Cricket’s ugly old man is a knight, and good men do nothing

“I don’t care a toss about her, love.” – Geoffrey Boycott doesn’t get why people are aghast that he has been honoured despite his conviction for beating up a woman.

TELFORD VICE in London

RAIN, cricket and England. That’s just how things are here in summer. So there was nothing unholy about the trinity gathering over Lord’s last month on what was billed as the first day of the second men’s Ashes Test.

It’s at times like these that commentators earn their money. Without field placings to fuss about, strokes to salivate over, bouncers to babble on, and the drama of dropped catches, what’s going on out of the pressbox window — not a lot besides the groundstaff’s hard work — won’t hold an audience for long.

If the rain keeps coming, broadcasters who aren’t resourced well enough admit defeat and resort to alternative programming.

That doesn’t include Test Match Special (TMS), which has brought cricket to the BBC’s listeners since 1957. Regardless of the weather TMS is on the air and in a class of its own, at least in English.

Nowhere else is cricket presented anywhere near as wonderfully. Television has yet to beam footage as captivating as the spoken word pictures painted by the TMS team.

They’re a touch fuddy-duddy — there’s a poshness about too many of them that doesn’t sit well with those of us who aren’t — it took them far too long to involve women, and they are too accepting of the banality of those who were exponentially better at playing cricket than they are at talking about it.

But TMS is unarguably the best in the business and a blessing the cricketminded among us should count at every opportunity.

As rain soaked Lord’s on August 14, TMS went above and beyond even all that.

Cancer ended, cruelly early, the lives of Ruth Strauss and Jane McGrath. Emma Agnew is also battling the disease, and winning. Strauss and McGrath left behind them four children and two husbands: Andrew Strauss and Glenn McGrath. Agnew’s husband, Jonathan Agnew, is the BBC’s cricket correspondent and the fulcrum around which TMS turns.

Instead of filling the empty airtime with wittering about long ago exploits on faraway fields, or nurdling this way and that through a debate about who should bat at No. 5, or wondering what’s for lunch — all staples of cricket conversation on TMS and elsewhere — the three husbands spoke about their wives. And about cancer.

They talked of bravery and commitment, of love given and received, of the best times of their lives. And the worst.    

They told their stories with openness and honesty, and with an uncommon softness that only added to the strength of what they said.

It’s rare to hear men express themselves with such care and goodness, more so on a prominent mainstream platform and even more so by such unvarnished examples of the species.

They were beautiful, and it rubbed off: unusually, it was uplifting to be a man listening to other men talk about women.

But the bubble has burst.

Geoffrey Boycott is an unpleasant old man. He is possessed of an ego monstrously bigger than anything he ever did as a player, which took him — willingly and profitably — to apartheid South Africa. He is a caricature of someone the world should have left behind by now; an unreconstructed bigot. He has somehow made a second career spouting clichés as profundities. He adds nothing to TMS except a rich Yorkshire accent.

None of which is news. Neither is it a secret that, in 1998, he was found guilty of the vicious assault of his then partner, Margaret Moore, in France. Moore testified that Boycott pinned her to a hotel room floor using his legs and unleashed 20 or more punches into her face, body and limbs. The photographic and medical evidence concurred. Boycott said she had injured herself in a fall.

The judge believed that evidence, as well as Moore and her blackened eyes and swollen face, and convicted Boycott — who appealled. And lost. He was given a suspended sentence of three months and fined £5 000.

It was also unsurprising that, in one of the last failures of her calamitous tenure as the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Theresa May decided to give Boycott a knighthood in her resignation honours list, which was announced on Tuesday.

Adina Claire, the co-acting chief executive of Women’s Aid, said: “Celebrating a man who was convicted for assaulting his partner sends a dangerous message that domestic abuse is not taken seriously as a crime.

“With increasing awareness of domestic abuse, and a domestic abuse bill ready to be taken forward by government, it is extremely disappointing that a knighthood has been recommended for Geoffrey Boycott, who is a convicted perpetrator of domestic abuse.”

Neither did it raise eyebrows that Boycott’s tone turned menacing when he was asked, elsewhere on the BBC, by Today’s Martha Kearney, whether the honour had taken so long to come his way because of his crime.

“I don’t care a toss about her [Claire], love. It was 25 years ago. You can take your political nature and do whatever you want with it. You want to talk to me about my knighthood. It’s very nice of you to have me, but I couldn’t give a toss.

“This is just recognition of my cricket. Very nice, very honoured, thankful to Theresa May, and I thank all the people that supported me and cared for me throughout my cricketing career.”

He claimed, wrongly, that in France “you’re guilty until you’re proved innocent” and listed that as “one of the reasons I [didn’t] vote to remain in Europe”.

So far, so Boycott. The only unanswered question in all that is why the BBC continue to employ him.

And this: what would the good men of TMS — who had at Lord’s used their platform to raise matters vastly more important than cricket — do about Boycott’s unrepentant, outrageous, disgusting answer to fair questions about his criminal past?

The question loomed when Boycott took his spot behind the microphone on the first day of the fifth Test at the Oval on Thursday. Would it be asked, nevermind answered?

That duty fell to Agnew, who greeted Boycott with: “Clanking in in his suit of armour, sword dangling by his side, visor down — I’ve called you ‘Sir Geoffrey’ for so many years, it’s ridiculous — but, Sir Geoffrey Boycott. Congratulations from all of us. Good man.”

Rain, cricket, England. And extreme disappointment.

First published by Times SELECT.

Bring back the boycott

South Africa’s problems are all South Africans’ problems. Not one of us is innocent. All of us are guilty. We need to own that guilt.

TELFORD VICE in London

HANDS up if you remember the long summers and winters of empty ache while, far away across the world, seasons runneth over with international sport played by people who were not us.

The way white people spat the words “Peter” and then “Hain”, the shameless lying in the press and on air that the dross dished up on rebel tours was Test cricket and rugby, the Springboks shamefully allowed to keep touring and playing long after the extent of the evil was known, the denial writ large on the blank faces of the delusionists pretending all was normal …

I remember. I was there. I lived through it. South Africa’s forced exclusion from world sport was the white noise of my growing up. I could hear the black noise of anger on the street. At least, I could before it dissipated into the smell of fear as state oppression mounted.

The Olympics? Test rugby and cricket? International football? They were for other, supposedly better people. Not for us.

I knew that was as it should have been. That until all South Africans had the same chances in life — not only in sport — the least the rest of the world could do was not allow the apartheid government to, as we say these days, sportwash the murderous truth away.

Politics was sport. Sport was politics. Is, was, always will be. Anyone who believes differently is, at best, stupid, at worst, on the high road to fascism. That offends you? Noted.

I cheered like mad during the 1981 Bok tour to New Zealand — for the protestors. I grew taller with pride every time my father, someone I was irreparably distanced from in all sorts of ways, defiantly and in the face of vicious opposition loudly supported the man he always called “Clay”.

He did so not because Muhammad Ali was a wonderful boxer. He did so because Ali invariably said and did the Right Thing. That my father was an ardent student of the art and craft of smacking someone in the face for a living but knew that Ali’s political bravery was exponentially more important than anything he would do in the ring has shaped me in ways I’m still, at 53, trying to understand.

And here we are, all these years later, and not nearly enough has changed. We still don’t have democracy. What we have is a pretence of democracy for the five minutes it takes to put a cross on a ballot paper every five years.

That’s for those of us who still bother to vote. The rest of us know that’s a waste of time. Whether we vote or not, the government will run on corruption and stink of ineptitude. Just like it did when it was white — when none of the legally available alternatives were noticeably less corrupt and inept, just as they are now.

Too many of us believed the bullshit of the 1995 rugby World Cup. That wasn’t unity. That was marketing. Nelson Mandela was dangerously wrong: sport does not have the power to change the world. Not, at least, for any longer than it takes the cheesy fakery of a beer commercial to shamble across our television screens. That’s even less than the five minutes we fool ourselves, every five years, that we’re a democracy.

The Springbok is the swastika of sport, the symbol of what white supremacy used to do on Saturday afternoons. Yet there the filthy thing still is, leaping on the left sleeve of the jerseys of the team who will, so they have been sold to us, represent South Africa at the men’s World Cup.

Why has the Springbok survived? Because it is a valuable brand. Because it makes money. That it is also a significant part of the story of the depths human depravity has sunk to matters less, apparently. How does that make you feel? How does it make me feel? Sick.

I would feel better if international rugby’s suits, having been reminded this week of how abnormal South African society still is and will be for too many decades hence, threw the Boks out of the World Cup.

Or if India — important figures in South Africa’s expulsion and readmission to international cricket — uninvited the Proteas to their tour there later this month.

At least Zambia have had the balls to tell Bafana Bafana not to turn up in Lusaka for their friendly on Saturday. The South African Football Association’s response has not been to reflect on why that has happened and to empathise with the Zambians, but to try and find replacement opposition. How completely disgusting.

Worse, Banyana Banyana played Botswana in the CAF Olympic qualifiers on Wednesday. It is an outrage that the match went ahead — could the players and the crowd at Orlando Stadium smell the hate drifting in on the smoke from the fires set by the xenophobes they consider compatriots?

How do you talk sense into the heads of people swept up in the irrationality that those who have come from far worse realities than theirs to make lives no-one wants to live are stealing “their” jobs and “their” women? Black South Africans, you are a disgrace.

But you have a way to go to join white South Africans at the bottom of the barrel. There is no reconciling with people who, having done everything wrong for hundreds of years, think they have the right to be treated as equals despite retaining all of their privileges.

The latter calamity has, of course, led to the former. How could it not? And how did we think the main victims of centuries of systemic, institutional racial violence — black men, without whom colonialism and apartheid could not have existed — would manifest their dysfunction if not against women?   

All that’s more pathetic than women calling for the death penalty for perpetrators of gender-based violence is men seeking to distance themselves from those perpetrators by issuing confections of affront at their actions.

Some women seem to think you should go to jail if you kill a man and be executed if you kill a woman. But only if you’re a man. Nevermind that the death penalty doesn’t work, or that men are far more likely to be victims of male violence than women.

As for the shrieks of protest by men about other men, if you had lived their lives would you be that different? Or are you trying to say that being born black and male means being born bad?

Much of the noise made by these men and women rises from that swamp of affluence we call the middle class. How dare we lump these fine citizens with those other, dirtier, poorer South Africans? How could we possibly equate swinging a panga in anger with the lethal buzz of an electric fence securing ill-gotten gains?  

South Africa’s problems are all South Africans’ problems. Not one of us is innocent. All of us are guilty. We need to own that guilt if we are to have any hope of rehabilitating ourselves. 

It will take a lot more than sport to heal South Africa. But reviving the boycott would be a start. It is the least sport could do. Bring back the boycott now and bring it back properly, and to hell with how much money would be lost and whose careers would be cut short.

Hands up if you’re quietly aghast to be South African but will make noise in support of the Springboks at the World Cup?

Shame on you.

Dad? Thanks.

First published by Times SELECT.

What’s the score on cricket? You might be surprised …

70% of fans are interested in Tests, but 75% of cricketers play T20 only.

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in Lisbon

A cricket fan walks into a bar where there are nine other people, all of them closely watching a match on the television.

How many of the 10 are women? Almost four.

How many are from the Indian subcontinent? A smidgen shy of nine.

How many are more focused on the game because it is a one-day international? If they are all South African, more than nine.   

What a release on Wednesday called the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) “first global market research project” has found that 39% of cricket supporters are female.

And that “South Africa lead the interest in ODI cricket” at 91% — perhaps because we are a nation obsessed with winning an as yet unwon World Cup.

But Test cricket aficionados need not be disheartened: the original and best format is of interest to 70% of the game’s followers.

Even so, their fears for the future will be fuelled by the facts that T20 is the most popular form with an interest rate of 92%, and that 75% of cricket’s 300-million players don’t play anything except T20s.

The study was conducted from November 2017 to January this year, and involved more than 19 000 interviews — 6 600 of them described as “in-depth” — with cricket fans aged from 16 to 69.

“The research was undertaken to enable the ICC and its members to understand the growth potential of cricket, to help shape the development of the growth focused global strategy for the game, drive decision-making and to provide a benchmark upon which to measure the outcomes of the strategy,” the release said.

The project was conducted in the ICC’s 12 full member countries as well as in the US and China, which offer significant opportunities to grow the game outside of its existing strongholds.

Cricket’s following in those 14 countries has been estimated at 952-million, almost 90% of whom are from Asia.

Will that percentage get bigger when the ICC get around to surveying fans younger than 16?

Count on it.

Leading Edge: Men are ruining a game played with integrity by women

Why can’t men play cricket without resorting to neanderthal conduct?

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

IF you didn’t know that men — as opposed to women, boys, girls or meerkats — are contesting the test series between South Africa and Australia, you should by now.

“It’s a lot of men playing out there and you’re allowed to celebrate sometimes,” Vernon Philander said during the St George’s Park test. “Sometimes there’s a fine line about celebrating too hard.

“It’s a bunch of men playing this game. It would be a totally different ballgame if it was a bunch of schoolboys. We tend to take things personally.”

Other players have also reached for the M-word in response to questions about the poor standards of player behaviour in the series.

Among them Faf du Plessis, who when asked what all this manliness was about joked, albeit not snidely: “We’re men and we play the game.”

Are these explanations for why men can’t seem to play a game of cricket without resorting to neanderthal conduct?

Or are they excuses — we’re men; we know not what we do?

What they should be is apologies, but they sound much more not sorry than sorry.

There’s a “boys will be boys” dismissiveness about how players from both sides have tried to rationalise the rampant and puerile swearing, shocking misogyny and, in one case, what would in a court of law be called assault the series has had to endure.

Men are not admitting their limitations when they resort to stating their gender in answer to concerns over the way they have, or haven’t, done something. Instead, they are proclaiming their superiority.

We’re men, dammit. That’s why.

There’s something like pride in the fact that, even in 2018 and despite everything that namby-pamby International Cricket Council tries to throw at them, men are still in touch with their primal selves enough to be able to summon their basest behaviour at the flick of an emotional switch.

And no switch is as easily flicked as the mere mention of a woman who is close to them, particularly by an adversary.

Take it from a man, “Your mother sleeps with your father,” would start an all-out brawl if it was uttered on the dressingroom stairs.

This poisonous perversion has permeated the boundary, beyond which lurk pathetic husks of humans wearing Sonny Bill Williams masks and thinking they’re funny.

None of this is, of course, limited to cricket. The world has been messed up by men for centuries, and they have tended to blame women for their failures or at least use them as justification for getting things badly wrong.

Hence, David Warner could not control his anger when his wife was apparently insulted by Quinton de Kock, who had himself been provoked by alleged comments about his wife and mother.

Of course, part of Warner’s defence for behaving as he did was that he was standing up for women.

Those damn women. Always causing problems in men’s lives. Once they were burned at the stake as witches. Now they are torched on social media.

It is not manly to stalk a cricket ground like some caveman sniffing the air for the scent of prey, and to react as if you have been attacked at a mention of what you decide is the wrong thing to say. It is, instead, evidence that evolution hasn’t made much progress.

It is also what does not happen when women play cricket. There is aggression aplenty in women’s cricket — watch Marizanne Kapp bowl and you will be in no doubt about that — and the sledging can be rougher than a goat’s knee. But there is also fine skill and wonderful competitiveness.

Women play cricket. Men don’t so much play cricket as try to punish it for being a game worth playing: how dare cricket think it can put an XI in front of us who think they are better than us?

Men are ruining a game that is played with more integrity by women. There are indeed a lot of men playing out there. Too many.