Making A Pitch For Cricket

The Indians toured England in the summer of 1971 and gave us a rare opportunity to see a world-class quartet of slow bowlers at work. Such bowlers are a liability on a percentage-playing team, since they can be hit over the horizon if they pitch badly. Very few national teams these days have the courage to use them often. The Indians did, and won the series. The finest of their snake charmers was a small bearded Sikh named Bedi, who has the picturesque habit of wearing a different-colored turban for each day of a match. I think if any visiting American had dropped in on one of the India-England matches and seen Bedi in action, he really would have given up on cricket. He would quite rightly have assumed the English team contained the best batters in the country—and what did he see? A bizarre mini-rajah taking three or four lazy strides, then pitching balls at the kind of speed that would disgrace an arthritic grandmother, balls which her 10-year-old granddaughter could clearly have slammed every time into the cricket equivalent of the bleachers. Yet here was the cream of England poking and prodding, missing and scrambling as if bewitched. Invitation after invitation to swing, and not a run scored—most of the time not even attempted.

Bedi's magic can be explained. It was based on miraculous accuracy. The slower the pitching speed, the smaller the area of optimum bounce becomes. At Bedi's snail-like pace he was down to the equivalent of infallibly hitting a dinner plate at 18 yards' distance—remarkable enough, even without all the other tricks of spin, flight, pace variation and angle of delivery arm that he employed. He never quite pitched the same ball twice, even in the longest spells, though to an American they would have seemed identical. Bedi was a perfect example of cricket's only too frequent unwatchability to all but other cricketers. For the neutral cognoscenti it was like being in the presence of a superb sitar player; for English patriots it was like watching children, your own children, locked up in a cage with a king cobra: for the rest, alas, Bedi must have seemed a final proof that cricket was invented in a lunatic asylum by an incurable catatonic.

Bedi leads me to one advantage, a fortune of history, that cricket has over baseball: the fact that it is played as well at the highest level by a number of other countries (all former parts of the defunct British Empire) as it is at home in England. Much more important in international competition than the prestige of winning is the esthetic broadening in style and technique that results. Each of the major cricketing countries contributes a special approach, a spirit, a mood.

The Australian approach is in a sense the most Americanized—the most free of unnecessary frills and graces, the most pragmatic. Australians play a little harder to win—on top form, a shade nearer the ruthless machine than anyone else. The other five major cricketing countries are India, Pakistan, South Africa (at present boycotted), New Zealand and the West Indies. The South Africans and the New Zealanders play the game more or less in the aggressive Australian mold. The Indians and Pakistanis are more temperamental—and perhaps especially when they are touring over here, since our climate doesn't suit their style of play. They need sunshine and hard ground. The Pakistanis have more panache, the Indians more subtlety.

But beyond any doubt the greatest contribution to the modern game has come from the smallest of the six countries—the West Indies. They have given to cricket something of what the American Black South brought to the history of music—a kind of élan, a new rhythm and vitality, an athletic grace, a joy and exuberance beyond the compass of any white race. For a start, they are born gamblers, which means that whenever a West Indian is near the action there is an indefinable heightening of the tension. Their finest batters have a very characteristic wristy strike, slashing and explosive, and like the finest black jazz players seem always to have something in hand over the best of their white rivals. A great Caribbean "bat" will show an acuteness of timing, a ferocity of attack, that is incomparable. Purists sometimes complain that they lack the classical elegance of the best English masters and the no-nonsense practicality of the Australian-run machines, but for sheer spectator pleasure they are in a class of their own, and in any case one might as well blame them for their inspired unorthodoxy as criticize a calypso for not being a Beethoven sonata. Many West Indian players have either settled here or come over for the summer to play in our major leagues, and English cricket is now unthinkable without their presence.

One happy result of all this is that the West Indians' cricketing popularity has helped the underprivileged position of their large community in this country. It is not only the way they play but the way they watch. West Indian spectators have as little inhibition as American baseball fans in telling the players—their own or the other side's—what they think. They have stood the English style of watching—silence broken by a polite clap—on its dull old head. A good shot they bellow for; a glorious shot they stand up and dance to.

A few years ago I was at a famous London cricket ground, the Oval, for the last day of a historic match between the West Indies and England—historic because for the first time the West Indies were close to beating England in the home series. The ground was packed solid with immigrants and native Londoners. There came a point in the final inning when it seemed the West Indies batting might collapse. The most dangerous fast bowler in the world is the Englishman John Snow, who has the build and a fair share of the temperament of an angry young bull. The West Indian batter facing him was a little man named Rohan Kanhai, about half Snow's size. Snow began to hurl bumpers, bouncing them lethally up round Kanhai's head. Since bumpers pass high over the stumps and are dangerous in a putout sense only if the batter tries to meet violence with violence, the proper strategy for Kanhai at that fragile state of the match was to duck down out of the way and wait the storm out. He did that a few times. Then Snow charged up and pitched what was evidently meant to be the bumper to end all bumpers—a thunderbolt straight between the eyes. This time Kanhai made an extraordinary midair leap to get up to the height of the ball and took a full baseball swing at it. It was the swiftest human reaction I have ever seen, totally improvised and totally without elegance, for after he made contact he fell fiat. Meanwhile, the ball was sailing high over the ground limit for the cricket version of a homer—a six-run score.

I doubt if Goliath has ever been more comprehensively slain. The whole crowd, white and black alike, roared its recognition. Every white spectator there knew it was a shot only a West Indian would have had the speed or the flair—or the madness—to attempt. The match was a formality after that. I watched the unique sight of working-class Londoners, not exactly the spearhead of the movement for racial equality in this country, loving the West Indians and all they stood for—and willing them on to the victory they eventually gained. When that came about, for a few unforgettable moments there was no color, no hate, no suspicion; just a common humanity.

And yes, in sad fact we still don't give the West Indians equal rights in our society, whatever lip service we pay to the race laws. Nevertheless, I like to think that what happened that day belongs to a real future. And I've left out one small detail. When Kanhai hit that unhittable pitch, Snow had for a moment the incredulous eyes of a steer poleaxed out of the blue. But then he did something rare in stricken Goliaths. He raised his hands and clapped. I think that's a better ending than the one in the Bible, and it will help me to a final definition. Those sullen and malevolent bumpers Snow kept pitching were not cricket; but that spontaneous clap was.

1 "Cricket," first clearly recorded in 1598, means a small stick-or bat.