What does a cricketer look like? Think before you answer …

David Gower sees a “gulf between people who’ve been very lucky to be fit, able, talented and enjoy the game at the highest level” and “those who can play, those who think they can play, who definitely can’t play, those who have no ability but love watching”.

Jeremy Fredericks bowls, David Gower drives, and Mike Gatting looks on from midwicket. Photograph: Mark Sampson

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

MIKE Gatting stood at the top of his run last week and delivered what someone in the watching crowd called the ball of the century. They were careful not to mention Shane Warne, nor which century. Perhaps the eighth, when not a lot of cricket would have been played. Gatting’s effort had darted directly down the pitch and past a flailing bat … bowled him! Just like Warne did to Gatting at Old Trafford on June 4, 1993 with the most celebrated leg break in the annals of the game. Famously, it flew towards Gatting on the line of middle stump, hooked legside through the air to pitch in the rough 30 or so centimetres outside leg, spat leftward with wicked turn, and nailed the top of off stump. It looked more like the work of an ice-blooded assassin than what it was: Warne’s first delivery in an Ashes Test.

All that connected his ball of the century with Gatting’s infinitely more modest offering was that both involved a ball. Not if you ask ‘Gat’. “Missed a straight one, just like me,” he quipped about his victim’s fate, to chuckles all around.

Anything resembling a cricket ground was a long way down. We were in Cape Town at the top of Table Mountain, which is not nearly as flat as it looks in scenic views broadcast from Newlands. Good luck finding a space up there big and level enough to serve as an oval and that isn’t formed entirely of unforgiving sandstone and haphazardly sprouted with legally protected indigenous flora called fynbos.

But playing what most of us would recognise as cricket wasn’t the point of the exercise. Nobody can play cricket on Table Mountain but almost everybody can play table cricket almost anywhere, which was the point of the exercise. Developed and facilitated by the Lord’s Taverners, the cricket charity founded in 1950, table cricket offers the physically and mentally challenged the chance to imbibe some of the spirit of cricket as it is more often played. It’s enjoyed by 8,700 children in 500 schools in England, where the finals are at Lord’s, and has also been established in Ireland, India and South Africa.

A netless table tennis table fitted with a firm boundary on three sides serves as the ground. The bowler delivers by rolling the miniature ball — which is either weighted to veer sideward, like a lawn bowl, or unweighted — down a ramp toward a batter armed with a small bat. The boundary is marked with designated scoring zones and bristles with movable shields manipulated by the fielding team. Hit the ball to a part of the boundary marked “4” or “6” and you score four or six. But should one of the fielders — teams comprise six players — slide the middle of their shield in front of the ball to intercept it before it reaches the boundary, you’re out caught. Should your stroke hit a shield toward its sides, you’ve not added to your score. There are no stumps but, should you miss the ball, you’ve been bowled.

Gatting, a Lord’s Taverners trustee, was in Cape Town to raise awareness and funds for the organisation. Their programme featured two games of conventional cricket and their party included David Gower. It was in that cause that Gatting and Gower went up the mountain and faced each other across the table — though it was commentator Jeremy Fredericks who was done by demon bowler Gatting.

Gower played cricket, metaphorically, in a tuxedo with a butler stationed at short leg stoically bearing a tray of G&Ts. He was class, right down to his pink socks.

It’s easy to accept Gatting as thoroughly human, and not only because he was proved mortal by Warne. As a Test player he was the epitome of grit and gumption with not a lot of thought given to matters of style and elegance. Getting the job done was the thing. Less so how he looked getting the job done. That wasn’t the way Gower played cricket: metaphorically, in a tuxedo with a butler stationed at short leg stoically bearing a tray of G&Ts. He was class, right down to his pink socks. He had style. He had elegance. He didn’t always get the job done, but for many that hardly mattered. Putting Gatting in the same frame as people who know life’s larger struggles up close and personal isn’t difficult. But Gower, who glided through the game on imported air? Gower admitted to Cricbuzz that there was a “gulf between people who’ve been very lucky to be fit, able, talented and enjoy the game at the highest level” and “those who can play, those who think they can play, who definitely can’t play, those who have no ability but love watching”. Importantly, he had room on his list for “kids who are physically unable to do anything active, so you can rule out cricket, tennis; all those games”.

“But sit them round a table like this … when you see them playing, the competitive urges come through, the smiles, the emotions, the tears. It gives them a very realistic chance of understanding some of the emotion of it all — getting some of the benefit and just enjoying the competition. The finals is an enormous, noisy, clattering day of hundreds of kids playing, wanting to win but building all the other things that we love about the game — a sense of camaraderie and team spirit, playing together, backing each other up. It’s an extraordinary thing.”   

Cricket isn’t good at being inclusive, even for those considered able-bodied. The skills required are diabolically ill-suited to how human bodies and minds prefer to do things. Stand side-on to the approaching bowler, squint over your front shoulder, curb your instinct to swing laterally, and poke your inverted elbow upward when driving; land with your foot parallel to the bowling crease but deliver, with a stiff elbow, the ball 90 degrees perpendicular in another direction even as your body hurtles down the pitch; catch a small, hard leather missile using only your bare hands; don’t think your time wasted if neither team win; don’t dare do any of the above should rain start falling.

Most aficionados’ idea of a cricketer is someone male and athletic in the ordinary sense. The amount of time and effort the commentators and even the players devoted to exclaiming how amazed they were that 86,174 people turned out for the women’s T20 World Cup final at the MCG on Sunday was evidence enough of that. Nobody went on in that fashion when 93,013 arrived to watch the men’s 2015 World Cup final at the same ground. When men play, mass adulation is taken for granted; even expected. When women play, they should be grateful for any attention they get. That Mitchell Starc returned home early from South Africa to watch his spouse, Alyssa Healy, in action in the final was among the biggest pre-final headlines. 

If talented, skilled, able-bodied women have to fight for their share of a spotlight focused sharply on the über-male, what chance do the differently abled among us stand of being accepted as cricketers? The Lord’s Taverners are trying to change the answer to that question, even if they have to resort to some of those über-males to validate their efforts.

But it can only help if David Gower thinks you’re extraordinary.

First published by Cricbuzz.

Why the Ashes isn’t about cricket

A team loosely drawn from a country that used to be great and mistakingly believes it still is shares a field with a team from a country that proclaims its assumed exceptionalism in rude and reckless ways.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

THE Ashes is about many things. Cricket is among them only in the sense that Jackson Pollock’s pictures are about paint. What Pollock’s paintings are about can be difficult to nail down. Ditto the Ashes.

Whether Frank O’Hara, the poet, knew much about the Ashes isn’t known. But he knew Pollock: “There has never been enough said about Pollock’s draughtsmanship, that amazing ability to quicken a line by thinning it, to slow it by flooding, to elaborate that simplest of elements, the line — to change, to reinvigorate, to extend, to build up an embarrassment of riches in the mass of drawing alone.”

Substitute Pollock with Shane Warne, draughtsmanship with technique, and drawing with bowling, and tell me that doesn’t fit.    

You know a Pollock when you see one — a mad, mess of manic, magnificently male energy poured, dripped, puddled, swirled, flicked, smeared and, yes, sometimes even painted onto a canvas bigger than any wall in the average house. Not that the owner of the average house could afford anything as outrageously expensive as a Pollock.

The same doesn’t go for the Ashes. It looks, sounds and seems like any other game of first-class cricket. In a word, average.

We know it isn’t, just like we know the nonsense of the assertion that any eight-year-old armed with a leaky tin of paint and left alone for a few minutes could deliver something Pollock might have rendered as a masterpiece of modern art.

Stand in front of Pollock’s Number 8, for instance, for as long as it takes your breath to flood back from wherever it was taken by your first sight of this frozen fireworks display in oil, enamel and aluminium, and know that you are in the presence of greatness. It’s not about the paint.

Neither was it about cricket at Old Trafford on June 4, 1993, when Warne, looking like a podgy refugee from a surfers-only boyband sponsored by peroxide and sunblock manufacturers, delivered his first ball in an Ashes Test. Facing it was a gormless, girthfull greybeard of an uncle who thought he had seen it all.

Not that you could blame Mike Gatting for not having seen, particularly in that lean time for leg spin, too many deliveries that hooked wickedly away from their leg stump line through the air, pitched well outside leg, and came roaring back off the spitting, snarling seam to hit off-stump three-quarters of the way up.

When the clatter was complete, Gatting wore a look of blanched bewilderment not dissimilar to how he had countenanced, three years previously, the terrible but undeniable truth writ large on streets teeming with angry black South Africans mobilised by the presence of him and his rebels and their well-paid role in helping to normalise a distinctly abnormal society.

Arresting deliveries are, of course, bowled in matches that don’t involve England or Australia. And often when a game features England the margins framing the picture of the contest are coloured darkly by the knowledge that, were it not for slavery and colonialism, far fewer of us would call cricket our game.

The Ashes isn’t about that. Australians no longer try to prove that the colonised can beat the colonisers. They have done it so often it no longer exists as a point worth proving. The English no longer consider themselves colonisers, which is a copout considering the vast swathes of the world they stole in the name of monarch and money are still suffering the consequences.

Indeed, Australianess can be said to have colonised modern England to a significant degree — from the style of espresso and origin of much of the wine in the better cafés and restaurants to the hankering of English employers after Australian employees, to the easy, shorts-and-shirt Aussie casualness that pervades a society once constructed along rigidly buttoned-down lines of class and rules.

Elementally, the Ashes is about a team loosely drawn from a country that used to be great and mistakingly believes it still is, sharing a field with a team from a country that proclaims its assumed exceptionalism in rude and reckless ways.

Three of England’s squad for the first Test are from the colonies, another part of a community victimised daily by racism visited on them by those who consider themselves more English than thou.

Three of the Australians are freshly returned from bans earned in the cause of a still septic culture that puts winning above all else, including cheating and behaviour that would score a beating from a pub bouncer.

A fourth is from Klerksdorp. His surname, dear Aussies, is pronounced labooskaghknee — not labooshane — and you need to consult that bit of your throat that meets the back of your mouth to get out a properly guttural “kagh”.  

Five Ashes paintings will be made these next few weeks, each on a different canvas. They will be definitively similar and starkly different, and they will be slapped thick with history, hagiography, and heroes old and new.

Who, what, when, where, why and how we can’t yet say. But we can be sure that cricket will be only the paint in these pictures. Nothing less, and certainly nothing more.