Lockdown cricket (retired hurt)

Even before good sense and Government edict confined us to our homes, sons no.s 1 & 2 and I had transferred our cricket games from the bedroom to the spring-lit back garden. The lockdown finds us in mid-season intensity.

Shooter!

Around 16 metres long, the garden provides just enough space for a pitch. The lawn, assailed from above by years of the boys’ football games and from below by the roots of a thirsty silver birch tree, provides an unpredictable surface. The tennis balls (or the inner cores of incrediballs) jag, leap and creep keeping innings brief and challenging. Modes of dismissal include hitting the ball over a fence, into a fence in an uncontrolled fashion, any edged shot in the direction of an imaginary full umbrella of slips and gulleys and one-hand one bounce. With no counting of runs, deliveries faced is our currency. The leave is highly productive.

The wicket on pitch 1 is the trunk of the maple at the back and centre of the garden. Wear and tear has forced us to pitch 2, where a concrete post provides middle stump, off and middle, leg and middle and we negotiate over whether the off and leg stumps have been hit. Pitch 2 opens up the off-side for the right-hander (sons 1 & 2) and plenty of space for me to nurdle leg-side.

The bowler has a step or two to build momentum. Hitting a good length produces rewards, but the temptation to drop short and see the ball fly past the batter’s chin (or scoot into his ankles) is strong. The pitch takes turn, although it hardly seems worth the effort to rotate a wrist when the natural variation is so.. varied.

Competition, the more so since we have had to spend so much time in each other’s company, is keen. The boys wind each other up, finding fault at every opportunity. They are young men and fling the ball at each other with venom. I flinch, waiting for a catch at short-cover, ready to step in and restore order, should either lad cross the line. No.2 son is particularly incensed that his brother’s criticisms of his technique end up stymying his play. He’s torn: last summer his sibling coached him back into a love of the game; this year, big brother may be trying to undermine him for advantage.

Balls disappear over the three fences and return at a slightly slower rate. Such is the discipline of our batting, it’s rarely the result of a loose shot. A firmly hit back-foot drive can hop next door. Bouncers, flicking arm, shoulder or just climbing over the batter, end up in the allotments behind us. But if it is from a loose drive or a top-edged pull, disdain rains down on the batter as they surrender the crease.

I found another way to leave the crease on Saturday. No.1 son had bowled a spell of off-spin. I had picked him off through the leg-side, forcing him to drop short, which I clattered to the fence (two metres away). He reverted to his stock: seam bowling. A delivery reared off a length, past my face which I turned, only to meet the ball coming back the other way from the concrete post. The tennis ball hit me squarely in the eye.

I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening lying in a darkened room. I had an early night, slept soundly and woke on Sunday with two functioning eyes. I now bat in my non-shatter cycling glasses.

It is a delight to share these games, sometimes good humoured, often intense, with my sons. It lightens the mood of this dark time. But there’s an unease that keeps picking away at me.

No.2 son returned to cricket after England’s World Cup Final win last summer. The junior season had passed and he played three senior matches and netted with his brother in the summer holidays. He has trained through the winter, working hard at senior nets. Cricket, he says, has replaced football as his favourite sport. The summer, this season, has been his goal. Not only may those hopes go unfulfilled, but I worry what shape the recreational game will take when we finally find it safe enough to congregate and spend whole afternoons together.

Hard work (for old bones)

The day after the first game of my season, a season that is to be my first fully committed to weekend cricket in over 25 years, I hobbled around the field at junior training, seeking sympathy. “I felt every one of my 51 years, yesterday,” I lamented. Indeed, I had looked and performed like a decrepit cricketer: a duck, two dropped catches and two chases of the ball that ended with me kicking it over the rope.

The Minstrel, friend, team-mate and fellow junior coach, did not indulge me. “My 74 year old uncle plays every week and I never hear him complain,” he replied, with some acute advice about doing the things you enjoy.

That hit home. I also reasoned that in time, sooner rather than later, I hope, I will achieve match fitness as my body adjusts to the rigours of an afternoon of cricket.

Now, three games in and I have generalised aches and stiffness, the length and breadth of my body, late in the game, after the game and for a day or two afterwards. Added to that, I’ve collected a succession of very minor injuries: scratches to the wrist from retrieving the ball from brambles; a bruised heel of my right hand from fielding a ball that leapt erratically; bruising of two toes from a gentle yorker that I missed; a shallow cut above my right knee from a sprawling effort to catch a ball. Most evocatively of all, my left elbow is skinned and raw providing a sensation that connects me to my early twenty-something self when, from May to September, my elbows would bleed.. scab.. bleed on a weekly cycle arising from dives to stop balls on the hard wicket-ends of Oxford and Kent.

That was then, how am I skinning my elbows now? Walking through narrow changing-room doorways? Slipping when pushing the covers on and off the pitch? It seems not. While I’m not actually diving in the field, I’m going to ground, elbow first, when the ball is hit either side of me. To set an example to the youngsters, I could argue. To avoid bending down, might be more honest. Whatever the technical failings, it gives me the sensation of being a cricketer, active in support of the bowlers, while also adding to the aches as my joints shudder from the impact.

I’m looking forward to seeing the Minstrel this evening at junior training. I am reconciled to my sore body, dosed over-night with analgesic. I’ll enquire how he feels after a challenging afternoon in the field. Sent to the longest boundary, then back into the ring as the batsmen rotated strike; at the other end, gulley for the new batsmen, mid-wicket for the established player. Barely two deliveries in the same position. Two-and-a-half hours of continuous motion, always in the line of fire. In the changing-room, post-match, capable of nothing more eloquent than groans as the team reflected on the afternoon’s action. Has the Minstrel any other advice for his captain, I’ll ask, or is it time for a quiet word with his 74 year-old uncle?

The running of the (white) balls

7 July 2017 – festival in northern Spain

The annual running of the bulls in the city of Pamplona pits several dozen men and women against a dozen bulls. The latter are released into the narrow streets, where they find the bull runners between them and their destination, the municipal bullring. Nobody died on the opening day of the festival this year. Five people were hospitalised, with injuries including the goring of one man in the chest and another in the scrotum. A third man suffered serious head injuries after being lifted and tossed by a bull.

Medics line the streets in a 21st century nod to human welfare as a tradition, of hundreds of years standing, continues to attract thrill-seekers and those with a need (and audience) to prove their mettle. So refined is the medical attention that, it is boasted, a victim of a goring will be stabilised within ten minutes of the incident.

7 July 2017 – festival in south-western England

2,000 people gather at the sports ground of a 176 year old college, where they double as spectators and targets for the twenty-two cricketers. The five and a half ounce missiles, cork encased in dyed white leather, have a long heritage, although not in their current hue. Much more recent is the dual role of those who stand and sit at the perimeter of the field. For decades, cricket fans have simply appreciated the action in front of them. Now they play an active part in the drama.

The day’s first casualty finds a ball narrowing in on him as he sits on a plastic picnic chair one row back from the fence. Two people ahead of him jump out of the ball’s way. He rises from his seat parrying the ball from his chest and is knocked backwards over the back of his chair. He lands heavily on his back and is carried away, strapped to a scoop stretcher.

Minutes later a ball sails over the boundary fence, skips off an awning below which diners are recovering their appetite and smashes into the tray of empties being carried by a waitress. Shards of glass tear at her hand and wrist. The ball is dried from the dregs it landed in and tossed back onto the field.

The spectators are now alert. When the next missile heads their way, it is caught competently by a local club cricketer. His view of the ball was cleared by a large man, from the local rugby club, sidestepping its path and landing heavily on the foot of a lady in sundress and sandals. She is lifted away from the incident, visible swelling suggesting a metatarsal fracture.

New Zealand’s former captain plays a short innings. He applies his famed strength and timing to just one delivery. It travels low, hard and fast through a gap in the field, bounces once inside the boundary, clips the top of the boundary board, which diverts it upwards in a direction unanticipated by those braced for its arrival. It catches its victim below the chin, breaking his jaw an instant before his teeth clamp and sever the tip of his tongue.

A high, long hit claims the afternoon’s last casualty. It soars to the back of the temporary stand, where a beery group rise to greet it, but succeed only in deflecting it onto the forehead of their neighbour who is treated on site, before exiting for concussion tests.

This Cheltenham College bloodbath is, with the exception of the concussion case, a fiction, departing from reality at some point after the ball is described crossing the boundary. It is not a fiction that has required a lot of imagination. One of these five incidents happened. The other four very nearly did.

The injured bull-runners at Pamplona do not attract much sympathy. They have willingly entered into a dangerous activity and suffered painful, but predictable consequences.

We do feel sympathetic for anyone injured watching a cricket match. “Should’ve kept their eye on the ball,” some might quibble, flinching as they remember turning to talk to a friend, or looking down at their newspaper, as the crack of a middled slog-sweep is heard.

But with sixes hit at a rate of one per 25 deliveries in professional T20 games, haven’t we reached the point where the need to evade or gain protection from balls smote over the boundary has itself become predictable? And if a risk is predictable, where does responsibility for its mitigation, or liability for its occurrence lie?

A little internet research reveals opposing views to this question in the UK and USA. In the judicature that covers the city of Cheltenham, case law points to sports clubs having responsibility for taking steps to counter reasonably foreseeable risks to the safety of the public.

Across the Atlantic, courts have sided with sports organisations, concluding that spectators understand and accept the risks of attending baseball or ice hockey matches. To place the liability with the franchise would, it is argued, increase their insurance costs, and push the price of tickets beyond the reach of those sports’ core fans.

Gloucestershire County Cricket Club may envy the legal protection enjoyed by the Philadelphia Phillies and the Pittsburgh Penguins, but they operate under the less forgiving legal code. What then, should the county club be doing to fulfil its duty of care?

I have three proposals which relate primarily to cricket played at occasional or festival venues, such as Cheltenham College. Spectators at purpose built professional grounds are less at risk. The playing areas are larger and the rows of fixed seats facing the middle help to keep spectators’ attention on the action. The ECB, with its plan to move to an eight team T20 league in 2020 may have the ultimate solution. These proposals are for interim precautions.

Pitch location

The pitch at Cheltenham was located off-centre. The distance to the nearer square boundary probably only just exceeded the minimum distance required by ECB playing regulations: 50 metres. That short boundary, opposite the college buildings, is where the majority of spectators were sat or stood. Sixes hit over the longer square boundary were highly unlikely to cause harm as so few people were in the line of fire. I would recommend that pitches at grounds like Cheltenham are central and certainly not closer to the square boundary where most spectators are gathered.

Protect areas where spectators mill

One of the pleasures of festival cricket is the promenading, dining, or standing and chatting in sight of the action. People thus occupied are distracted from the game and so less likely to be able to evade a ball hit towards them. Preserving the traditional pleasures of festival cricket needs to be balanced with the modern artillery of limited overs cricket. Protective netting can allow the two to coexist. Occasional grounds lack stands with roofs or double tiers, which could be used as a frame for protective netting. But a temporary net could be raised between the playing area and the concentrated zones where spectators expect to have sight of the match, if not their eye permanently on the ball.

Pad hard surfaces

The really unnerving moment at Cheltenham was when McCullum’s pull shot ricocheted from the lip of the boundary boards. Its pace and sudden change of direction would have defeated anyone but the sharpest slip-fielder. Grounds should ensure that the fittings erected between the players and the spectators do not exacerbate the threat to spectators. Padding around the top of boundary boards and other hard surfaces would absorb the ball’s momentum.

Unlike Pamplona’s running of the bulls, the running of the (white) balls is unlikely to last into the next decade at grounds such as Cheltenham College. The event’s passing will happen whether or not the safety of spectators from flying balls is given a higher priority. In the meantime, do not turn those spectators into unwitting bull-runners; or the players into bulls. John Simpson of Middlesex launched the six that hit the head of the man at the top of the temporary stand. Simpson held up play and walked towards the boundary, concerned for the injured spectator. He only allowed the game to restart when he saw one of the teams’ medics run across the outfield and climb the steps of the stand. The very next ball, mind perhaps not fully returned to the game, Simpson judged a quick single poorly, and was run out.

 

Heartbeat

My company’s 5-a-side team had spent 12 months being taken apart by streetwise sides in one of inner city Manchester’s evening leagues. But displaying the virtues of application, teamwork and finding a ringer or two, the double digit defeats (32-1, 29-0) were behind us and we were competing.

Our rise towards 5-a-side football competence is relevant because I remember feeling excited as I leant against the mesh fencing behind a goal, gulping air and talking to Laurie. Five or six minutes into the game and we were leading. Laurie and I had finished a shift (of five or six minutes) and been substituted – regular replenishment by fresh legs was another factor in our rise.

Laurie, I recall, was about to say something to me. With my attention divided between the continuing game and my colleague, I saw him fall backwards with the rigidity of a felled tree. Within seconds he had people – players from other matches – attending to him. I ran to the office to get an ambulance called.

Laurie didn’t make it. Heart failure. In his mid-40s, he was fit. Thursday evenings he played 5-a-side with us. Weekends, he played on a team with his sons. But there was some impairment in his heart that had been dormant through so many exertions and then emerged to strike suddenly and irremediably.

The last time I recounted this story, I was taking a first aid refresher course to support the junior cricket coaching work I do. The course leader asked if anyone had experienced a situation where emergency first aid had been required. In a group of seven, there were two of us who had witnessed fatal heart attacks playing recreational sport – the other example was from a cricket match. Neither involved someone doing anything more intense or exacting than their routine.

It’s rare, yet common enough to be a story to have touched many families, friends, teammates and opponents. David Epstein, in ‘The Sports Gene’, writes about a fellow high school runner, a state champion, who collapsed and died within metres of crossing the finishing line. Epstein goes on to write about the genetic condition, hypertrobic cardiomyopathy (HCM), which is a kindred, equivalently grave, affliction to that diagnosed for James Taylor this week: Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Cardiomyapathy (ARVC).

How could Taylor, I wondered, who has been around the England set-up, with its legion of backroom staff, for almost ten years, not have had this serious condition identified sooner, as part of routine health testing. Epstein may provide an answer; several, in fact.

To begin with, the most telling indicator of HCM is an enlarged heart, which also happens to be common among healthy athletes (AVRC also has symptoms that affect the structure of the heart that can be caused by other factors). Distinguishing between the medical condition and a well-developed muscle requires the input of an expert, of which Epstein wrote, “there are precious few in the world.”

Both conditions are inherited and caused by genetic mutation. Presence of the mutation does not however mean that serious symptoms will be experienced. Moreover the mutations vary greatly with many being restricted to a single family.

These uncertainties create a dilemma for clinicians diagnosing the conditions in athletes – they cannot tell which patients may be at risk of a sudden fatal heart malfunction. Understandably, the advice given will be to avoid physical exertion and so withdraw or retire from competitive sport, just as James Taylor has announced today. Epstein recalls that at his running friend’s funeral, his peers emphasised that the young man died doing what he loved – racing. Epstein demurs: “For me, there is scant solace in the poetic detail that he died running.”

James Taylor will now be deprived of the heightened experience of cricket played at its most intense: duelling with fast bowlers, challenging fielders with aggressive running and steeling himself not to flinch when crouched close at short-leg. Just as Epstein’s friend would have “eagerly rechanneled his competitive energy elsewhere,” and Laurie would have settled for watching his sons play football and to continue his active role in his family’s development and his own career, so Taylor will find another outlet for the ability, poise and commitment that took him, if only briefly, to the top of his sport. I hope he can find that fulfilment somewhere in cricket.

——-

The material on HCM is drawn from chapter 15 of ‘The Sports Gene – Talent, Practice and the Truth about Success’, by David Epstein.

Quick single: Harmison draws Ponting’s blood

The opening session of the opening day of the 2005 Ashes. Steve Harmison, bowling from the Pavilion End at Lord’s, hit Justin Langer on the elbow with the second ball of the day. A few overs later, Matthew Hayden tried to pull Harmison, missed the ball which continued its upward course to strike him on the helmet. Hayden fell shortly afterwards to Hoggard, bringing Ricky Ponting to the middle.

Harmison was bowling rapidly and with good rhythm. Into his sixth over, another pull shot attempted and missed. Ponting took a blow on the grill. For the second time that morning, the Australian physio was out in the middle, this time to staunch blood and patch-up the skipper’s face. Ponting batted on and in Harmison’s next over, drove at a ball outside off-stump and edged to be caught in the slips.

At the fall of each wicket that morning, and three more came before lunch, the crowd roared, rose to feet, arms up or fists pumped. The crowd’s response to each of the blows sustained by the Australian top three was just as unrestrained. Often, there’s a sense on the first morning of a Test, that the crowd needs to settle in, adjust to the pulse of a match due to last five days. That morning, though, there was a stronger alertness and anticipation. It was going to be a contest, closely fought, for the first time in years.

By batting first, Australia enabled England to lead off with their strong suit: four fast bowlers, varied in style and method. There was an anxiety, a yearning that England would, figuratively, draw first blood. The Lord’s crowd had sat and admired Australian batsmanship and rued hapless England bowling for years. This crowd on this morning wanted something different.

Alongside the anticipation for the game, there was a tension peculiar to this match. Cricket followers in England are cossetted, compared to their peers in some other countries, from the threat and experience of violence. Two weeks earlier, though, London had been struck by four suicide bombers. The city was on high alert and rumours rumbled like thunder. Bag and body searches were, if not introduced that year at Lord’s’ gates, stiffened. Sitting at Lord’s, watching Test cricket might feel defiant, or indulgent, but it also felt like being a juicy target for a terrorist intent on striking at western decadence.

Failed bomb attacks occurred that day in West London. On the second day of the Test, as Australia built a health second innings lead, police shot dead a mis-identified suspect in South London. This unsettling news swirled around the Lord’s crowd.

The hunger for England to finally knock over these Australians was the principal cause of the roars that greeted the blows to Langer, Hayden and, in particular, Ponting, that morning. The pent-up excitement at seeing England dictate terms, bursting out into shouts and displays of approval of violence. There was also a tension in the air, a mistrust and discomfort that may have infected the crowd’s response.

Ten years and almost twenty days of attending international cricket later, the first day of the 2005 Ashes series has imprinted the strongest impressions on my memory. The chain of incident of Ponting being struck, the crowd’s (and my) reaction, his removal of his helmet to find a trickle of blood, connects me closer to that intense morning than anything else.

Short pitch: Battle scar?

I’m not in the mood for much typing tonight. I returned from cricket with a sore thumb.

The question for you is, did I sustain this minor injury:

A: hitting my thumb with a mallet when setting up the stumps before the match;

B: fending off a bouncer;

C: shutting the car door on it when hurrying back to the house for my son’s spikes that he had left behind;

D: rolling the pitch covers over it when positioning them after the match.

Wearing one

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Descriptive language tends in two directions. One is the hyperbolic, where the notable is ‘incredible’, the amusing is ‘hilarious’, the inconvenient is ‘a complete nightmare’. The other direction is careful or casual understatement and it is often found in situations of danger.

In cricket there’s little more dangerous than being hit by the ball. And so the understated, off-hand description of a batsman being struck on the head by a fast bowler may include ‘the ball got big on him’ for the moment prior to impact; ‘sconned’, not for an incident in the Great British Bake-off, but for the thud of the ball onto head; and ‘wearing one’ for the outcome of being unable to elude the speeding ball.

Rarely has ‘wearing one’ applied more literally to a cricketer than to Stuart Broad at Old Trafford on the third day of the fourth Test.

Broad’s innings was brief. He played no stroke to his first two balls, ducking under a short delivery from Pankaj Singh. The following over, looking to increase the scoring rate to build England’s lead quickly, Broad drove at a full ball from Varun Aaron, before hooking successive short balls for six.

The next ball, the sixth of Broad’s innings, was also a bouncer. Broad aimed another hook but, with the ball propelled at 87mph it may have bounced higher, he played under the ball, which arrowed towards his eyes. The momentum of the shot, rather than any move to avoid the ball, swung Broad’s head to the right so the ball crashed into his helmeted head facing midwicket, rather than the bowler. The ball, perhaps through some minor misalignment of the helmet’s grill, forced its way under the helmet peak, breaking Broad’s nose.

Broad swivelled and moved back past his leg stump, after a few steps crouched and waved to indicate help was needed. All the while, the ball was jammed against his face, pinned in place by the helmet’s grill.

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I have found the image of Broad with the ball stuck hard against his face, inside the helmet, oddly unsettling. Much more so than the pictures of him bleeding onto the ground, or stitched and bruised. I cannot quite put my finger on what gives me such a strong instinctive reaction to that image, but I’ve tried to rationalise it and have identified the following possibilities and associations:

• the sight of an object lodged fast against the face suggests not just injury, but suffocation. The damage caused is continuing and needs urgent alleviation, not merely treatment.
• the ball is screening the wound, meaning the true extent of the injury has to be imagined until it is revealed.
• a projectile bursting into a body references warfare – not missiles and bombs, but their deadly side-effect, shrapnel
• it even conjures images of assaults by animals, their teeth or claws attached to the flesh
• the picture, in my mind, that it most closely resembles is that of a victim of 1970s football hooliganism with a dart in the nose.

Broad may return for the Oval Test, wearing a mask and wearing a replacement helmet when batting. If he does play, he’s sure to be tested with short-pitched bowling. Let neither he, nor anyone else, have the misfortune of ‘wearing one’ in that unsettling way.