Society
There is no political situation that cannot be made worse by an international sporting event
Published 24 May 1999
I went to see England against Sri Lanka, the first match in the cricket World Cup. This isn't going to be an authoritative account of the match because I make a strict rule of not going to a cricket match more than once in a decade.
In the fifties I didn't get to a match at all because I was only six months old when the decade finished. In the sixties I didn't go because I was only interested in football. In the seventies I went once to see a day of an England Test match against Pakistan. That had seemed exciting in prospect because their young batsman, Zaheer Abbas, had scored a double century in the previous match, but the day was completely rained off. However, wandering around the ground to alleviate the boredom, I did get the autograph of two people who are now dead: Brian Johnston and Denis Compton.
There is a special circle reserved in hell for grave-robbers, confidence tricksters preying on defenceless old women and people like me who experience a very slight sensation of pleasure when somebody dies whose autograph we possess. When Samuel Beckett died I felt very sad, but comforted myself with thoughts of my now more valuable signed first edition. As it happens, even Samuel Beckett's handwriting looks alienated, or maybe it was just reluctant.
In the eighties a friend invited me along to a match at the Oval, but I can't even remember who was playing so I'm a little short of anecdotes about the match. (I can see my chances of being offered one of those "celebrity" columns in the sports supplement of a national newspaper receding with every sentence I write.) And then there was the England-Sri Lanka match.
I don't want to sound like an old fogey. (How many folk-singers does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to change it and two to sing about how good the old one was.) I am not going to join the late Kingsley Amis's campaign to keep on calling the country Ceylon. Still, though I'm not particularly sensitive to colour combinations, there was something aesthetically pleasing about the combination of the green grass, the white flannels and the red ball.
I'm not quite sure why the international players now dress in what look like nylon shellsuits. Maybe it makes them feel more like athletes, in the way that the people who clear up the vomit on the 40-minute hovercraft journey between Dover and Calais dress like stewardesses as if to convince you that this emetic lurching journey six inches above the waves is a flight.
Apparently the English and Sri Lankans hate each other. This has nothing to do with Sri Lanka's brutal civil war. There is no political situation that cannot be made a bit worse by an international sporting event. There is still bitterness about whether one of the Sri Lankan bowlers committed the unpardonable sin of "throwing" the ball (ie not bowling it with a straight arm). We British also apparently hate Pakistan, not because of their involvement in a destabilising arms race, but because they have illegally tampered with the ball.
But cheating is just one word for what goes on in that grey area in all sports where the rules don't apply exactly. For example, in the current World Cup, the South Africans wanted their players on the field to wear radio earpieces because they are not specifically banned by the rules, whereas the authorities have banned them because they are not specifically allowed.
In a tennis match, when the ball bounces on the edge of the line nobody can really tell whether the ball is in or out. It's just a question of whether you give the benefit of the doubt to yourself or to your opponent, or perhaps give your opponent the benefit of the doubt most of the time except for those key points on which matches turn.
Once, in a school "house" match, I had to bowl the final ball when our opponents needed a boundary to win. Naturally I rolled the ball along the ground. (The Australian captain, Greg Chappell, once caused a scandal by permitting a bowler to do the same against New Zealand.) The receiving batsman told me afterwards that he would rather lose a match than do something like that.
"Well, you did lose, so what are you complaining about?" That is what I should have said, except that I only thought of it while I was writing this piece, 25 years too late. Maybe I could get an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for the world's slowest bit of repartee.
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