The art of cricket

“Cricket is an art. Like all arts it has a technique, but its finest moments come when the artist forgets about technique and is absorbed in the game.”

CLR James

Well, that was quite the fairytale finish. Last Monday, in his final match in any form of professional cricket, Stuart Broad secured the win with the last ball he will ever bowl in a Test. The previous morning, he’d smashed a six with the final ball he will ever face in a Test.

We will miss the exuberance and optimism of Broad’s appeals, whether those appeals were justified or (more usually) not.

And what’s with that “bazball” stuff (a term hated by the England team apparently) — the incorporation into the longer game of the supposedly reckless techniques familiar from the shorter form? There were times during the series when the Australian fielders looked as baffled as a victim of David Blaine’s “street magic”. Some of the most entertaining moments of the series were generated by the hapless attempts of the Australian batsmen to emulate the bazball panache. To extend the Blaine analogy: they tended to drop the pack of cards. (That wasn’t all they dropped, come to think of it; but to be fair, so did England.)

This may or may not have been one of the best Test series of all time: a plausible assessment will require some distance of time. But it was certainly one of the most absorbing — and in many ways, also perplexing). Not only was the series drawn (and therefore close). And not only was every match close. And not only was every session close. At times it felt like every half session was close and could potentially turn on a sixpence.

I was introduced to the magic of cricket by my grandfather, who at the time was dying of the emphysema gifted to him by the Lancashire mines. This was in the 1970s, the days of Roberts and Holding; Lilley and Thompson. It was Grandad who introduced me to the peculiar internal language of the game (just think of the field place names!) and supplied the necessary translations. I was lucky: as with learning a foreign language, the acquisition of the grammar of cricket is best done in childhood; it can be baffling to the adult mind.

Here’s an observation regarding that point. Children are proficient when it comes to the internalisation of rules. And cricket, like all games, is a rigidly rule-governed activity. In the specific case of cricket, the governing rules are venerated to such a degree that they are referred to as laws.  (For those without a life, you can find them in codified form in The Laws of Cricket, where they are set out as a system of numbered instructions. A bit like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, but somewhat harder to understand).

There seems to be a paradox here. How can it be that an activity so rule-constrained facilitates such different styles of play? How can there be room in cricket for both “bazball” and its Australian opposite?

The answer, of course, is that this is the wrong way to look at it. Laws, rules, constraints are necessary conditions of the creative impulse. There is a natural contrariness to the human psychology, a habit of subversion, which turns those rules to its advantage. It is, if you like, difficult to do anything freely in the complete absence of constraint.

And there is a conservative element to this as well. For the Burkean conservative, tradition is not the same as stasis. Tradition allows for constrained renewal – on condition that the renewal in question pays due deference to the system of rules which makes it possible. There are few games more “traditional” than cricket and it is this quality which has permitted its evolution, from the days of WG Grace to the modern bazball era.

The Trinidadian cricket writer, CLR James, who furnishes the quotation with which we began, was correct. Cricket is indeed an art, but one with an aesthetic which shifts subtly over time. Some of the greatest players even from just 30 years ago would be perplexed by the way England played this series. The Old Man himself, WG Grace, would not believe he was looking at the same game.

I’m going to conclude with a rebuttal. Earlier this Summer, something called The Independent Commission for Equity Report issued a report in which cricket is criticised for its lack of “inclusion” in the game. It deploys the predictable flipchart quota approach to James’ work of art.

One can only hope that the panjandrums of this committee absorb the excitement and brilliance of this summer and conclude that cricket is surviving just fine in the absence of their woke recommendations.

This 2023 Ashes series has reaffirmed that there is only one “beautiful game”. And it isn’t football.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.