30 November 2011

Right, then

It's just as well I actually read the sports section today, because I mightn't have otherwise twigged that the cricket season starts tomorrow.

I've obviously been in a bit of denial about the whole cricket thing, which is partly the whole "if a wicket falls in a foreign land and is not broadcast on free-to-air TV, did it really happen?" thing, partly the whole "if this is the start of the cricket season then this year is definitely done and dusted and what have I done with my life?" thing, and finally, obviously, the whole "Oh God, Australian cricket" thing. I can barely look.

I will, tomorrow, because the start of the cricket season is a ritual unto itself, and that's something to be observed even when the actual watching doesn't promise much fun. Let's play Polyanna again: New Zealand can be a dashing lot and I'll have my jar out for all the new bugs.

And let's sink the whole "cricket book-Chinaman" thing, too, to start the season off with a clean slate. It was so offhand and breezy when it first popped up in my life, but has grown concrete feet.

A couple of things I'll salvage:

1. I was talking to a (non-cricket-watching) friend how the elusive figure at the centre of Chinaman could only be a spinner, that there were no "mystery fast bowlers", though in the course of that I did find myself "explaining" to her (it's good when your friends know nothing about cricket, you can tell them anything) that bowling in general was the more cerebral art in cricket. When I started being interested in cricket, my father "explained" to me that bowling was the "working class" art in cricket, and at the intersection of those two ideas lies a whole history of cricket, class and colonialism, which Chinaman partly draws on. PS I also just enjoyed reading it, it's funny and well-written.

2. I bought a little secondhand Pelican paperback from 1964 called "Learning to Philosophize" by E.R. Emmett, because it's always interesting how people approach these things, and I suppose I had to buy it when I flipped it open and in a chapter on "value judgements", saw this:


It's very interesting what Emmett says about this. He starts off by talking about what we mean when we say "A is better at chess than B". Because "Chess is a game and the object is to win", being better at chess is about winning more often. There's a bit of debate about whether "winning more often" means "has won more games in the past" or "will win more games in the future" - and therein lies a selector's debate in itself - but ultimately when we say someone is better at chess, we mean their aptitude for winning, and it would be using the term "better" in an "odd and irrational" way if we were basing our judgement on stylistic considerations, eg. that A was a "lively, attacking, enterprising player" whereas B was "dull, stodgy and safe", regardless of who won.

Then comes the comment pasted above. In cricket, a better batsman might have made more runs or potentially make more runs, but aesthetic considerations also come into play: I might call A a better batsman "because I find his style more pleasing, attractive", so this is an extra thing to analyse out when you're working out what someone means when they say "better". Learning to philosophise yet? Such fun people.

What's interesting to me is that, working backwards, Emmett is implying that, to a certain extent, and to its observers at least, cricket is not a game and the object is not to win, and I can't decide if there's another class issue here. Is this Gentlemanly hauteur with regard to vulgar concerns like winning? Or an acknowledgement that cricket is a spectacle as much as a contest?

That was all. Bring on the dancing boys.

15 November 2011

Peter, Peter, Peter

What to say about Peter Roebuck? It’s always disturbing when the group loses one of its members, and he seems to have been a very lost sheep indeed and maybe for a long while.

I don’t think it’s disrespectful to say I often found him a very silly man. You don’t have to be a “tormented genius” to earn affection or be entitled to be mourned and I think there’s an element of hysteria in the accolades that have come from his colleagues in the last 24 hours. They protest too much. Starting with Greg Baum’s He was tormented as only genius can be. The circumstances of his death attest to it. I might be misreading the stress here, but surely the one thing that the circumstances of Peter Roebuck’s death attests to is all the reasons a person can be tormented apart from because they're a genius. And Malcolm Knox's citation of a remark made about Roebuck before his death: Peter could have been anything, a professor of literature or a High Court Judge or a political leader.” Could anyone, given the historically established facts, be a more spectacularly inappropriate High Court Judge? Is anyone more unimaginable as a political leader?

A professor of literature, I’ll buy, and Harsha Bhogle is probably on to something when he says that Peter Roebuck was born to write about cricket. Cricket writing is a natural home for Spartan values blended with excessive prose and clearly I know of what I speak. But contra Harsha, Peter Roebuck was born to write about cricket in exactly the opposite way to how Tendulkar was born to play it, because the latter is the triumph over the proprietary rights of imperialism rather than their expression. There was a lot of Imperialism in Peter Roebuck - his global drift, his missionary zeal, his tragically misplaced applications of muscular Christianity. But he also played against type, he was often refreshingly pragmatic and progressive in his views on the evolution of cricket and I appreciated that.

I do think it’s disrespectful to gloss the unsavoury parts of his life as “flaws”, and I do mean disrespectful to him, though not only to him. If you can’t be seen plain after your death, you’ve been erased in a way that’s more sinister than dying. Committing suicide was Peter Roebuck's final feat of eloquence and the least we can do is listen to what he was saying.