Food
"Cucumber sandwiches. . . distant tinkle of ice in lemonade jug . . . satisfying clunk of leather against willow." There are many summer sports with strong eating associations. Think of tennis and strawberries, or baseball and hotdogs. But one sport is uniquely gluttonous. Only cricket actually writes mealtimes into the rules. According to Law 16 of cricket, you can cancel tea, but lunch is sacrosanct.
This reverence for the rituals of feeding is part of what makes the game so relaxing (some would say boring). Nothing is so important that it should interfere with a man's alimentary refreshments. No part of the game is so dramatic that any of the players would forget that they feel a bit peckish around one-ish. And nor is the game so demanding that it can't be done on a full stomach, if pushed. You don't have to be the world's leanest athlete to knock a ball with a stick and then amble across a rather small square of grass a few times, though it makes the game more interesting if the fielders are sprightly enough to run a bit.
Some of the greatest cricketers have been prodigious eaters, and stout with it. The Victorian all-rounder Alfred Mynn was massively built, thanks to tremendous suppers of cold pork, yet was "exceedingly light in his movements", as a contemporary remembered. "Beef and beer are the things to play cricket on!" he declared. W G Grace was also huge, though he ate surprisingly little. Drink was a different matter. Every lunchtime he took a large whisky and soda with a dash of angostura bitters, and another after the end of play. When he wanted to slim, he drank cider, with predictable results.
English cricketing greed has traditionally had a narrow pavilion mentality, a suspicion of anything garlicky or flavoursome. Indeed, village cricket is still played on carvery lunches and teas of Victoria sponges and rock cakes, the immemorial picnic food of little Englanders. The archetypal England team would travel the world without ever tasting it - going to India or the West Indies without sampling a single dish of foreign muck. Mike Gatting was said to pack a jar of Branston pickle with him wherever he went, just in case. In the last century, the superbly padded umpire "Old Hickling", on tour to France, would lecture local waiters on their failure to provide grey joints of mutton for him. "Come over to England, confound you!" he expostulated, "and we'll show you how to live - and how to die, too." Bemused French cricketers, surveying his wobbling form as if he were a cow, called him "John de Bull" and took up other sports instead.
But the age of the John de Bulls is waning. Cricket has become a dietician's sport, like any other, fuelled by the same boring power drinks, bananas and slow-release carbohydrates. The current World Cup, with its crowd-pleasing shell suits and fit-looking players, is a world away from cucumber sandwiches. Lunch comes at the uncivilised hour of 2.30. The Billy Bunters have been banished from the field to the crowd, where they can still guzzle hampers of pork pies and Taunton cider.
Not all cricketers have succumbed to the rule of restraint. Pakistan's Inzamam-ul-Haq is strikingly well-upholstered, and not too keen on running between the wickets. David Shepherd, the umpire, is virtually spherical, with a John Bull complexion to match. Shane Warne is famously expandable, though he feeds his face with pizzas, not suet puddings. Yet these are heroic exceptions, as most World Cup players look honed enough to play a real sport.
A pity, because however unathletic the John de Bull lifestyle may have been, cricket is less itself with the passing of the fatties.
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