From JM Barrie to Harold Pinter, cricket has for eternity had a close connection with literature, but it was Dickens who without knowing sponsored the Ashes…Samuel Beckett, the only Nobel laureate featured in Wisden. take pictures of: AFP everybody knows that cricket is a civilising game. Even Robert Mugabe recognised this, on one occasion. In the first flush of his country's independence, he is reported to have said, "I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe. I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen." further than fiction? Cricket brings a lot of strange alliances, chiefly in literature. Quiz addicts may know that Samuel Beckett is the only Nobel laureate to appear in the cricketer's bible, Wisden. I'm willing to bet, however, that not numerous cricket quizzers know that it was Dickens who inadvertently sponsored the Ashes. In the annals of the pastime, there are few stranger penalty of the novelist's strange celebrity. In 1861, a Melbourne catering company, Spiers & Pond, scared by the huge achievement of Dickens's public readings in Britain and the USA, invite the writer to do in Australia. But Dickens was tired and unwell, and declined. In quest of sponsorship, Spiers & Pond moved easily from literature to cricket, and asked an English team on tour. Some senior players accepted an offer of £150 apiece to travel to Australia and play a statewide series of matches. The Spiers & Pond contest was a great success. In 1863 the Melbourne Cricket Club invite more players. Eventually, the English cricketing organization reciprocated, with ultimately embarrassing penalty for the home team. But it is somehow appropriate that the Ashes series should begin with Dickens, the creator of that highest proto-Australian, Magwitch, the sombre offstage attendance who broods over Great Expectations. By the turn of the century, the wedding of ink and willow was complete. JM Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, AA Milne, and HG Wells were all keen players. The author of Peter Pan even fielded his own team, the Allahakbarries, a name derived, according to its captain, from the Arabic for "paradise help us" ("God is great"would be more accurate). In Edwardian times, it was as common for fictional London to meet at the batting fold as in the reading room. Conan Doyle, who used to hold a cricket week at home in Hindhead, was an talented batsman, and his protege, PG Wodehouse a useful medium-fast right arm bowler. By now, cricket had become less a game, more a metaphor for a way of life. English writers ranged from the fervently idolatrous to the merely obsessed. Some were rash enough to attempt capturing the mysteries of the game in the pages of their books. AG Macdonnell, in England, Their England, was famously winning, but misleading. His account is thrilling, and very funny but it's the intermittent tedium of the game that make it true to experience. A unforgettable Observer account of the batsman Chris Tavare noted that surveillance him bat was "a bit like waiting to die". Macdonnell wrote about village cricket, but the apotheosis of the game is the test match, especially an Ashes test. Tom Stoppard once said, of this supreme contest, "I don't think I could take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach its end". Stoppard's play, The Real Thing contains perhaps the best cricket speech in English literature: "What we're trying to do", says Henry , "is to mark cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might travel..." Baseball, I be sorry to say, does not come close. Americans have baseball novels (Malamud's The Natural, for instance) and "Casey at the Bat". Some Americans associate baseball and text, with names like Angell, Auster, Roth and Halberstam. We, who have cricket, an much richer game, can invoke fiction, drama, and, without breaking a sweat, the cricket poems of Byron, Blake, Betjeman, Tennyson and Pinter. Someone once said that Pinter's plays were analagous to a game of cricket: players rank around, apparently unrelated, in situations of excruciating tedium, occasionally uttering gnomic remarks before making mysterious exits. The measure of cricket's literary heft is the range of its appeal. James Joyce, intended for instance, has a tour de force passage in which he smuggles the slightly altered names of thirty one cricketing stars into the text of Finnegans Wake. More recently, Joseph O'Neill's outstanding novel Netherland contains many fine passages on cricket, and uses the game as a way to explore the life of New York after 9/11. Not all writers find such depths in the game. In Life, The cosmos and Everything, Douglas Adams has a satirical passage in which an "Ashes trophy" is stolen from the planet Krikkit. A magnificent man, but clearly not a player, or even a man.
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