[Full text below]
The
spirit of cricket usually only gets dusted off when people behave badly or contentiously.
This happens roughly once a year, to conveniently remind us that a) there is a
spirit of cricket, and b) no one is entirely sure what it is.
This
year we’ve had the Butler-Mankad brouhaha. Last summer, there was the
startlingly hypocritical Broad-not-walking commotion. And the last time India
were over, we had the Bell run-out-and-reinstatement kerfuffle.
Since
2000 the spirit of cricket is enshrined in MCC’s Laws as a ‘preamble’. This in
itself is controversial, many believing that to attempt to pin it down is to
miss the point. I’ve just re-read it, and if the preamble is the best we can
do, I am inclined to agree.
Golf
has an unofficial code of conduct which is both memorable and followable: “Play
the course as you find it and the ball as it lies. If you can’t do either, do
what’s fair.” Isn’t that splendidly concise? There’s a lot of ground covered
there.
Maybe
cricket would benefit from something similarly pithy. But cricket generally
prefers to be ambiguous and waffley, which ultimately perhaps is part of its
charm.
Usually
the spirit of cricket is only brought up when called into question. Rarely is
it arbitrarily celebrated. Well, I seem to have inadvertently spent the weekend
doing just that.
In
our Saturday league game I had a hugely enjoyable duel with a left arm over
quick bowling with a 7-2 offside field and a packed slip cordon. Very
infrequently he over-pitched and I drove him straight, but mostly he had the
better of the exchange.
Eventually
I drove at one that wasn’t quite there and snicked a textbook edge to second
slip. The bowler ran up as I trudged off, grinning from ear to ear, put an arm
round my shoulders and said “Batted mate! You and I could have done that all
day, eh? That was great fun!” Grinning back despite myself, I had to agree.
And
there, I thought, is the spirit of cricket.
What
an excellent attitude. That’s what we’re doing here. When the ball is live, we
are enemies. When the ball is dead, we are comrades, united by a shared obsession.
This
was my one weekend a year when I was given special spousal dispensation to play
both days. Sunday, a friend’s schoolmates, Old Purleians CC, came down the M3.
One of cricket’s great strengths is that it is just as pleasurable as a process
as it is as a contest. In friendly matches, winning comes a distant second to a
good close game. Brilliantly, the game was tied, after which we sat in the pub
garden, drank beer and swapped cricket stories until the sun went down.
In
conclusion I am happy to report that, contrary to reports of its demise, the
spirit of cricket is alive and well and living in the country.
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ends 485 words -
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