The Authors XI: A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon (Wisden)

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Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn into politics I did not have too much to learn. James, Beyond a Boundary. But no sport can come close to matching cricket for the sheer volume of transfer into political life. The nature of the modern game is such that the volume of transfer is increasing:. Yet even in previous eras, where the cult of celebrity was less developed, cricket has proved an unusually fine training ground for would-be politicians.

More of that in a moment; for now, we can update C. James who was himself updating Rudyard Kipling in asking two separate but related questions: And what do they know of cricket who only politics know? As in love, so in cricket — youth has never been any guarantee of competence. They flicker instead with the staccato quality of old cine film, the grainy record of an age that seems almost fabulously remote. When James Joyce, in the early years of the twentieth century, wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he was looking back to the formative years of a life that had begun in ; but some things, it seemed to me, when I first read the novel, had barely changed since then.

Above all, like Stephen,. I had come to associate cricket with vivid childhood horrors: Whether the cadaverous and quite fabulously antique headmaster kept a pandybat in his own armoury, I was never unlucky enough to find out; but the knowledge that he could and would inflict pain if provoked by disobedience hung over us in our classrooms like a haze of chalkdust. The ambition of the school was clear. Arriving there the unheroic offspring of local estate agents, farmers or solicitors, we were to leave it Spartans.

Today, we are taking on a bunch of schoolboys — and a 3rd XI at that. But this is Eton. It is hard not to cringe. Walking into the pavilion, the honours boards stretch back over the entire course of the twentieth century. I love it — but I hate it, too.

It is certainly no challenge now, in such a setting, to savour once again the long-forgotten flavour of my loathing for cricket. The rest of us slunk back to London after this bruising defeat. But for Tom, this was a moment of radiant joy.

From a survey by the British Heart Foundation. I know this because I chose it for him — it was a gift from the team he has run for over twenty years. For many people, including Tom, this bat is the least interesting aspect of his sporting feat. But there are many of us who place huge importance on our cricket kit, fetishising bits of leather and wood in an alarming way.

We travel armed with linseed oil, bat tape and other superfluous items that are almost never required, but we feel almost bereft without them. A builder was in my flat the other day. Surveying the mess, mostly cricketing in nature, he asked me if I was a professional cricketer. I like cricket kit and own quite a lot of it. I think it makes me better at the game. Sometimes, of course, it makes me worse — like the. I was promptly caught at mid-off, trying to hit over the top with that miserable piece of wood.

For me this meant my plastic suit of armour, accessorised with a sword and axe. Whites, a cricket bat, pads and gloves were the natural next step. I may not have drawn my Slazenger V12 from a stone, nor been given it by a Lady of the Lake, but my first bat was no less exciting. It is no surprise that one manufacturer actually puts sword stickers on the back of its bats. Like Arthur, I experienced a sense of destiny.

Fortune might not have favoured us on the field but the weather gods were with us for the most part, during this wet and miserable summer. Kamila and Dan were making their debuts for us, and we were joined for this match by Hadley Freeman and her companion, Arthur. We are hoping for a greater female contingent in the Authors next season, with Scarlett Thomas lined up to play. The occasion in the past has been very attractive to the ladies.

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Douglas Jardine, writing about captaining an Authors match. I know and love it as a spectator. If you grow up in Pakistan not-knowing-cricket takes a monumental effort of will, a readiness to be on the periphery of the most impassioned conversations, an anti-social streak which will leave you out of the most anticipated gatherings. In the mid-eighties, when I fell in love with the game, the cricket magazine of choice in Pakistan — the Cricketer — had a female editor, Afia Salam.

And one of the most respected cricket journalists in the country, also female, was Fareshteh Gati, who later played a pioneering role in uncovering match fixing in Pakistan cricket. So when there was a chance to be involved with the Authors CC and write for this book I was only. Team manager had a fine ceremonial ring to it, I thought, and gladly adopted the title without taking on any of the attendant responsibilities. But the skipper had other ideas, and my closest friend on the team, Mirza Waheed, joined forces with him to say that of course I should play; what reason was there not to?

Which was deemed entirely insufficient. The mark of it remains: So I got myself a grip. Something approaching a stance. But Waheed had decided to take his coaching duties seriously. He bowled the gentlest full toss the world has ever seen. Willow on leather, that sweet, sweet sound. And in that moment I knew that I wanted to go out on to that field at Shepperton and hit at least one ball. It was at this point in the season that the weather became truly atrocious. Rain blanketed the country and there appeared to be no prospect of cricket for the next month.

Our long-awaited game at Arundel Castle fell foul of the weather, heartbreakingly. The prospect for our game at the spectacular Valley of Rocks in north Devon looked equally bleak. Infectious, I had to stay away from school, so I lay in bed with the summer going on outside, a floaty sensation as the fever broke, a district nurse arriving to dress the wounds, scabs like small coins scattered across my trunk and legs and arms.

And on the little portable TV with its wire halo aerial at the foot of the. England vs India at Edgbaston, England amassed , David Gower scoring not out, no helmet, his longsleeved billowy white shirt unbuttoned further than strictly necessary. He was twenty-two and had made his England debut the previous year, his batting an enterprise of touch and timing rather than brute force.

Will had been heroic up until this point. The best fielder in the side and the most stylish batsman, he was a stalwart of the Authors, driving people uncomplainingly to matches, keeping wicket when needed and forming the ideal opening partnership with Sam. We had a gloomy month, waiting for news of his collarbone, with very little cricket to alleviate things.

But we had to wait until August for our long-awaited match against the Publishers. But cricketers and cricket writers have always flattered themselves that they operate on a higher plane, that they can raise their prose to the level of literature. Myriad theories abound to explain the unique richness of cricket writing, or maybe simply to rationalise and justify the obsession.

For some the explanation lies in the reflective nature of the game and the subtle rhythms within. For others the wellspring of this plenty is the acute existential crises of cricket. Yet more draw a comparison between the essential loneliness of both the writer and the cricketer. The sage Richie Benaud famously wrote that captaincy is 90 per cent luck and 10 per cent skill. We fancy our chances against these Publishers. Some of them have turned down our books, and motivation is not lacking. If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.

Trevelyan, English Social History. This is cricket in the raw. Aristocrats gambling breathtaking sums of money, match fixing, the decline of traditional communities, revolts and riots: By the time of the French Revolution,. The club reverted to what, over two centuries later, it remains today — a community club, but one with an extraordinary history.

The Authors XI: A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon

Hardly a wonder, then, that for the Authors CC this fixture constituted as much a pilgrimage as a cricket match. But it is our glowering fast bowler Matthew Parker who appears to be most in his natural habitat. Ridge Meadow is idyllic. The ground, fast-draining chalk land, is like an upturned dish, sloping gently away on all sides to the surrounding fields. Outside the pavilion, regulars are nursing the first pints of the afternoon. On the outfield, our opponents are warming up, flinging thirty-yard throws into the wicketkeeper with casual ease.

This, however, is a club with three senior XIs, nine. This match was the undoubted highlight of our season, and the one that everyone wanted to play in. I think the sportsman and the actor share more than just a common linguistic heritage. Sportsmen are players in the other sense of the word, too. They take to the stage, they inhabit a role. When I talk with performers — whether they are actors, singers, musicians or sportsmen — I notice shared characteristics.

In , I made a series for Radio 3 exploring the parallels between the lives of sportsmen and musicians. Craig Ogden, the classical guitarist, told me: Some pages may be slightly dog-eared through previous use. The spine may show some creasing through previous use. Ultimately we would never send any book we would not pick up and read ourselves. Will be completely new and unfolded. Wrapped carefully to prevent damage or curling of book edges.

The Authors XI: a Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon, review - Telegraph

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Express shipping is available only to UK customers at present. For all the grey drizzly days when spikes are barely able to cling to the greasy turf, it is the one beautiful afternoon of bright warm sunshine — bees buzzing on the scented air, people picnicking by the boundary, balls being cracked to the ropes and sudden drama in the final couple of overs — that flickers long in the memory. His debut novel, Indrakhani Pass, is now available on Kindle. Follow Telegraph Books on Twitter.

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Monday 17 December A painting of a cricket match at Hambledon, the birth of cricket, dated The Allahakbarries cricket team, founded by JM Barrie, The Authors XI,