As surely as night follows day, or Barrichello follows Schumacher, so the collapse of yet another England cricket tour produces a deluge of suggestions on what must be done to improve the team.
One correspondent suggests the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) should pay Test cricketers ‘peanutsâ€. This, he says, would inevitably attract monkeys and clearly monkeys — quick, agile, brimming with self-confidence and full of the kind of mischievous good humour that defuses tensions in the dressing room — would do a better job than the current team. All true. Unfortunately I feel monkeys’ habit of hurling excrement at people would lead to problems with the match referee.
Another writer opines that the English game would take on new vibrancy if it were suddenly declared illegal. Intriguingly, the ECB’s marketing department has been toying with this idea for some time.
Ever keen to bring a younger audience to the game (or ‘facilitate the pre-job-market/cricket interfaceâ€, as chief executive Tim Lamb prefers to style it), a faction at the ECB has long held the belief that banning the game may be the only way to save it.
These insiders envision a time when outlaw cricket will recreate the rave scene of the early 90s and illegal Test matches advertised only by word of mouth will have thousands of kids driving round and round the M25 until guided to the venue by text messages. A slogan — ‘Sorted for Es and Wickets†— has already been green-lighted by Lord’s and a single recorded by the late Lonnie Donegan, The MCC Is Def and Phat, will be rushed out the minute any government ban is imposed.
Perhaps the most positive suggestion for improving playing standards in England came from the Australian Test player Tom Moody. Writing in The Observer, Moody attributed his countrymen’s superiority in the field to the fact that Australians spend much of their childhood throwing stones at road signs.
I have never been to Australia, but a friend who has assures me that Moody is quite correct. He says that the clanking polyrhythms created by millions of rocks smacking thousands of steel signs does as much to establish the tempo of life down under as does the beat of the samba drums in Brazil.
According to my friend, throwing stones at signs is so intertwined with the woof and weave of Australian society that many top universities offer it as a strand of their cultural studies courses.
Although Glenn McGrath’s arm is a thing of wonder, I wouldn’t like things to be taken quite so far over here. I see no reason, however, why throwing stones at signs, possibly alongside other cricket-related skills such as crouching and grunting ‘Bowled, Dobber!†in an aggressively pointless manner, shouldn’t be introduced as some sort of vocational qualification at our science and technology colleges. The question is, do we have the facilities for this to happen?
Moody makes no direct comment on the subject, but I infer that his experience of life in England has led him to the conclusion that we don’t. A cursory walk along a few of our byways shows he is right. Of signs there are a multitude and should the average high-spirited lad wish to hurl a pizza box or a McDonald’s carton at them he would find his needs amply provided for. Decent stones, though, are in short supply.
As a result, English youths seeking road-related high jinks are forced to make do with staggering about wearing traffic cones as hats. This is an activity that builds no cricketing skills whatsoever, though it does explain why British footballers lead the world when it comes to running laps of honour with trophies balanced on their heads.
Clearly this lack of throw-able rocks is a situation that must be tackled. ‘Every man his own football†was the slogan of the Berlin Dadaists; ‘Every boy his own stones†should be the war cry of the English cricket fan.
As to the signs, well, as I said, there are plenty of them, although they are perhaps a little on the large side. Making all council signs the size of a wicketkeeper’s glove would undoubtedly be an aid to accuracy. It would be better still if the stones were thrown not at immobile objects such as signs, trees or Richard Dunne, but at a moving target. Here a ready solution presents itself.
Much is made in this country of the lack of use we make of the experience and knowledge of our old-age pensioners. Surely this is a chance for them to put back into practice the survival skills they learned during National Service by acting as mobile Aunt Sallies? Clad in those metal dustbins that have been made redundant by the encroaching wheelie-bin menace and shuttling from the post office to Poundstretcher and back again, the pensioners would sharpen up our youngsters’ aim a treat.
They will attract converts, too.
After all, it’s hard to imagine many kids who wouldn’t take satisfaction from the doleful clang of an armoured senior citizen struck ‘over the top of the stumpsâ€. And I can’t help feeling the oldsters themselves would return home dented, yet fulfilled, having done their bit toward the revival of the summer game. —