Theme and variations

SEND 'EM HOME! This was for years the stock journalistic response to any poor performance by a touring England cricket team. True, never in the field of cricketing conflict has a Test match side said to the opposition, 'Awfully sorry, but we're not good enough, so we're going home.' But the journalistic kind cannot bear very much reality.

The send 'em home story is out of date. These days, every poor performance by an England cricket team is not the end of that particular team, but the end of Test cricket as we know it. England made a terrible start to the Ashes series just completed in Australia, losing two and saved by the rain in the third. The contest was over, England was lying on its back, paws in the air, in the classic submission posture of the puppy - or of the old bitch gone in the teeth - and cricket people were saying, 'Really, what is the point of a five-Test series when Australia are so manifestly, so colossally superior?' (Note that in Australia the word 'superior' in this context does not mean 'better at cricket'. It implies a moral judgment as well, and a cultural one.) Other commentators were saying that Test cricket itself is morally bankrupt: not even the winners enjoy a sport that alternates between rain and humiliation.

Australia, some said, were simply 30 years ahead. Why, the Australian second eleven also roundly humiliated the mother country. The only way for England to improve is to try to be like Australia, and modernise at once. Actually, the best counter-argument claims that Australia is in fact 30 years behind.

This is because Test cricket is a game 30 years out of date; the game of the present and the future is football. Why, England's fifth team would humiliate the best Australia could produce. This is a good argument with which to silence Australians always something worth doing - but the last two Tests rather damaged its substance.

I am often asked which sport I like best. Reply depends on mood, but I usually say Test cricket. Why? Because it is the easiest. The combination of the leisurely time frame and the apparently infinite number of variables means that you never have to grub around for something to write about.

So with this series. England changed from cowed bitch to cornered rat and fought back. True, it was too late, but that rather added to the beauty of it. They won in Melbourne, and put together a memorable performance in the final, wildly oscillating Test match in Sydney. England lost, but it was a close-run thing, a battle packed with many highly satisfying kinds of drama. All in all, it was deeply satisfying sport, and the point is that it was the better for the three ghastly Test matches that went before. Test cricket is the only sport that provides these labyrinthine plots, outrageous twists and turns that would not work in the short-story format of most sports. They can only be found in the roman fleuve form of Test match cricket.

The roman fleuve form, as readers of Marcel Proust and Anthony Powell well know, combines the addictive charms of soap opera with the grandeur of epic. But you don't really get the hang until you have read the first three of the dozen or so volumes. The magnificent final two volumes of the Test match series depended on the difficulty of the first three. Le cricket retrouve.

Copyright Spectator Jan 9, 1999
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