Concert hall cricket

I went to a Halle Orchestra concert last week. The opening piece was Brahms’ Nanie. The Halle Choir sung with such power they briefly made the string section sound puny. After the interval, the orchestra played all four movements of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. The first three movements were jarring and often discordant. The contrast created by the last section was extreme: smooth, languid strings, bringing the evening to a beautiful conclusion.

My musical knowledge is slight. As a performer, my pinnacle was reached 15 years ago at the end of term concert for the Singing for the Tone Deaf class that I attended in London. As an audience-member at a classical concert, I lack the background knowledge and familiarity with the performers and even to some extent with the action that I can draw upon when spectating at a cricket match.

I enjoyed the Brahms piece. It was entertaining and an arresting spectacle with choir and orchestra in combination, but almost competing. It was classical music’s equivalent of a rousing late order rally. The bat thrown, boundaries hit, chances taken and missed. The scoreboard ticked over before the innings perished, with the inevitability of death in Brahms’ funeral song.

The fourth movement of Mahler’s symphony was also very pleasurable. It finds its equivalent in a calmly constructed partnership between two batsmen stroking boundaries with ease, but not aggression. Cover drives and leg glances amid correct defensive play.

But the early sections of that symphony were a drag. The music was dissonant, the changes of tempo confusing and I couldn’t comprehend the pattern or direction of the piece. Here were batsmen grafting against bowlers operating in favourable conditions and their own lack of form: playing and missing, grinding out a few runs with nudges and deflections, but nothing that imprinted on the memory. A few chances went begging but the bowling, without being particularly penetrating, remained on top.

A more informed concert-goer may have appreciated the technical competence of the musicians, or detected themes that gave a deep structure to the movements that to me had sounded bitty and lacking in cohesion.

Recently, I read the reminiscence of a cricket fan’s first day of live cricket. This fan missed every wicket that fell that day, mostly through following where the batsman was aiming the shot, not the actual trajectory of the ball which was into stumps or the slip cordon. Similarly, last week I found myself scanning the orchestra from my viewpoint in the side-circle, trying often unsuccessfully to locate the source of a particular note or chord that caught my ear.

On international match days in England, grounds are fairly heavily peopled by spectators whose knowledge of the game is at a level similar to my appreciation of classical music. It’s only the concert hall’s custom of complete silence during a performance that stops me betraying to the people around me my limited understanding of the music. There’s no convention at cricket of silence during play and so the occasional visitors are probably more conspicuous.

If you look at who follows cricket at one step removed from the in person experience – that is, through live TV or radio – the mix of informed and occasional followers is diluted again. Harsha Bhogle, in his most recent ride on The Cricket Couch, made this explicit when justifying the type of commentary offered on major matches

We represent a relatively small segment of the total watchers. I know you and a lot of your friends who are on the net together and who have very strong and very acerbic comments about the way things are done. I think that is a small subset. It is not even a significant subset. It is a small subset that I discovered during the IPL. When I am at the IPL, I discovered that this very involved number driven, nuance driven, strategy driven, good old Chennai Tambrahm cricket viewer – to be profiled in a sentence. He is a very small minority. Television audiences cannot cater to that minority.

…

The research also shows that when you say “if the long leg moved just a little finer”, they said they don’t know what that means. A very large percentage of people watching the match on TV have not been to a cricket ground. For them, cricket is what they see on the television. If you say “it is just moving mid-wicket squarer”, they say “What does that mean?”. That is the overwhelmingly large segment that the television has to cater.

Those of us, in Bhogle’s words, ‘on the net together’ – cricket bloggers, forum lurkers and tweeters – are very proprietary towards the sport. It forms a large part of our identity and so we have strong views about how it is covered in the broadcast media. Crudely, Richie Benaud and Mike Atherton – GOOD; Nick Knight and Danny Morrison – BAD. The commentators we would place in that first camp are outnumbered by those condemned to the second.

Bhogle’s words and my own naive enjoyment of classical music have encouraged me to rethink my position. Cricket, while not commanding anything like the reach of football, is a sport with mainstream appeal. That mass appeal fills grounds in England for around 30 days of international cricket each year. It draws thousands to one day and T20 cricket in Asia and Australia. In South Africa, a cricket nation whose economy doesn’t match its playing prowess, the appeal saw almost 4 million viewers tune in to TV coverage of each Test match this year. In the battle for talent with other sports, its appeal must play some part in AB de Villiers, Dave Warner, Corey Anderson and other headline acts opting for cricket.

Mass appeal means money, which provides facilities, vibrancy, international competitions and trade in players, media coverage and innovation – as well as corruption, short-term decisions trumping long term sustainability. Mass appeal has funded the sport we cherish. Nick Knight’s strongly emphasised platitudes are a small price to pay for those of us who identify so strongly with, and tend to be precious about, the game.

I have found another reason to be less critical of cricket’s mass audience seeking broadcasters. Again, it’s classical music. My father-in-law is a talented pianist, amateur music director, aficionado and stickler with prominent shades of pedantry. He listens to Classic FM all day, just as I would listen to Test Match Special and with the same intolerance of uninformed broadcasters. His current complaint is that the hosts announce, with Nick Knight-like solemnity, that a piece was written by Johannes Brahms or Gustav Mahler. Who, my father-in-law demands, do we think wrote it: Ronald Brahms? Basil Mahler? His complaint is that the use of the forename is unnecessary and shows the host’s ignorance.

How petty! How like the criticisms of cricket commentators. How I don’t want to be perceived like that.

Alastair Cook, England captain, obviously

I have heard it said that the turning point for George Bush (the father) as US President was marked by the New York Times publishing his quotations verbatim: every stumble, stutter and malapropism [1].

George Bush Senior is the United States’ most recent single term president. A politician who failed to capitalise on the advantage of incumbency. Nine of the other 44 US Presidents served a term (or less in Gerald Ford’s case) but were defeated when running to retain office.

The significance of the New York Times’ treatment of Bush lies in its unusual failure to extend to Bush the exaggerated respect mainstream American media affords to its heads of state – past and present. The leader’s flawed diction, his struggles to articulate his position on matters of state were laid bare. Nobody speaks in the pristine sentences of newspaper reports, but journalists polish up what they hear: removing redundancies and false starts, adding punctuation and ignoring fillers and non-lexical vocables (uhhh, um, etc).

Alastair Cook is another leader who, in public, is not a fluent speaker. He doesn’t trip over his words in the manner of Bush. Cook’s shortcomings as interviewee are mundanity, cliche and evasion. ‘Obviously’ is the verbal equivalent of his clip off his pads, sprinkled through his pronouncements in the way that legside stroke is found with high frequency in his innings. Cook doesn’t think what he is saying is self-evident; uttering ‘obviously’ just gives him a moment to think, a ‘noisy pause’ and a way of acknowledging the sense of the question he answers.

Just how much polishing do the media give the England captain when reporting on his interviews? On 1 May, Cook was interviewed on Sky Sports News about the decision to remove his mentor, Graham Gooch, from the post of England batting coach. Cook says:

Y’know, it’s obviously been a very tough decision for eh me, personally ehh when you’re discussing such a great man, and a guy who’s given obviously me so much in terms of my career. We started working together at at 17, ehhm all the way through Essex and obviously in the last 4 or 5, 4 and a half years is it for England. So it’s been an incredibly tough decision to be ehh to be to ehh make, to be part of that decision process ehmm but we just felt it was time that we just needed a bit of freshening up ehm yes it’s certainly it’s happened on the playing staff playing side of it and obviously the coaches as well. Y’know I think we’ve got to remember the good stuff with Goochy and thank him for all his hard work. I’ve never been, I’ve never been part of ehh anyone, sorry any coach who’s worked as hard as him, y’know, not only with the England players but also when he went back to Essex as well.

The Sky Sports News website carried a piece that reported Cook saying to their reporter the following:

Firstly, we need to thank Goochie. Obviously he’s been an absolute legend, not only for my game but for all of our games over the last five years.

“We all hold him in such high regard, have a huge amount of respect for him and what he’s done for English cricket over a huge amount of time not only as a player but as a coach. We just felt it’s time to freshen things up and move on.

It reads like an extract of an interview, but it’s quite different to the words Cook used in the Sky video. That’s probably because Cook read or issued a press release separate to the interview. Just possibly, it’s journalistic license, condensing and smoothing out Cook’s comments.

An England cricket captain is unlike a US President on so many counts. He doesn’t get the exaggerated respect of his domestic media, for a start. Nor is there the expectation of longevity or advantage of incumbency, particularly when judged by England cricket’s highest honour: being selected as the Ashes tour captain. A cricketer is appointed to that role once every four years (with some exceptions) – the same frequency as US presidential elections. 43 full tours of Australia have been undertaken by England. Only four captains have served a second term: Arthur Shrewsbury (1884/85 and 1886/87), AE Stoddart (1894/95 and 1897/98), JWHT Douglas (1911/12 and 1920/21) and Mike Brearley (1978/79 and 1979/80); Douglas being the only captain to do so with four or more years separating his assignments – nine years in his case! So Cook leading a second Ashes touring team in 2017/18 would be a rare achievement.

At the moment, it appears that Cook, despite the heavy defeat in Australia, the post-tour shedding of coaches and star players, and his own rigid approach to captaincy, is accepted as skipper by the England cricket media. Should England struggle to defeat Sri Lanka and India this summer and Cook not score heavily, it might be worth checking how literally the press is covering his quotes as an early indicator that faith in his leadership is ebbing away.

Bush lost the 1992 election to the silver tongued Bill Clinton. It wasn’t, however, the President’s opponent’s greater facility for public speaking that won him the election. Clinton’s winning strategy was summed up in the phrase, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ He based his campaign on telling people relentlessly what his research told him was important to them. Here, perhaps there is a lesson for Cook. Team ethics and new eras mean little unless the team’s ‘economy’ is functioning – taking wickets and scoring runs. The leader who focuses on the changing room ambiance, and appears to be making decisions that compromise the performance on the field, has the hallmark of a single-term President.

 

Footnote 1: I cannot evidence the New York Times’ treatment of Bush. I was a graduate in communication studies in the US at the time and I remember my classmates discussing the significance of the newspaper’s move. It was the sort of ‘communication’ story we would have picked over with delight.