cricket, lovely cricket?

After the humiliating Ashes series in Australia, the ECB has just released the cricket fixtures for the coming season. Unsurprisingly, once again, the four-day County Championship games (the closest format to Test cricket) have been largely relegated to the beginning and end of the season – although the ECB is at pains to tell us that this isn’t QUITE as bad as last year. The details obviously very from team to team but, essentially, it will provide six matches in April+May, four games in June+July; and four games in August+September. Once again, the bish-bosh white ball cricket (in the form of the Vitality Blast and Royal London Cup) take pride of place in the height of the English summer – with The Hundred tournament following on from July onwards.
Following events in Australia, people have been reaffirming their belief that Test cricket is the finest form of the game and urging the powers-that-be to make changes to ensure the County Championship is given a much higher priority. Unlike the ‘old days’, the coming season will feature England Test matches against New Zealand… and India… oh, and South Africa – with fixtures being played June-September!
So, if the County Championship is the ‘feeder nursery’ servicing the England Test team with fresh, young talented players, you really do wonder how this will happen.
You really couldn’t make it up.
These days, many of the current England Test players have central contracts from the ECB (20 annual contracts covering both red and white ball cricket). This effectively takes away England’s Test players from the County Championship (eg. I think Joe Root played just the two games for Yorkshire last season). So, today’s County cricketers are getting virtually no experience of playing against/with Test cricketers… until perhaps (if they’re very ‘lucky’ and England have to seek players from outside the contracted individuals) when they’re ‘called up’ into the Test team (probably at very short notice)!
The four-day County Championship format is the closest to emulating five-day Test cricket. It’s the ONLY ‘training’ format that provides aspiring Test cricketers with the opportunity of ‘building an innings’ or ‘develop bowling techniques and tactics’ or even captaincy. I was brought up watching games played between counties and the international touring sides and these all featured the very best players the English counties could provide – watching cricket that featured ‘proper stars’ of the game. These days, county championship teams are reduced to fielding ‘non-stars’ (featuring players either at the beginning or the end of their careers).
But, as things stand, these county cricketers also have to ‘perform’ in the white-ball, bish-bosh games to justify their place at their county clubs.
You really couldn’t make it up.
As you’re probably aware (from my various cricket blogposts over the years), I am a great lover of County Cricket – I enjoy its rhythm and pace, the traditional field settings (not like the limited overs games with fielders frequently relegated to the boundary rope), the tactics and the skills. Yes, I’m definitely an old codger, but I genuinely fear for the future of the game unless drastic changes are made over the next two or three seasons. I absolutely accept that the limited overs cricket matches provide the counties with a significant proportion of their finances (other than the sums provided by the ECB from Test Match incomes) but I do believe that the game needs to be fundamentally changed to cater for two DIFFERENT formats of cricket in which counties each have TWO teams – one exclusively for red-ball matches and the other for the white-ball game. I also feel that the number of Test Matches needs to be reduced, so that England Test players (for example) are able to perform in far more County Championship games (and also allow more international cricketers to be able spend time learning the game in its traditional format).
Yes, I’m just a boring, old cricket-lover and, yes, the Australia, India and New Zealand Test cricket sides don’t seem to be suffering in the same way as their English counterparts… but SOMETHING has to be done (and quickly!).
But, hey, what do I know?! 

the tragedy of macbeth…

I went to the Watershed yesterday - for only the third time in the past two years (I know!) - to see Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth”, featuring Denzel Washington (Macbeth) and Frances McDormand (Lady Macbeth). We all know the Shakespeare play and there was part of me wondering why they were making another film of it (there have been at least seven other screen adaptations).
But, frankly, it was worth it. Washington and McDormand were both predictably brilliant and the stark black and white film portrayal powerfully and wonderfully apt. I loved designer Stefan Dechant’s imagining of Macbeth’s castle as a giant modernist house, with ‘sharp’ edges, dramatic level changes and courtyards enclosed by huge high walls. The witch apparition was disturbingly impressive and I found Birnam Wood ‘coming to’ Macbeth’s castle, with Malcolm’s soldiers holding tree-branches over their heads, eerily effective.
All in all, it was very good to be back in the cinema (and, happily, EVERYONE was wearing a face-mask!).

january 2022 books…

Allegorizings (Jan Morris): As you probably know, I’m a great lover of Morris’s books. I still regret that I no longer have the hardback copy of the James Morris edition of ‘Oxford’ (published in 1965)(I’ve owned the Jan Morris paperback version, published in 1978, since 1979)… clearly, I ‘lent’ it to someone and sadly never had it returned. One dictionary definition of ‘allegorize’ is to “interpret or represent symbolically” (just so you know). This book of essays/musings was published in 2021 (one year on from her death at the age of 94) and she was well aware that it would be published posthumously; they’re effectively no more than ‘idle thoughts or perhaps ‘whimsy’ (some serious, but mostly funny and entertaining… and one or two that I frankly found quite boring). The range of subjects is wide (understatement) - from falling over; zoos; whistling; hot water bottles; kindness; about her no longer believing in nationality “or the cursed Nation-State”; and even nose-picking! There’s also a wonderful piece about Princess Diana: in Morris’s opinion, she should “have been given the all-but-superannuated royal yacht Britannia, which nobody knew what to do with, and invited to rollick her way around the world on the national behalf, living it up without inhibition, taking a new boyfriend to every port (or finding one there) and distributing a taste of outrageous English gaiety among the nations”! A lovely, very enjoyable book that I’ll no doubt continue to dip into over the years to come.
Go Went Gone (Jenny Erpenbeck): This novel is set in Germany and tells the story of a retired university professor who found a surprising new community among African asylum-seekers who have set up a tent city in Berlin. It’s a story about displacement, upheaval, race, privilege, nationality, rigid bureaucracy and humanity. It’s profound, unsettling and quite, quite brilliant. Erpenbeck has clearly talked to a lot of people who have been through similar, relentless experiences… and so, with so much research, in many ways, the book doesn’t feel like fiction at all. She writes brilliantly. It’s an extraordinary book. You need to read it.
I Am I Am I Am (Maggie O’Farrell): O’Farrell is one my favourite writers and this is a rather special book. Its sub-title (if that’s the right phrase) is “Seventeen Brushes with Death” and it’s a collection of essays in which O’Farrell chronicles her own ‘near misses’ – including haemorrhage during childbirth, miscarriage and leaping off a harbour wall into the sea as a teenager. I spent much of the book reflecting in amazement that such experiences can all happen to one person (I seem to have come off very lightly, so far, in my life!). Unsurprisingly, it’s brilliantly written and utterly captivating (and shocking… and brave… and moving). Ru lent me the book and I read it in a day. Wonderful.
Azadi (Arundhati Roy): This is a series of essays/lectures that deal with matters of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism. Unsurprisingly, Roy makes regular reference to matters happening in her native India (and she’s massively critical of Narendra Modi’s government and his Hindu nationalist party: “The infrastructure of fascism is staring us in the face, the pandemic is speeding up that process in unimaginable ways, and yet we hesitate to call it by its name”. The essays have reinforced my realisation of how little I know of the complexities of the country: some 780 languages; more nationalities and sub-nationalities, more indigenous tribes and religions than all of Europe. She writes brilliantly (and persuasively) and uses her essays/lectures as ways of highlighting matters of justice, rights and freedoms in the current hostile environment. It doesn’t make for easy reading… but I think it raises fundamentally important issues.
Miss Benson’s Beetle (Rachel Joyce): I loved Joyce’s “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” and, in a way, this was another novel about pilgrimage. Set in 1950, it tells the story of two unlikely women travelling to the other side of the world in search of a golden beetle that may or may not exist… trekking through dangerous terrain, breaking all the rules and learning about emotional courage. The two principle characters are rather wonderful (very funny, but also joyous individuals). In many ways, I suppose some might regard this as a ‘woman’s novel’ (although, frankly, I would disagree); what it IS is a tender book about heartfelt friendship, compassion, hope and, as the book’s cover says: ‘second chances’. Reading it was a good excuse to avoid all those depressing stories of people offering excuses to justify a certain prime minister’s alleged actions/rule-breaking escapades over the past nine months or so.