CHELTENHAM LITERATURE FESTIVAL

Last month I was invited to the Cheltenham Literature Festival by The Nightwatchman, for whom I'd written three fairly eclectic pieces  — the first about what Graham Onions' career-best 9 for 57 could teach us about the 'deconstructionist' philosophy of Jacques Derrida (or vice versa); the next about the great Aussie cordon of Healy, Taylor, Waugh M, Warne and, in the gully, Waugh S; the latest about having my penis trapped in my box by Dean Headley — with a couple more in the offing: about cricket's 'connection' with bullfighting and the Minor Counties' matches in the old Benson and Hedges Cup.

I was just as thrilled to meet Jon Hotten, aka 'The Old Batsman' [click here for an example of the man's talents], as I was about the prospect of bumping into various literary heroes: Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Kevin Pietersen...

Jon was chairing proceedings in the Waitrose / Nightwatchman tent, diligently mentioning the sponsor's name at the start of each session, expertly deflecting the intrusive interjections of one or two northern folk in dutiful attendance who seemed particularly keen to steal the, ahem, limelight from whoever it was talking. Apparently, there is no subject sufficiently esoteric for it not to be brought back to a tale about the Yorkshire League. The only thing that really kept 'Steve' quiet were the plentiful jam tarts and gourmet nuts on offer from Waitrose.

Anyway, I was there for a little over 24 hours, only attended one session that wasn't in our stall, but had a grand old time drinking and chewing the fat. I wrote a short piece about it all over on my (much neglected) non-cricket blog, Motionless Voyage, which I reproduce here because I'm essentially a very lazy person.  

AMIS IS AS GOOD AS A MILE 

It was an interesting experience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where the highlight of my talk — I was chucked a bit of a hospital pass by the organisers: “Cricket, the perfect sport for a spot of philosophy” — was being interrupted by a bumptious Yorkshireman (is there any other sort?), who, shortly after I’d told the not especially philosophical tale of getting my foreskin trapped in my box by Dean Headley when I was 16 years old, barked: “What’s your best cricket story? You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine…”
 
On the upside, I went to (my writing hero) Martin Amis’s Q&A in the main tent, The Times Forum. He was talking about his new Auschwitz novel, The Zone of Interest, telling several hundred guests that “the black hole in Hitler Studies was his sexuality” and speculating that he was “probably a pervert rather than asexual. Maybe a coprophile”. I was due to ask the next question from the floor when the session was ended — good job, probably, as my heart felt like I was just coming up on a steroid overdose.

An hour later, having told my colleagues from the Waitrose / Nightwatchman stand what my question would have been while guzzling the complementary wine a bit too unselfconsciously, Amis walked into the writers’ hospitality lounge (out of my line of sight) and was momentarily stood alone. “Go and ask Martin Amis your question, Scott” said the editor, Matt. After a moment’s thought (about the same length of time I used to take at school when persuaded, or goaded, into doing the sort of idiotic though entertaining stunts that regularly got me put on daily report), I said, “alright then”.

“Hi Martin. So, I was going to ask you the next question when your session was wound up earlier.”

“Fire away”.

“Yeah, I was fascinated by what you were saying about the War being lost from 1941 and Hitler essentially spending the rest of it punishing the German people for their shortcomings. I once heard a definition of fascism as ‘a manic attack by the body politic against itself, in the name of its own salvation’. Does that chime with your knowledge of Nazi Germany? And, if so, was the average German complicit in that self-destructive delirium?”

He took a couple of steps away from me and put down his glass of wine. My ‘crew’ thought he was abandoning the conversation — and you couldn’t really have blamed him — but he then pivoted back and, after a beat, said: “Well, that definition might take some time for me to absorb, but there was definitely a lustful frisson [immaculately pronounced] in their administration of petty cruelties. They knew what they were up to, alright”. Then someone much more important and much less earnest than me caught his attention, and he was off air-kissing some Camilla or Priscilla in a Chanel suit.

I returned to the table, and received a small and un-ironic round of applause. “Did you take a photo of that, Matt?” “I didn’t, mate. I was too much in awe”. “No worries”, I said, secretly crestfallen. “But I’ve got to say, your body language was strong: hands in pockets, relaxed shoulders…”

Then Dame Judy Dench walked in. Heads turned. I had nothing for her, so went and got some more wine.

TUGGA LOVE?

True Grit

The gimlet eyes adjusted to the unremitting glare of the Australian sunlight (and the global spotlight); crow’s feet, the visible bodily inscription of many hours of unyielding concentration; the metronomic mastication, pausing only when a foe is to be faced down; a hint of stubble, on which perhaps to scuff a ball ready to swing Irish. Didn’t give much away, ‘Tugga’ Waugh.

Game face. Although primarily associated with the ice-veined players of high-stakes poker, the importance of a ‘game face’ is a commonplace of all professional sports, perhaps all competitive environments. Indeed, there are some strains of Cultural Studies that claim that in all our everyday social interactions we are in some sense performing (not for nothing does persona derive from the Latin for ‘mask’). Of course, such a desolate hypothesis gives the impression that us latter day homo sapiens are – from the cradle to the cricket field, nightclub to the negotiating table – all highly calculating über-pragmatists happy to pin ‘appropriate’ sentiments to our face according to context, when in fact we know full-well that our authentic, if unruly, emotions are always threatening to irrupt and overwhelm our self-containment, restraint, and decorum. Just ask Glenn McGrath. 

However, it is often assumed that once such fiercely driven sportsfolk as McGrath and Waugh exit the furnace of top-level competition, the game face is left there to burn. Suddenly, these predatory creatures are amiable, approachable, perhaps generous-spirited; where once they crackled with the energy of a seemingly bottomless ruthlessness and bristled at the slightest provocation, now they are affable, cordial, gracious even.

WAUGH: "What the fuck are you looking at?"
AMBROSE: "Don't cuss me, man"
WAUGH: "Why don't you go and get fucked"

For cricket lovers of a certain age, Steve Waugh was just about the most hard-nosed and remorseless competitor of his era: giving it, taking it, never shirking it, always meeting obstacles head on. There were those piercing, gunslinger’s eyes, which were either fixated on the source of danger or, from gully – the quintessential lone ranger’s position, off at the edge of the pack yet where the bullets fly fastest – boring into some fresh quarry. From a distance, the arch gum-chewer remained a largely taciturn presence on the field, words seemingly redundant when you are already irradiating such menace. This silence was but a fragile accord, though, and when his mouth opened it seemed to carry nuclear-level threat. At times, he seemed to be affectless, the reptilian brain of our hominid ancestors writ large, batting with lizard stillness and sporadic celerity, motionless until a sinuous snap took his body into a ball with width, either flaying cuts or dropping concrete-heavy hands on a square drive. Unfussy. Insatiable. Always happy to keep you on the wrack. Finally, there was that jaunty, ten-to-two gait and swinging shoulders that simply refused to sag, even when carrying his team through a tough day on tough pitches against the toughest of bowlers, giant bowlers who he would stare down, swear down, and more often than not wear down. The granite-hewn legend is well known.

However, Waugh is also – and always was, of course – a bright, articulate and open-minded soul, not only intensely aware of the traditions of his own culture but a pioneer in dragging the game forward, keeping it in step with (and sometimes a pace or two in front of) the changing desires of the audience. Most impressively, he used the wealth and fame that cricket has bestowed upon him to channel enormous quantities of financial and emotional assistance to the impoverished people of India (in particular, the Udayan leper colony in Kolkata). Here was a Baggy Green-revering citizen of the world; a humanist and humanitarian whose charitable impulses are blind to, and overflowed, national borders, nestling where need was greatest.

So it was that at the Trent Bridge library recently, I opened Waugh’s autobiography, Out of my Comfort Zone, expecting to see the gnarled Aussie warrior to have mellowed sufficiently to be able to express a certain amount of sympathy and suppressed admiration for English cricket, sentiments he was constitutionally unable to show while still competing against an opponent over whom his country lorded for all but the first series of a nineteen-year Test career (one that took in eight Ashes campaigns), a dominance in which he was as prominent as any of England’s other tormentors – be that Warne, McGrath, Gilchrist or whomever. 

Research took me to the Index, and there it was: the main entry for ‘English Cricket’, with a total of 14 sub-entries that, read as a list, provided an interesting…well, index of Tugga’s longstanding basic outlook on the old foe. Yes, there’s the caveat that this view is of only those sides that he faced, the calamitous, revolving-door years, and not ‘English cricket’ construed as some entity with permanent characteristics. There’s also the very real possibility that the indexing was not the work of his own hand. Even so, these 14 sub-headings are a gorgeous snapshot of an era of Aussie hegemony – perhaps contempt – from which England supporters will feel glad to have awoken, a summation in miniature of our myriad failings and the abject futility of our desperate hopes at the time that we might, might... They are a bullet-point bullet-proof indictment of why we didn’t have a prayer.

Readers of Out of my Comfort Zone wishing to investigate S.R. Waugh’s views on ‘English Cricket, 157’ could therefore have looked under the following headings, listed alphabetically:

English cricket, 157

Australian stranglehold begins, 273, 274

caught between youth and experience, 3

damned in the press, 114, 209, 609

‘dead rubber’ syndrome, 472

familiarity through county matches, 193

fear of Australia, 599

lack of self-belief, 496

lack of total commitment, 206, 207

local negativity, 609

no fun, 282, 283

poor fielding, 496

search for a captain, 609

volatile crowds, 600

weakness against spin, 497

In the same way that Waugh’s charitable works have transcended local, parochial concerns, I hoped my nationality would not overheat the passions and thus occlude the genuine tug of admiration I felt for this most cussed of cricketers, one who, from the moment he took guard – before, in fact – never, ever let his guard drop. Truly, the most formidable game face of them all. 

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GOWER PEN: INSULAR?

There are certain things that you can only really admit when there’s little left of your bedraggled, bullet-riddled reputation left to salvage, when one’s stock is a-tumblin’ and unlikely ever to be restored. So it was that, halfway in toward the collection of skeletons in the deepest recesses of my closet, I happened across a somewhat corny poem that I had written as an 18-year-old (which in itself is an disclosure I’d rather not make) about a cricketer I greatly admired. (I won’t say a hee-ro, ‘cos what’s a hee-ro...)

The uninspired title of this uninspiring eulogy was ‘Ode to Gower’; the verse was penned in a blizzard of delusional self-congratulation and speedily despatched to the man in question, then of Hampshire, from whom I received a gracious if understandably perfunctory reply (pictured below), more of which in a moment…

While its tone was undeniably mawkish, a younger generation might not realize that Gower hasn’t always been the slightly leathery anchorman for Sky Sports’ international cricket coverage, a polite middle-class ying to Botham’s bumptious yang (albeit with the same Bacchanalian streak). No, he was once the flashing blade of English cricket, a man who hooked his first ball in Test cricket to the deep-square fence and thereafter scarcely reined in his attacking impulses, gathering 8231 Test runs at 44.25 to lie third on the England all-time run-scorers list behind men of utterly opposing character in Gooch and Stewart, quintessential sergeant-majors both. That said, in his Cricinfo profile, former Wisden editor Matthew Engel speculates, baselessly, that “his devil-may-care attitude hid some complexities, perhaps even an inner loneliness”.

Anyway, despite his stellar record, Lord Gower was always viewed with a certain degree of suspicion by the joyless roundheads at the TCCB (antecedent of the ECB) and thus was often, it seemed, playing for his place. They saw him as a dasher, a dilettante, dangerous and distracting. A scapegoat in, um, goat’s clothing (well, coiffeuse). Capricious. None of which quite mitigates my poem’s bootlicking butteriness, of course…

However, the benefit of an improved understanding of my teenage psyche – otherwise known as revisionism – now permits me to explain all this away as a ruse: clearly, the phrase “good that fortunes at Moddershall are improving” implies that I’d taken the trouble to inform him of our circumstances (we were in our third year in the NSSCL, then a two-division league, and would that year win promotion), no doubt in an effort to get Gower, then in his last year of international cricket, to attend an event at Moddershall CC – you know, a race night, quiz, pool comp, that sort of thing. As it was, he was probably out hunting yak. In a tiger moth.

The presumption – or, I suppose, optimism (naïveté, even) – is pretty staggering, now that I reflect upon it. At that stage I no doubt thought it entirely reasonable that a former England Test skipper would pop up to rural Staffordshire as a heartfelt thank you for a piece of cruddy adolescent verse – I hadn’t gone through the Copernican revolution of the self, and therefore still thought everyone else was a planet orbiting me, the earth (the sun, of course, shone out of my arse).

Anyway, the point is this – I can now pronounce, as a sort of politburo of my adolescent id, that the poem is not the unambiguous hero-worshipping schmaltz of a teenager. It is subterfuge, designed to get a famous face to help out my club (altruistic version) and in so doing garner myself a vast dollop of kudos (egoistic version). Given the unlikelihood of it happening, however, I might just as well have saved myself the trouble (not that it was much trouble), wandered down to some cricket ground at which he was playing, and bellowed, in the manner of madmen the length and breadth of the land: “Oi, Gower – come cut this ribbon for us, ya gifted square-driving twat, ya!” 

As you can see, Gower’s reply was entirely in keeping with the persona now familiar to us from the Sky chair: indulgent up to a point, but firm. For those struggling with his handwriting, it reads:

Dear Scott,
Thanks for the letter – and the poem: familiar, but nonetheless appreciated sentiments. Good that fortunes at Moddershall are improving – I hope all continues to go well.
Yours sincerely, David Gower.

Now, if I were feeling particularly sensitive, the phrase “familiar…sentiments” could be interpreted as a withering assessment of the hackneyed ideas in the poem, as cutting as it would be for WH Auden or WB Yeats to endure a critique of their use of zeugma or chiasmus [insert clever use of zeugma or chiasmus]. That said, I wasn’t writing for the Bridport Prize. I simply thought, in my own insane way, that I could get him to Barnfields for a beer. I’m still Waiting for Gower…

What’s that? Oh, the poem. Here. If you must:


ODE TO GOWER  
There’s no finer sight in the game of cricket 
than to see David Ivon Gower strolling to the wicket
at Lord’s, the opening Test of the Ashes,
the first act of another of those titanic clashes –
he enters the fray at 20 for 2,
all England praying he can make a few.
Languidly he stands at the crease,
running fingers through that golden fleece,
awaiting the bowler – fairly quick –
he rocks back, then…a little snick,
he offers a simple catch behind.

“What must go through that lad’s mind?”,
sighs a Yorkshireman in the crowd,
“Bloody terrible!!” he screams aloud.
“First ball he faces is wide and short,
flamin’ obvious he’d go and get caught,
but could he leave the damn thing alone…
now our chances of winning are blown;
another cheap wicket the Aussies have bought,
Mr Gower out for bloody nought.
Now, you know I don’t like to criticize
but I don’t think the lad even tries!”
His young son tries to disagree
but the wise old veteran interrupts his plea:
“Look, son, you’re barely a youth –
Gower couldn’t care less, and that’s the truth”.

Second innings and England are deep in trouble
chasing 330, Aussies starting to bubble.
Remember the phrase “cometh the hour…”?
Well, out to the middle strode David Ivon Gower.
30 for 3 and backs to the wall,
our cavalier – on a pair – awaits his first ball…
Short and wide, it’s crashed through the covers,
up leaps the Tyke with Gower’s other fickle lovers
and yells “Well played, son, smashing shot!!!” –
what short memories some folk have got.

Australia’s bowlers begin to cower;
with perfect placement and latent power,
with cuts and drives, glances and flicks,
Gower moves effortlessly to ninety-six.
Desperate, the Aussies, to find a match-winner,
they toss the ball to their number one spinner
who flights it up, with a hint of drift,
but Gower just dismisses it with a roll of the wrists
and as the ball speeds away over the ropes for four
the prince of cricketers is a hero once more.
The crowd stood to proclaim a scintillating ton
and within the hour England had won;
Gower was back as the idol of the nation,
as he drank in another standing ovation.

Now, our Yorkshireman came to realize
just what he’d seen transpire afore his eyes,
and that night, before he went to bed,
turned to his beaming son and said:
“Some folk criticize the way that he plays
but if they could see him on his majestic days
when a cricket ground would be brim-full
just to see one commanding pull,
a lazy flick or elegant drive,
the sort that brings the day alive,
they’d forgive him the odd mistake
(something simple, as you or I would make)
because what he has just cannot be taught:
the man’s a genius, a true God of our sport!”

Now you now why I pay twenty quid a ticket,
just to see David Ivon Gower walk to the wicket. 

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