The Outer Sanctum

GH on the new dressing room

As inspirational speeches go, Ben Stokes’s foreshadowing his last days of international cricket to his players is pretty underwhelming: rambling, repetitive, inarticulate, containing not a single resonant phrase or memorable sentiment. The most remarkable aspect is that we know this, because it was captured on film by an England Cricket Board cameraman, then screened on Sky Sports. We’re getting used to this, of course: players’ social media is increasingly about offering a kind of backstage pass. But this development is extremely recent. Traditionally around dressing rooms, a cordon sanitaire has been not just enforced but generally respected.

We know that dressing rooms have born witness from time to time to memorable utterances. The climax of the Test that inaugurated the Ashes tradition was famously preceded by Fred Spofforth’s declaration: ‘This thing can be done.’ Or at least, so the story runs. Had it been filmed by the Cricket Australian media team, we’d probably have discovered it was more like: ‘Guys, I reckon youse are gonna do something, y’know, pretty good, yeah, am I right?’ So perhaps it’s for the best we have not known. The dressing room is more mystical for the protection of its quotidian banality. It’s interesting to reflect, in fact, on cricket photography’s paucity of interior images, the earliest I can think of being this intimate study from the scrapbook kept by George Hirst on Marylebone’s 1903-4 tour of Australia - a charming mix of informality and modesty.

There are, for example, many photographs of Bradman, but none I know of in a dressing room. All of which lends an extra tang to that delicious passage by Jack Fingleton of watching Bradman in repose: ‘He was a study when not out during lunch of a big innings. He had, in Sydney, the inevitable light batting lunch in the dressing-room of rice custard, stewed fruit and milk. Each slow mouthful was an essay in method, in digestion, in cold planning and contemplation of the feast soon to follow in the middle.’ It was almost certainly Bradman who at Adelaide Oval in 1933 leaked Bill Woodfull’s bitter aside to Marylebone’s visiting manager Plum Warner (‘There are two teams out there. One of them is playing cricket’). But the very fact we do not know for sure testifies to the proposition that it is a private space, shielded from prying eyes and ears by general agreement. Where existent at all, historic dressing room images tend to involve visitors bringing photographers in their train, such as Sir Robert Menzies congratulating Neil Harvey on his undefeated innings in 1954’s Sydney Test. I do love the contrast here between the cricketer’s hastily-improvised towel and the leader’s proconsular bulk - also Menzies’s upraised knee and cigar. There’s an eagerness about Australia’s longest-serving prime minister here that’s almost boyish.