10 Things #16

GH on an old trophy, an old stager, an old photograph and an old classic.

Artwork by Fisher Classics

1/ The Wisden trophy is on.  Except it’s now the Richards-Botham Trophy, isn’t it?  Remember when it was the Wisden Trophy? It happened that West Indies were touring England in 1963, the year of the almanack’s centenary, so the firm of John Wisden & Co endowed what was really only the third bilateral trophy after the ancient Ashes and the newly-minted Frank Worrell Trophy. It featured a relief of John Wisden, who’d never have dreamed of cricketers emanating from the Caribbean, and figurines of Jack Hobbs and Harold Larwood, neither of whom played against West Indies.

The Wisden Trophy

- which my friend Mike Atherton, inter alia, deplored in a well-argued column: ‘Surely we can do better.’ He mooted a trophy named for Baron Constantine, which was an excellent idea - there was a nice connection in that Constantine himself signed off on the Wisden Trophy and, with Wisden proprietor Ken Medlock, presented it to Frank Worrell at the end of the series. 

2/ Further coincidence: Medlock, a remarkable Merseyside entrepreneur, just predeceased the trophy he instigated.  But there was no Constantine Trophy - instead we got something in tune with the modern trend to hyphenation viz Warne-Muralitharan, Border-Gavaskar, Chappell-Hadlee, but which, to be honest, looks like it was designed for a christening rather than cricket.  What a wasted opportunity.  Also makes me think: if anachronism is a problem, is there not an argument for jettisoning the Ashes, seeing that the nomenclature has as much to do with the irascible Captain Hanham as mighty Doctor Grace?  Contemporary suggestions for a new and relevant Anglo-Australian cricket trophy are invited in the comments. The BazBowl?  The Kylie-Clive James Cup?  

3/ Speaking of anachronisms - SWIDT? - the toast is James Anderson, whose virtues I extolled last week, and who may be the last significant cricketer never to play franchise cricket.  As Anderson  said at the presentation: ‘Every time I've pulled on this shirt it's been about trying to win games for England….Winning series and winning Test matches has been the only thing that I've been interested in.’  

4/ But when Mike asked him to elaborate on Test cricket’s appeal, to pick out if he could one quality of the format he valued, it was in terms of endurance.  The physical kind: ‘It does hurt. I enjoy walking off after bowling 25 overs in a day and feeling sore, feet hurting, legs hurting. I probably won't miss not being able to get out of bed and sit on the toilet first thing in the moment.’  The mental kind: ‘The amount of emotions you go through in a game, the ups and downs that Test cricket brings. When the captain throws you the ball at 6pm, it shows a lot about your character and things you might not know you had, how deep you can dig. The situations you get in, actually managing people, working in partnerships. Things like that have helped me away from cricket as well.’  Was it the best format? ‘It's been a while since I played white-ball cricket but I feel like Test cricket is the perfect game. You go on a rollercoaster through the match... the satisfaction you get after a win whether it's three, four, five days, there's no better feeling than that. White-ball and T20 has been amazing for the game but sometimes you might get the rub of the green. There's no amounts of luck that will help you win a Test match.’  Perfect; just perfect; Sky would do well to capture it as a vignette, a spontaneous apologia for ‘the perfect game.’

5/ It reminded me of, among other things, a story Kevin Pietersen retailed at the World Cricket Connects of chatting to an unnamed T20 star ahead of an ODI recently.  ‘Fifty overs, man,’ said the player.  ‘It’s so long.’  I dare say the player will feel the same about T20 once he’s partaken of T10, so imagine what he would make of Anderson’s sentiments.

6/ I had a fun trip to the UK, thanks for asking, what with visits to National Archives and the British Library; I wandered lots of lovely country lanes too

The highlight, however, was probably the gorgeous Fragile Beauty exhibition at the V & A.

7/ There’s only one sports photograph, but it’s a ripper, from the oeuvre of the pioneering colour photographer Stephen Shore - the great Graig Nettles in a batting cage in Fort Lauderdale in 1978. 

Of course, I’m bewitched by Puff’s mirrored likeness to Beldam’s Trumper - the solitary figure, the upraised bat, the face in profile.  But I also love the triplicate nature of the cages and the two stray balls.  They, and the industrial bleakness of the backdrop, convey the sense that here is a man who, by dint of concerted repetition, is trying to become a sporting  machine - to so drill himself that the act of hitting becomes unconscious.  Nettles is famous for his line about the Steinbrenner regime: ‘[W]hen I was a little boy, I wanted to be a baseball player and join the circus. With the Yankees I have accomplished both.’ But this is no circus.  Because Shore’s signature was capturing the unmemorable, it somehow captures professional sport’s grinding, uncompromising, mechanical regimentation.

8/ As the new government takes shape, I am here reminded of Malcolm in Macbeth: ‘Nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving it’.

9/ As I boy, I loved Hornblower, The Gun and The Ship; and who can resist The African Queen?  But for whatever reason, I’d never sampled C. S. Forester’s noir until I picked up a new edition of Payment Deferred to read on the way back.  Good choice!  It’s suspenseful, darkly comic, socially subtle, and I’m guessing in its time pretty successful - the unlucky protagonist Alice Marble gave her name to Forester’s family motorboat.  Highly recommended.

10/ ‘The planet is too small and everybody wants to go to Venice,’ argued old mate Nassim Taleb last week . 

No they don't.  Also en route home, C and I were marooned for ten hours in Marco Polo Airport - 'Your Gateway to the Land of Venice'.  Piazza?  Basilica?  Meh.  Aerophile C led some intensive plane spotting - here she is mesmerising me with the Westeros-like saga of the Skyteam Airline Alliance . 

‘This is my reality TV,’ she said, and I have to say that the Air Bridge of Sighs knocked even MAFS into a cocked hat.