This Isn't Cricket...but It Is

Leaves from a souvenir cricket album, a potpourri of memories of that most sporting, most gentlemanly of games:

Port of Spain , Trinidad, February 1981: The national side of England is scheduled to play the West Indies in the first of a five-match series. The backdrop is idyllic: the green mountains of the Northern Range and the branchy samaan trees that divide the toylike stands, some fretworked in the Victorian style. From those quaint bleachers, at 11:20 a.m., an empty rum bottle comes whistling through the air, signaling the first riot of the new season.

Jammu , northern India , February 1981: A mob of 3,000 burns down the main gates of the stadium and, hurling stones, besieges the visiting team for five hours in its locker room. The visitors are women from England , there to play a side from the Indian Women's Cricket Association.

Melbourne , Australia , January 1981: On the last ball of a New Zealand vs. Australia game, the New Zealander at bat must hit a six—the equivalent of a home run—to tie the game. He's given no chance. The Australian captain, Greg Chappell, tells his brother Trevor to "bowl a grubber," i.e., to underhand an unloftable ball along the ground to the batsman instead of making a proper overarm delivery.

It was legal, it seemed, but the cheapness of the play almost caused a severing of diplomatic relations. Aussies have an underarm problem, declaimed T shirts sported by New Zealanders, as their prime minister, Robert Muldoon, raged, "The most disgusting effort I can recall in the history of cricket...the Australian team was as yellow as the uniforms it played in." To which Australia 's prime minister could only reply, diminuendo, "Uh, a serious mistake."

"Ah, well," as they might say in the Members' Pavilion at Lord's Cricket Ground in London , the shrine of the sport, "these hot climates, you know. These colonials...."

Just a moment, please.

The Members' Pavilion, Lord's Cricket Ground, summer 1979: It's a most prestigious occasion, England vs. Australia in the Centennial Match, marking 100 years of such contests. The game has been delayed by rain and the two umpires, Dicky Bird and David Constant, a greatly respected pair, have been out to inspect the wet field. Not ready yet, they conclude, and return to the Pavilion—where, waiting for them as in ambush, is a group of Members, badged and blazered, wearing their exclusive neckties of broad yellow and orange stripes. Clearly they have been drinking in the bar for some time. They have become increasingly angry over the delay, and now, yelling profanities, they grab the umpires by their collars, manhandle and abuse them. To traditionalists, it was sacrilege.

"A game that was once played by gentlemen," the New Zealand Prime Minister mourned after the Melbourne incident, and he was right if he was referring to the two or three decades, in that golden playtime of the West which ended with World War I, when the standards of the British public (i.e., prep) school prevailed, when such expressions as "It's not cricket" were coined. He was right also if he meant that the sport has become more win-at-all-costs, more physically intimidating, more likely to provoke violence, even among its fans.

At cricket grounds all over the world you will hear old hands opine that the sport, or the sport that they loved, was, after protracted illness, finally killed in 1977 by an Australian named Kerry Packer. Until then, cricket had been the sole administrative province of some of the most conservative elder sportsmen in the world, the spiritual kin, if you like, of the late International Olympic Committee president, Avery Brundage .