A REMINDER
Cricket in its true homes - cricket on the village green, cricket at school, cricket at college, cricket that we don't pay to see: no one seems to have any fault to find with that. But first class county cricket has a thousand vociferous censors or emendators, most of whom to me, seem to miss the point, for most of them want to make a new game, either by the wish that each match should be compressed heretically into brief time limits, or to the glorification of hitting to the exclusion of all other branches that are less popular but often of greater importance.
Should one be provoked to attempt a re-statement, I think it should rather run on the lines such as these; -
Cricket is not a series of spectacular events, a display of sparkle and it never can be. Cricket is a stealthy and protracted and often very dogged and unexciting form of warfare, subject to sudden hazards and changes, and differing from any other form of warfare in this element of surprise; For the unforeseen is continually happening. Hence the historic phrase about its glorious uncertainty.
Those who clamour for big hits and quick scoring, forget this phrase altogether or they would buy their seats at Lord's only with a guarantee that a certain number of sixes were offered to them. I have no doubt that this will come:
I have no doubt that a showman will, before long, rent a ground or a stadium and engage a team of sloggers to fill two hours, or even that he will arrange contests of tip and run. Let him. It will be good fun for the impatient; but it won't be cricket. It will be as like cricket as a music hall program is like a play by Shakespeare.
Big hitting has the same relation to cricket as wit to a parliamentary debate, or champagne to dinner. They are exhilerating when we find them, but just as legislation can go on without wit, and dinner can go on without champagne, so can the game of cricket go on without fireworks. The spectacle of a watchful and astute captain assisted by a bowler and nine fieldsmen trying to get a man out, should be as entertaining as one dashing hitter. It is the whole concerted attack and the determination of the resister that make cricket. Splendid, no doubt, when the resister finds the boundary again and again, but not less admirable, when doing his best, he merely succeeds in keeping his end up and either winning or preventing defeat.
Cricket is not big hitting or consistently bright batting, although big hitting and bright batting are part of cricket. Cricket is big hitting and bright batting
plus no hitting and anxious batting,
plus even dull batting,
plus bowling,
plus fielding,
plus strategy,
plus chance. That is the game: all those ingredients are essential.
Furthermore - and at the moment we are losing sight of this - a cricket match should be won or lost, so that in addition to those ingredients is the very important one of untiring, unrelenting, rivalry. This year, I regret to say, the points for first innings advantage, the insidious ideal of 1000 runs in May, have been allowed to blunt the edge of the fight, and there has not been, in the first class fixtures, the keen struggle that should never be absent from the game, and which gives it much of its fascination and its drama.
- E. V. Lucas writing in
The Cricketer