The cricket season 2020. Not quite the last summer
Uniquely, cricket is shaped by the forces of nature. The season starts in spring, a time of renewal, and ends in September, with conkers on the ground and woodsmoke in the air. Its charts an emotional course from hope to melancholy.
That Will Be England Gone, Michael Henderson 2020
Michael Henderson’s elegy to the 2019 cricket season is a ‘world we have lost’ book and I have some sympathy with it.
I started watching cricket in the early 1960s as a young boy and played it badly for the school side.
I get the excitement of the 50 and 20 over games but the battle between bat and ball is heavily skewed in these forms of the games to the former. The occasional six is a great spectacle. Several in an over seems excessive.
CLR James Beyond a Boundary sees cricket as an art forms mirroring the ebbs and flows of life and I still much prefer longer forms of the game and have no trouble at all with a draw. As trade union officer I know that’s how matters often work out in life even if I personally might prefer sharper outcomes.
Henderson’s book is well worth a read and he is certainly right that cricket does usually mirror the seasons. That’s only partly true in 2020. There was no cricket in April, May and June for reasons anyone reading this knows well enough.
There was however cricket in July, August and September and the season ends at Edgbaston this weekend, given the weather forecast, as a damp squib it would seem
Yet the 2020 season was not a damp squib thanks to Herculean efforts of players, staff, administrators and broadcasters.
The 100 which caused Henderson to write his elegy did not appear and we’ll see about 2021.
There was Country Cricket, there was a short form competition and international contests involving the West Indies, Pakistan and Australia. Women’s cricket also made a belated return and saw 5 T20s against the West Indies.
There were rarely any spectators but Sky and the BBC particularly for County games did a great job in making sure cricket could still be watched even if not in quite the circumstances one hoped.
There was also grassroots cricket without which the infrastructure of the game will eventually fail as interest and young players disappear.
Its not time to write the obituary for cricket yet, even if Henderson has a decent try.
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