the joy of cricket - the invincibles

[Ken Gargett]

nice article for cricket fans. 

Tales of the 1948 Ashes show sport’s purpose is to brighten our lives

 

Emma John

Jack Fingleton’s delightful take on Don Bradman’s Invincibles details the escapist pleasure of the series for post-war England

Sun 18 Nov 2018 20.00 AEDT

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Don Bradman at the crease during Australia’s eight-wicket victory in the first Test of the 1948 Ashes at Trent Bridge. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

This past week, I bought something for nine pence. It felt something of an achievement, even in a charity shop. Perhaps the manager of this one didn’t see much value in sport or perhaps she cared about it so passionately that it inspired her to rare feats of generosity. Either way, the cricket books on the shelves were being offered at a price as nostalgic as their contents.

Which is why I have finally read Brightly Fades the Don. My previous experiences with some of the so-called classics of cricket writing had put me off – I’d rather eat corrugated cardboard than read any more Neville Cardus – but Jack Fingleton’s account of the 1948 Ashes series was an unexpected delight. Written in the days before we could relive most magic moments with a cursory YouTube search – it is sportswriting as much about the what as the why.

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There’s the Len Hutton leg-glance so good that it needed a second field to do it justice and the acrobatic catching of Neil Harvey, who “seemed to pluck one from the middle of a flock of pigeons”. Fingleton’s fine sense of humour has stood the test of time – who doesn’t love an anecdote about Sid Barnes, an umpire, and an escaped dog? – and his sardonic eye doesn’t just fall on cricket. Steve Waugh’s tour diaries certainly never detailed Edward III’s cuckolding at the hands of the Earl of March or its relevance to the Trent Bridge Test.

It is now 70 years since the summer that Don Bradman’s Invincibles laid claim to be the best Test side ever, after their unbeaten tour of England. To fans, this Ashes series carries the significance of an almost biblical event. And for those who weren’t alive in 1948 – whose parents weren’t even born – our perception of that series is often filtered through Bradman’s achievements. Not least because it was his great swan song and his final innings at the Oval – that two-ball duck that condemned his batting average to 99.94 – is the tale’s well‑told climax.

It took an Australian writer to show me the English side of the story. From the moment Fingleton arrived, he saw everywhere around him the reality of a country scarred by war. He noted the “pitiful remnants of bombed-out buildings and homes” in London; the wildflowers growing around St Paul’s Cathedral in soil that hadn’t seen the light for centuries; and the burned woodwork in the Oval pavilion that could still blacken a player’s whites. In Manchester, he saw more destruction and met an Old Trafford groundsman who had spent the war collecting unexploded bombs from the pitch in a wheelbarrow.

 

It was no wonder that English cricket was in bad shape in such circumstances. David Kynaston’s masterful work Austerity Britain has documented the many trials of the era, but a book he coauthored this year with Stephen Fay – Arlott, Swanton and the Soul of English Cricket – included a quote that brings home the reality of rationing to anyone who ever pondered Freddie Flintoff’s protein intake. “Our cricketers have to last till lunchtime on a watery chunk of hotel dried egg,” wrote EW Swanton, hinting at one reason for the national team’s declining standards.

There had been no true fast bowlers in the county game since the young men were sent off to fight; the England batsmen, now accustomed to fast-medium swing, had nothing to practise against that could prepare them for Australia’s firepower. The two-tier class system that privileged gentlemen amateurs over paid professionals was not yet dead, still influencing the way the game was run and teams were selected.

Yet the series was not the tedious whitewash it might have been – it was, dare one say it, closer than the collective memory likes to allow. England might have won the Old Trafford Test but for the rain; at Headingley they were hamstrung by the inexplicable lack of their best spin bowlers. More significant, though, it was a long, sparkling draught of escapist pleasure for a country battling through a grim old time. “English cricket, since the war, has been building up to this season,” wrote Arlott in Gone to the Cricket. “It is not the cricketer’s fault that his occasional failure to catch a leather ball between his hands will be greeted as a national disaster.”

Fingleton, who had toured England as a batsman 10 years previously, observed: “The man in the street … had developed a bent for sport which exceeded the days of pre-war.”

The birth of the BBC’s ball‑by‑ball radio commentary brought the action directly into people’s homes that year but its nascent following was nothing compared with the zeal with which the Australians were followed all round the country. “Queues, of tortuous length, wound up and down the side streets, and as one entered the ground it was obvious that thousands upon thousands outside had no earthly chance of admission.”

It was a nice reminder, this book, of sport’s real purpose, to bring a little light into our lives. Seventy years on – a single human lifespan – the sports headlines can be a depressing reminder of the world we live in, rather than an escape from it: F1 protestors jailed in Bahrain, the effect of Brexit on football squads, Richard Scudamore’s bonus.

In 1947, the year before the Australians arrived, Denis Compton was having the season of his life, bringing joy to blitz survivors. “The strain of long years of anxiety and affliction passed from all hearts and shoulders,” wrote Cardus. “There were no rations in an innings by Compton.”

Perhaps it’s time I gave him another try.

[hedgeybaby]

Thanks Ken.