The Name Of The Game

 

At Law school, one of my lecturers wrote an academic paper called 'The Man In White Is Always Right'. It equated the Law with the game of cricket.

I grew up in a family which loved cricket, and to this day can watch a match on television from beginning to end with some knowledge and great enjoyment, following the changing tides of fortune of the competing teams. 

There are many great players to call upon, when thinking about the embodiment of cricketing ideals, conduct and standards. Name after name, face after face. Great matches, fantastic catches, the thrill of unexpected spills and dismissals, and rapid collapses of the batting lineup. Those strategic spin bowlers, those thunderous fast bowlers. The way the players move and act together, intuitively and imaginatively, in accordance with the conditions of the pitch and the situation. 

Some people - including my former professor - say that these one day matches, with the players in coloured uniforms blistered with logos representing sponsors, destroyed the great game. 

My favourite players include batsmen and bowlers from many countries and eras. But the person who I most admire as a player and personality is the great Donald Bradman. Others were fiery, dramatic, fierce or stylish, with sweep shots, wild flourishes and majestic sixes. But there was a consistency in Bradman’s performance that I found enormously reassuring. I only knew him as a legend, and saw archival footage of his great matches, but there was a focus and a concentration in his approach that made sense of the world to me, as I watched. 

I liked him because he always gave of his best, and had high personal standards of performance. No tantrums, spasms, self-indulgence or self-pity. Full accountability, and a commitment to self improvement. I have heard he did not endear himself to his team-mates because he did not buy them drinks after the matches or socialize with them off the pitch. He was no people pleaser. A private man; a reluctant public figure. 

Recently I was missing him, and the qualities he represents for me, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. And I found there a bar graph chart clocking his batting scores throughout his career. It was eye-opening. His consistency was remarkable. You could see his steady growth and his consolidation and extension past previous limits. You could see him, teaching as a player, testing himself, stretching himself and what he was capable of, increasing his personal territory. 

I resolve to print that bar graph out in colour and use it as a wall chart, like a vision board. The inspiration in the fluctuations remind me to look at the momentum built over time. To see how great records and lasting achievements are built. 

I am no mathematician, and most of the inspiration I found in my school lessons was in literature classes, but there was one moment in geometry class one life-changing day when the teacher was able to explain to me that a line was made of infinite individual dots. 

I actually saw it, in my mind’s eye: the line and the dots superimposed together, like a simultaneous double vision - not one or the other, alternating, but both at the same time. 

This is what the game of cricket, with its kaleidoscopic unfolding sequences, represents for me. Each game, test and match. The way the field and the formations of players are created to adjust in fine attunement with the player on the crease, who is ‘the still centre of the turning world’.

That characteristic style, so distinctive, developed by Bradman, was the result not of intermittent flash and dazzle but of day in and day out: hard yards, consistently well played. Those mighty scores, those double century averages, gave the spectators space and time to watch the lines of his mastery increase, point by point.