Dialogue: Luck, misery, courage, heroism, subtlety - that's cricket

By JOE BENNETT

"Sorry but no," I said into the receiver. "It's kind of you and I'd really like to go. I just love Bulgarian films, especially from the 50s, those gritty black and white tonal values, that daring absence of plot, but it's just ... "

"You want to watch the cricket," she said.

"The cricket," I said with vehemence, "the cricket, exclamation mark. Yes, I do."

"Cricket," she said in the manner of a public health official diagnosing hepatitis, "is 20 boys who somehow got through puberty but didn't let it change a thing, wasting five days of what they like to think of as their lives playing a game devised in the 19th century to keep schoolboys from masturbating and the British Empire from revolting; a game that, if it ever had any virtue, has now surrendered it entirely to commercial interests."

"Twenty two boys," I said, but I might as well not have spoken.

"Haven't you noticed," she swept on, "that the team from this country is sponsored by an offshore telecommunications company and that the team from the other country is sponsored by another offshore telecommunications company and that the whole shebang is televised by a third offshore telecommunications company whose only purpose is to keep drongos like you rooted to the sofa, beer in hand and brain in neutral cramming pepperoni pizzas into your mouth for 50 years until you die?

"You're a dupe, a stooge, a dummy, a victim of commercial manipulation, a life form in suspension, a passive receptacle for trash, a donkey at the water wheel drawn ever forward by the synthetic allure of the business of sport. It's manhood by proxy, war by proxy, nationalism by proxy." She paused for breath.

"I wish," I said, "you wouldn't say 'offshore'. What's wrong with foreign?

"Or," I added conciliatorily, "even overseas". But she was in no mood for conciliation.

"The saddest thing of all," she said - and the word "said" comes nowhere near accommodating the rising swell of her passion - "are the people known as commentators, aged fools who once upon a time were young and played the game until their bodies betrayed them and who were then so deeply terrified of having to grow up that they scuttled like so many hermit crabs into the commentary box where they could bathe forever in the perpetual infancy of reminiscence and mendacity."

"I see," I said.

"Is that all," she snorted, "all you've got to say to defend the way you choose to spend a day of your life?"

"It ought to be," I said, "but since you ask, it isn't. Cricket's beautiful."

Her gasp was gratifying.

"Truly beautiful," I said. "Like you," I almost added, before wisdom stilled my tongue. "Have you not seen Shane Warne," I asked, "a man whose manner I find utterly repellent, a man who has the aura of a moral vacuum, a man whom I would cross the road to miss, but a man who bowls a cricket ball as Leonardo wielded paint?

"To watch him shuffle with his surfboy hair a few short strides towards the stumps, his wrist furled up, his fingers wrapped like tentacles around the ball and then to toss a leg break up in such a way that it will dip and curve and land and bite and spit and leave a batsman baffled - that, my dear, is beauty. Forget the artist - Leonardo after all had pimples and breath like Agent Orange - but love the art.

"And have you not," I added, "seen Stephen Fleming bat? He gropes and looks ungainly and then from furnaces where art is forged he leans onto a bent front knee and puts the ball past extra cover so sweetly that confectioners swoon.

"The right elbow may not be elevated as the coaching books would wish but that's the imperfection that makes beauty. There are moments when he conjures up a hint of David Gower, and praise can go no higher. Gower batted like the Holy Ghost in whites.

"I could go on," I said. "I could tell you of a dumpy little Englishman called Philip Sharpe who caught the ball at slip with such deft ease I swear that, had he wished, he could have plucked a swallow from the summer air.

"And even," I continued, "in these grim commercial times of sponsorship and chewing gum, the sport can still produce a game like the one that has just been, a game that over five long days swung one way then the other, a game embracing luck and misery along the way, and heroism, courage, subtlety and thought, a game of such intensity it drained the colour from my hair. And in the end it was a draw. Beat that for irony," I said.

"Beat that for simulation of the way we are. Beat that."

She couldn't. She'd gone.