbery. For goodness' sake, we should all be `snobs'! Without it there can be no true civilisation.
The fact that Cardus wrote for the Guardian may also perplex some modern readers. In his day the Manchester Guardian was a liberal provincial newspaper. Today, despite its many good qualities, it is the natural habitat of the self-hating Home Counties set. From the rich fare of Cardus (and Philip Hope-Wallace) to the bread-and-water asceticism of Polly Toynbee in one generation! Brothers and sisters, is this not progress?
No is the simple answer. "The good work was ruined by Bradman, who is still not out 257," he wrote in 1938. "Several people were heard to say that without Bradman the Australians might not be so wonderful after all. Probably not; Hamlet without the Prince would not be so wonderful and the Grand Armée without Napoleon might not have been exactly the force it was."
Or how about this? "A bat, indeed, can look an entirely different instrument in different hands. With Grace it was a rod of correction, for to him bad bowling was a deviation from moral order; Ranjitsinhji turned a bat into a wand, passing it before the eyes of the foe till they followed him in a trance along his processional way; George Hirst's bat looked like a stout cudgel belabouring all men not born in Yorkshire; [Charles] Macartney used his bat for our bedazzlement as Sergeant Troy used his blade for the bedazzlement of Bathsheba - it was a bat that seemed everywhere at once, yet nowhere specially."
Nowadays many sportswriters employ wit. Some can even make you laugh. But Cardus got there before everybody else and managed to connect cricket to the world beyond the boundary, which is why he matters. The sad thing is, were he growing up today, he might be lost to the game altogether. "Cricket ... has developed a routine standardised efficiency at the expense of the personal touch," he wrote in 1970. "It is offering itself in one-day hit-or-miss scrambles in which winning or losing points or awards is the only appeal to the spectator." What, one wonders, would he make of the blink-and-miss-it nonsense called Twenty20, which - we are assured by the counties - represents the future of the domestic game?
He certainly would not take to the compression of a Test series against Australia into seven weeks between late July and early September. This is no more than `industrial' cricket, in which quality takes second place to quantity. Pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap! Cardus was familiar with a world in which Hedley Verity read Seven Pillars of Wisdom on the boat to Australia, "and [George] Duckworth danced each evening with a nice understanding of what, socially, he was doing". Remember that when the England players exchange those unnatural `high-fives' at the fall of every wicket this summer.
We cannot - worst luck - turn back the clock. We have to live with what we have, and so much of the modern world is brutal, even in sport, which is supposed to offer relief. But we can from time to time recall a gentler world and those, like Cardus, who evoked it.
This article was first published in the April issue of The Wisden Cricketer.
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