The Shorter Wisden 2013 (29 page)

The thing is, I don’t believe a word of it. This new cor-blimey geezer feels like a total reinvention. He was born Philip Clive Roderick Tufnell, and went to an independent school. Was his
laddish persona a self-cultivation? If so, his performances as a pundit on
Test Match Special
take on a darker meaning. Tuffers’s role on
TMS
is to be the informed bloke
calling out from a sea of posh establishment voices, the man of the people who may frequently get his words and thoughts confused, but has a heart of gold and speaks the truth to Joe Public. If
Tuffers isn’t really like that at all, then his shtick is insincere and patronising. I know I’m being harsh, but I feel disappointed. I loved watching Tufnell bowl, and I can’t
bear the fact that, if he carries on putting his name to books like this, he’ll principally be remembered as having sold out.

Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to make cricket funny. It’s the trying too hard that’s the problem. The game itself is so shot through with hubris that only those
running it seem not to notice. Left to its own devices, humour will almost always find a way to land a laugh.

A few years ago, the actor and stand-up comic Miles Jupp performed a one-man show about his efforts to become a cricket journalist covering an England Test tour; he has now extended that riff
into
Fibber in the Heat
, a gentle – and genteel – unrequited love affair.

Like many of us who are blessed with next to no natural ability for cricket, but have a borderline-obsessive desire to follow it, Jupp wondered – during a career break from playing Archie
the Inventor in the touring production of the children’s show
Balamory: Live!
– whether he might be able to combine his passion for cricket with something that could loosely be
called a job. And so, having maxed out his almost non-existent contacts book, he eventually found himself with two letters inviting him to contribute the occasional freelance report for the
Western Mail
and BBC Radio Scotland during England’s 2005-06 trip to India.

As it happens, I found myself doing something rather similar in 1992, when I managed to persuade the Pakistan cricket team to let me hang around with them during the 1992 World Cup in Australia
and New Zealand so I could write a book about Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis. I can therefore testify that every word Jupp writes resonates with eternal truth, failure and laughter – though in
my case it took several years to appreciate just how much funnier everyone else found the experience than I did.

Jupp lives constantly on the verge of being found out. He’d like to write several probing features for the Cardiff-based
Western Mail
about how Welsh-born Simon Jones’s
injury has unbalanced the squad, but his day-to-day preoccupations are far more mundane: worrying if he has the right accreditation, worrying that the other hacks have made separate travel
arrangements, worrying whether he’s going to get into the press box and find there’s nowhere for him to sit, worrying that no one is going to invite him out in the evenings and that he
will be spending night after night feeling homesick in the not-very-nice hotel he can barely afford. Worrying, always worrying.

It has to be said that Jupp came rather closer to making it as a proper member of the British cricket media corps than I ever did, but he fails for much the same reason. At heart, he is just too
much of a fan to be a reporter. I never could get used to the po-faced silence of the press box, where cheering a century was the last word in poor form. I knew the game was up when I found myself
celebrating with Wasim inside the Pakistan dressing-room at the MCG after he had just bowled his country to victory in the final, rather than trying to get a few quotes I could sell. I just
couldn’t imagine ever wanting to go back into the press box. And yes, that night I too failed the Tebbit Test.

Marcus Berkmann set the benchmark for heroic tales of failure in amateur cricket with his 1995 book
Rain Men
. It chronicled the weekly incompetence and petty rivalries of his nomadic
team, the Captain Scott XI, and established a new – and welcome – sub-genre of cricket writing in which the terminally useless and unfit, who make up 90% of the world’s players,
get their day in print. Sustaining interest and comedy in people known to nobody but the author and a few close friends is a hard act to pull off. Since Berkmann, many writers have met with varying
levels of success.

One of the typical problems with this sort of book is being able to believe that the team are quite as bad as portrayed. Amateur cricketers are prone to self-deprecation, and I’ve lost
count of the number of times over the 30 years I’ve been playing for the particularly useless Hemingford Hermits that opposing captains have said before the start, “Oh we’re
really not very good at all – seven of our best players are on holiday,” only to find we are 13 for five after six overs. So I’ve become deeply suspicious of cricket writers
bearing gifts of false modesty. I will, though, make an exception for
Not Out First Ball
, by Roger Morgan-Grenville and Richard Perkins, a book that oozes charm and humour from the
very first page and, most importantly, describes failures of the terminally delusional so accurately that I could almost believe one of the more disloyal members of the Hermits – and
disloyalty is written into the team’s DNA – had written a
roman à clef
.

Every familiar character is writ large. The captain who has never quite been able to come to terms with the fact he is no longer head boy of his minor public school; the fast bowler whose
shoulders went 20 years ago, and can now only pitch one ball in six; the opening batsman who can’t get the ball off the square, and is invariably one not out after ten overs; the wicketkeeper
who can no longer bend his knees. Then there’s the sledging. Why would anyone want to undermine the opposition when there’s so much more fun to be had from rubbishing your own mates? If
the White Hunter Cricket Club doesn’t exist, it ought to. And if it does, the Hemingford Hermits will give you a game.

I shouldn’t end, though, without a brief salute to the pamphlets that cricket enthusiasts continue to self-publish. A special mention should be made of
Triumph at Wattle Flat: When
Castlemaine Beat the Poms
, by Richard Mack. I’ve no idea what spurs a man on to research a minor game between the first English side to tour Australia in 1861 and a Castlemaine XXII,
and then write it up in such depth. But I’m glad that men like Richard Mack exist. Cricket – and cricket writing – wouldn’t be the same without them.

John Crace is the author of ten books on subjects from cricket and football to fatherhood and literature. He is also a TV reviewer and columnist for
The Guardian.

WISDEN BOOK OF THE YEAR

Since 2003,
Wisden’s
reviewer has selected a Book of the Year. The winners have been:

CRICKET IN THE MEDIA, 2012

J
ONATHAN
L
IEW

The world of cricket media is a smaller one than many of the men and women who inhabit it – men, mostly – would like to admit. Peer inside the press box at a Test
match, and you will find friends and enemies sitting side by side, former team-mates and foes brushing against one another as they queue for the sweet trolley. The analogy of the goldfish bowl is
apposite – not least because cricket journalists continue to eat for as long as you keep feeding them.

In such an environment, where information and disinformation spread like contagion, where a rumour can be halfway across the ground before the truth has got its pads on, it is unsurprising that
beefs develop. In that respect, 2012 was a more rancorous year than most. Nourished by the onrush of social networks, the cyclic plod of quotes-driven journalism, and the unshakeable fondness of
the press for writing about themselves – guilty as charged, by the way – the media, more often than is customary, became the story.

In April, as Andrew Strauss struggled for form in Sri Lanka, Graeme Swann turned his irritation on the assembled press corps. “It’s obvious there’s been a little bit of a
witch-hunt towards him that I think is unjustified,” he said. “He hasn’t shown any signs of being under any pressure. We only realised he was under scrutiny because some of us can
read.”

For while the world of cricket media remains small, its reach and penetration are now unprecedented. Online newspaper articles can be shared over oceans and across national borders. Tweets and
television broadcasts ping across the globe at all hours of day and night. Throw enough opinions at the dressing-room and, eventually, some will slip under the door.

Ex-players, especially recent ex-players, can sometimes provide the most injurious criticism, and perhaps Michael Vaughan’s verdict on Strauss’s captaincy struck a nerve in the
England camp. “If he clings on to the job and doesn’t score runs, then he runs the risk of it turning nasty,” he wrote in the
Daily Telegraph
. “My fear is that if
he carries on and has a poor start against West Indies, then the selectors might have to remove him from the team.”

In truth, the tone of Strauss’s inquisitors was never quite as shrill as his supporters claimed. “There is nothing fundamentally so wrong with Strauss’s technique that a little
serious time and reflection in the nets is not likely to solve,” wrote James Lawton in
The Independent
. “Removing him from the captaincy, or pushing him towards resignation,
would surely stand out as remarkable folly even by the old standards of English cricket.”

Of course, we all know how Strauss’s story ended. Indeed, at his final press conference he revealed he had been considering retirement for six to 12 months. Perhaps, in hindsight, there
were cracks beginning to appear in his immaculate edifice. Back in Sri Lanka, he responded with uncharacteristic exasperation to the assertion by Bob Willis on Sky Sports that he had given up the
England one-day captaincy at the behest of his wife. A surer-footed Strauss would have thrown Willis’s comments out with the rubbish. Instead, he bit. “That was pretty
disappointing,” he said, “considering the person in question knows neither me nor my other half.” Whether he was referring to his wife or Andy Flower, of course, is a matter of
tangential discussion.

May brought more shenanigans, as Kevin Pietersen was censured for tweeting criticism of Sky’s Nick Knight. It was a classic non-story, utterly extraneous to the game itself. But with Fleet
Street struggling to drum up much interest in a one-sided series against West Indies, it could scarcely have been more perfectly timed. A delighted
Daily Mail
emblazoned
“SKYGATE” on its back page, following up the next day with a “SKYGATE EXCLUSIVE”, in which Paul Newman revealed Pietersen had “held clear-the-air talks with Nick
Knight to thrash out their differences” and “explained his feelings face-to-face”.

Surprisingly, given all the air-clearing, difference-thrashing and feeling-explaining, this particular storm blew over quickly enough. More of Pietersen later – you can be assured of that
– but the Knight rumpus turned out to be a neat portent of the summer to follow, when cricket had to shout like never before in order to be heard.

In the larger sporting patchwork of 2012, after all, cricket was the merest stitch, the Basil D’Oliveira Trophy proving no match for Team GB’s deluge of gold, silver and bronze.
While Britain held the biggest sporting party in its history, cricket bumbled along at the peripheries, maintaining a dignified detachment from London’s orgy of precious metal. In truth, it
was not until England’s win in India at the fag end of the year that cricket enjoyed anything like a firm grip on the nation’s consciousness.

To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and there was a snide subtext to the giddy euphoria that greeted the Olympics. Football suffered most harshly, but cricket received its
sideways glances too. “Cricket and rugby, with their positive celebration of alcoholic excess, should be taking a hard look at how they regard their paying customers,” wrote Richard
Whitehead in
The Times
. “London 2012 has reminded us of one long-forgotten thing: that watching sport can be, above all, about pure, innocent fun.”

Beyond the soul-searching, our national summer sport was faced with the dilemma of whether to ingratiate itself with the ecstatic throngs, or tough it out until the Olympic tsunami subsided.
Some cross-breeding did occur: Jonathan Agnew chuckled his way through the archery at Lord’s, while Mike Atherton, cricket correspondent of
The Times
, wrote a number of fine
Olympic-themed essays.