The Art of Cricket

GH on a new exhibition

Sir Robert Menzies’s office was hung with two paradigmatic Australian images - one a Tom Roberts landscape, the other a Keith Miller action shot. Thirty years ago I chose the latter, taken by Fairfax’s Ross Freeman during New South Wales’s game against Marylebone in 1950, to adorn The Summer Game.

So I’m delighted to have seen the image revived in a new exhibition at Fox Galleries by Victor Rubin. Rubin, born in that Ashes year of 1950, is celebrating his three-quarter century with a pageant of paintings, A Field of Play, celebrating a lifetime’s devotion to cricket. KRM, now entwined with his friend Denis Compton in the series award for the Ashes, looks a treat as always. The shade of the outfield, in fact, reminds me of Kenneth Gregory’s line: ‘The sun was not afraid to shine when Miller or Compton was on the field.’ His mien also has a touch of Boris Karloff, so that his levitation has an almost supernatural quality.

Speaking of levitation, another favourite of mine, Jack Iverson, springs to life in Rubin’s rendering of his bowling to Roy Tattersall in Adelaide that same summer.

And speaking of spinners who represented both Brighton and Australia, welcome SKW!

Look at that back leg drive, the open mouth, the overpowering gaze - eyes on the target, always on the target. Well, usually anyway, because Warnie also features in this ensemble of Ricky Ponting backhanding opportunistically towards Geraint Jones’s stumps in Perth in 2006. Not out lbw; out run out!

Who wrote better about this dismissal than old mate? Jeez, all my worlds are colliding today…..

This, however, may be my favourite - Andrew Flintoff in the same summer departing a misty MCG, somehow capturing the bleakness of that Test, and also generally the desolation of dismissal.

In this counterpoint to Miller’s seigneurial splendor and verdant backdrop, you might be looking through a window of tears. The great ground could be about to swallow England’s captain whole. There is, then, all of cricket in A Field of Play. For more information, go here.