I can’t believe that already two of this summer’s cricket test matches have already gone and we’re rapidly approaching the end of the third, as we career towards midsummer’s day and the sudden disappointing realisation that the damp darkness of winter is returning once again. Granted, with the amount of rain stopping play during the games so far, perhaps those winter days might not seem all that bad in comparison, but, for me, the summer ticking its way into memory is always marked by the passing of the test matches.
My own experience of an English summertime always seems to be punctuated by those long days of listening to cricket. One of the criteria I insisted upon when I was last looking for somewhere to live was that there would be an outside spot where I could place a chair and listen to the cricket on the radio on the occasional pleasant afternoon. A few years before this I had been on holiday in Ireland and my fellow holidaymakers had scurried away from the cottage we were staying in, going off in search of their own adventures, and I had been left alone to complete some dreary freelance job that had suddenly become desperately urgent just as I had been packing my bags to leave.
Buoyed up by the jolly chit-chat of Johnners and Co, my inept scribbles had been completed to nobody’s real satisfaction, and I was left with a large chunk of the afternoon in my own company to look forward to. Having entertained myself by going through everyone else’s luggage (no I didn’t really, but I just wanted to see if you were still paying attention), I settled down in the garden with a can of beer, a paperback book and a handy radio and awaited the return of my fellow travellers, and had a lovely restful couple of hours listening to the cricket in a beautiful and peaceful spot. This was the moment I wistfully looked back to when my house-hunting began in earnest, that small inner need to capture those fleeting moments when you consider yourself as having been “happy” for a while.
Car journeys are nowadays smoothed along in the jovial (and occasionally controversial) company of the Test Match Special crowd, and I can’t think of any long car journey in recent summers that hasn’t had Radio Four Long Wave as its soundtrack (my venerable vehicle is still very “analogue”) for at least part of the way. Occasionally trying to keep track of the game can be a little intrusive, like when I walked around the Tatton Park Flower Show one year with my little radio clamped to my ear, although that was a bit of an ice-breaker when the occasional chap in a Panama Hat would ask me if I knew the score. My life can all get a bit “Charters and Caldicott” every so often, especially if I just switch on to get an update and I have to listen to “CMJ” rattling on for ten minutes without mentioning the wretched score. I’ll find myself increasingly drawn in, sometimes with a crowd gathering, when I’ve just said I wanted to quickly check up on how things are going.
I have been known to bellow.
This year there will be seven test matches played in England and Wales making up our international summer, with a smattering of one day tournaments and with a few games in the young upstart format that is the 20Twenty game (I find them far too quick and far too loud. I like my games to me sipped not glugged…), so many of my days are likely to vanish by way of listening in, but at least you can do other things at the same time, rather than just slumping in an armchair and watching the game unfold.
The three match series against Sri Lanka is all but over and with the prospect of four more against India it is shaping up to be a lively old summer (if you like that sort of thing), but, before I even realise it, they will all be over and another summer will have slipped into autumn and I’ll be another year older and still as frustrated by the inevitable disappointing performances that have been displayed.
The test matches, or rather BBC Radio’s “Test Match Special” really are the soundtrack to my summer. Many a long hour can be spent in the garden with those jolly voices burbling away describing every ball as best as they can and commenting on them afterwards, as well as discussing the bigger world issues that tend to creep in which can always in some small way be linked to the complex world of international cricket.
Jonathan “Aggers” Agnew seems to be the enthusiastic glue that binds it all together nowadays, and I always look forward to when his cheery voice takes over the microphone. His many tales of his home life with his legendary wife in “The Vale” and his sometimes hopelessly naïve insight into modern life is always entertaining, as are the “View from the Boundary” celebrity interviews of which he is the chief interrogator, and his recent “double act” that he has developed with the no-nonsense “Sir” Geoffrey Boycott is now something else to look forward to and make the day more special.
Ah! Geoffrey!
Always tells it like it is, does Mr Boycott. Keen listeners now play a game known as “Boycott Bingo” spotting some of his many favourite little phrases, “I could’ve hit that wi’ a stick o’ rhubarb”, “My Mother could ’ave caught that in her pinny”, “The corridor of uncertainty”, and a recent positive cascade of references to “Uncovered pitches” managed to rattle around the Twitterverse.
Occasional games will include Henry “Blowers” Blofeld on the commentary team, the fruity-voiced, eccentric veteran of forty years doing the job. A happy greeting of “Henry!” will always greet his distinctive tones as he joins us to give his unique perspective upon the game, even if sometimes it doesn’t seem to be the same game any of the others are watching.
Another stalwart is “CMJ”, Christopher Martin Jenkins, he of the legendary lack of timekeeping skill whose constant bamboozlement with any kind of modern electrical device just seems to add to the fun.
Nowadays the summarisers, those voices picked to add extra insight to the commentators descriptions of the action (or lack of it) include wise old Vic Marks and the jolly fun that Phil “Tuffers” Tuffnell brings, managing to disprove the recent feeling that, like in a lot of areas of life, the dedicated but dull has replaced the flamboyant and colourful, and so the young ambitious sportsman seems to be so focussed on the glittering prize that he seems to have nothing of interest to say. I was rather disappointed when “Former England Captain” Michael Vaughan joined the TMS team, presumably to give it a more recent professional game-playing edge, because I’d always found him to be the dreariest of post-match interviewees in the past, but, apart from the occasional lapse towards being slightly too “Pro-England” in a supposedly unbiased commentary, and occasionally bringing up such lowbrow topics as “The X Factor” or “Britain’s Got Gullible Wannabe’s”, he seems to have blended in rather well. Rather sadly for this narrative, it wasn’t he who once found “F.E.C” carved anonymously on his dressing room locker, and wondered whether it meant “Future England Captain” only to get the reply “The ‘E’ stands for ‘Educated’…”
The echo of previous greats must weigh heavily on the shoulders of the new crowd. Iconic figures such as Freddie Truman (the first “Oh dear, oh dear. oh dear…” of the morning,..) Johnners, John Arlott and Trevor Bailey were so good at making it all sound so easy and amiable, that maintaining that kind of performance can’t be easy. So many mutterings of people claiming that “It’s not what it was” can’t be that easy to live with.
I’m always amazed when they can recite memories of games of long ago, some of which I must have listened in to, but, since the matches moved from being on my telly to the wicked world of Sky, seldom seen. For me it all becomes a bit of a blur, although I’m not sure you can have an audio blur, but, without the visual stimuli, I’m unlikely to picture those moments in my mind. Perhaps that’s the problem really. I can remember watching David Gower sweetly building a sublime innings when I was a teenager, but there are very few modern day players who I could pick out of a line up, and I always seem to miss most of the highlights or forget that they’re on. Sometimes that’s because, due to the weather, the game is sometimes still being played as the highlights start to air.
The first morning of the first test match of the summer always excites me in a way that’s hard to describe. Right from the moment when the version of “Soul Limbo” played by “Booker T and the MGs” blasts out from my radio, my mood lifts and I realise that summer is officially “here”. Rather sadly and strangely, it is exactly the same tune being played that can make me feel just as equally forlorn when it blares out after the final day’s play of the last match of the summer, usually on gloomy September’s evening, and, for me, always indicates that summer is over, and listening to the winter tour at bizarre time-shifted times of the day, is all I have to entertain me through another dark season.
Still, that’s a way off yet, so I’m just going to try and enjoy the moments that this summer will bring. We’re not even half way through this cricketing summer yet, so now is not the time to worry about that, but just to seize the joy on offer today.
Over to you, Geoffrey… What’s that? Your granny could’ve hit that with a what…?
Sorry Martin I never did get cricket.
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