Almanac Cricket: Mad Hatter’s Tea Party or Cricket?

 

‘I say

I don’t like cricket, oh no

I love it

I don’t like cricket, no, no

I love it.

Don’t you walk through my words,

You got to show some respect,

Don’t you walk through my words,

Cause you ain’t heard me out yet.’

(Dreadlock Holiday, 10 CC)

 

This piece is really about more than cricket. It is about watching something that you have loved all your life become something different by tearing itself apart. Cricket no longer feels like the game I loved and grew up with.

 

It seems to me that today there are tensions across all aspects of the game: tradition versus entertainment, patience versus spectacle, local loyalties versus global money, cricket as a game versus cricket as a product, and then we have all the player controversies on one thing or another. Then there’s the tinkering with conditions and the rules; a la the blasted AFL.

 

Just like the rest of the world presently, the world of cricket is a mess – a real Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

 

I have practically given up the struggle to keep up. Thankfully Gideon Haigh’s and Peter Lalor’s Cricket et.al podcast and writing keeps me abreast of the issues better than elsewhere.

 

I grew up in a cricket obsessed family. Cricket was not merely a sport in our house it was part of the furniture. Summer evolved around test cricket, the Sheffield Shield and local cricket. I listened to the ABC test cricket broadcasts on our maroon and cream bakelite wireless that crackled away on our kitchen mantel piece. When we finally bought a black and white TV set which enabled me to watch the last session of test cricket, I thought all my Christmas’s had come at once. I was even more enthralled and obsessed.

 

When very young, I often stayed up until the early hours listening to the ashes battles between England and Australia with my grandfather. I kept my own scorebook and was fascinated by the cricket Gods of the day such as Hawke and McKenzie, Wally Grout, Boycott, Trueman, Hall and Griffith, Sobers, Barlow, Barrington, ‘Deadly’ Underwood, Pollock, Lillee and Thomson, the Chappells.  These are but a few; I could go on and on. As a child, then a youth, I knew all the cricket heroes from all the eras, practically from the very first test match played, but especially those of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. They were loved, respected and spoken of in near idolatry terms.

 

Lately I have lost my love of the game. It seems to me in my ‘rose coloured glasses state of mind’, that perhaps it is because I have just fallen out of step with the modern game.

 

I can remember when cricket didn’t seem to be quite so rushed. When a batsman might spend 30 to 60 minutes settling in before playing a great back cut, cover drive or a pull for four over square leg. When a bowler could toil away for over after over, session after session setting a trap for a batsman. When a young upcoming batsman would leave a good swinging and rising ball outside the off stump or duck a fearsome delivery from someone like Wes Hall or Peter Pollock. I remember once reading a comment that Fred Trueman was willing to allow a good batsman to make about 40 runs while he strategically worked away at getting him out.

 

Is it just me or does the game seem restless today? Fidgety, ansty, troubled, unsettled – all of it.  Choose your adjective and you’ll be right!  Every year there are new debates about one thing or another. Red ball, pink ball or white ball? Day or night tests, short versus longer game formats, new and amended competitions, television schedules, broadcasting rights, sponsors, club amalgamation, Bazball or the BBL train wreck. These all appear to have more weight than the tradition or the game itself. Thank heavens for Gideon Haigh who is able to explain all of this to those of us who lose track of the issues (or get bored by them!).

 

Granted, cricket has always had its politics, but increasingly it seems as though decisions are being made to suit the interests of a few rather than the game itself and the punter. Seemingly, the influence of power and money is at its heart, especially in the sub-continent, and is affecting us all. The power balance has shifted which is not comfortable for many like me.

 

I know millions love the Twenty/20 game and I guess I can understand why. As my daughter tells me: ‘Dad, get with it, it’s fast, colourful, easy to consume and quick’. The owner of one of my favourite beer joints in Geelong, ‘The Farm Dog Brewery’ says, ‘Allan, don’t knock it. It’s great entertainment. I get them in here to watch a quick game on the way home from work and they drink and eat lots.’ There you have it!

 

Yet whenever I have tried to watch it, which I don’t anymore, I have felt less like a participant and more like an outsider attending someone else’s shindig.

 

Unlike my daughter and her friends, I have not embraced Twenty/20 cricket at all. I have tried and failed, even refusing free tickets. I know that many love it, especially the younger generations. I know that it fills stadiums and the television audience is large. I also know that many see it as a quick source of entertainment for a family outing. Good luck to them I say. I’m left cold. The BBL leaves me with the same feeling. The awful music, the young voice screaming out over the loudspeaker, the blinding lights. It’s got to a stage where we are witnessing an entertainment affair with a cricket component rather than a cricket match with an entertainment angle.

 

Why we apparently have to copy the American ‘flashy’ and ‘big’ and ‘loud’ way of doing things is beyond me. I gave up attending and watching baseball too, a game I enjoy, for these very reasons.

 

Yes, daughter dear, I agree none of it is wrong, but it’s just not the style of cricket that captured my imagination in bygone years or nowadays. And, I don’t like it!

 

Give me a district Premier League, local suburban or a Sheffield Shield match on a warm sunny afternoon any day of the week. Even a 3 dayer I can wear. Fifty over matches are okay and still make me feel connected to the game I grew up with. Give me a test match that unfolds over a highly charged and closely fought 4 or 5 days. Give me the quiet glee in watching a hard fought hundred or a spell of disciplined fast bowling, tricky leg and off side spin or the deceptive cunning of a slow bowler any day.

 

Yeah, I guess I could be called a traditionalist. One who is out of touch. One of those who belong to a generation that sees cricket not as a product to be packaged and sold off to the highest bidder (e.g. BBL). Rather, a game to be played and savoured.

 

The game goes on and millions enjoy it, yet sometimes while watching the game today (when I do!), I wonder: ‘Am I mourning the game, or the passing of my own time’. The older I get the more I wonder if cricket has changed beyond recognition or if I have.

 

Perhaps my angst is not really with the game of cricket at all. Maybe it is the realisation that the game, like everything else, simply cannot stand still even if I wanted it to. I have to accept that the cricket I grew up with and knew belongs to a bygone era. As, perhaps, do I.

 

Sometimes however, just sometimes, every now and then, every so often, amid the riddles of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, I still catch a glimpse of the game I once knew when watching a Sheffield Shield match or a hard fought test match, even a local suburban game.

 

It is in those moments that both the game and I still seem young again.

 

 

Read more from Allan Barden HERE

 

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