Slapstick and Ashes
by Nicholas Lezard
June 2023
As he waits for play to finally get underway on the final day of the first Ashes test, Nick Lezard attempts to explain the sometimes-mystifying appeal of this longest of long games.
The thing you have to remember is, cricket is as much a state of mind as it is a sport.
It appeals not just to the sporty but to the unathletic, the contemplative, the geek. You can be tiny, weedy, overweight or freakishly tall and still be ok at it—sometimes at the very highest level. Every moment, even the dimmest fan is constantly computing run-rates and all sorts of complex statistics without apparently making any mental effort. The players, more crucially, are doing instant, unconscious computations of trajectory and speed from the moment after the ball has left the bowler’s hand.
And it is gladiatorial: until the ball is hit, it’s bowler vs batter only. The rest of the people on the pitch are just bystanders. Until they aren’t. People can and do get hurt—not too often, thank goodness; but having a hard ball thrown at you at 90mph, or hit straight at you at the same speed, is hair-raising. (Being made to look a Charlie by a ball bowled at half that speed is a whole other kind of humiliation.)
Cricket is stylised savagery: like jousting, but with deliberate imbalances. ‘OK: we’ll do this, where I have a horse and you don’t. Then we’ll do it the other way round.’ Only sometimes—to pursue the analogy into the ground—it is often unclear whether the person on the horse actually does have the advantage or not.
Oh, and the way England are playing these days is a complete and profound reimagination of the tactics and strategies of the five-day game, which changes everything we've thought about how to play it, but in the best possible way… except for the fact that sometimes it becomes almost Too Fucking Much.
And here’s the clincher for me: farce and comedy are never far away during even the most modest game. It is a rare cricket match in which there is no laughter at some point. In fact, there’s more in it than in any other sport. Come to think of it, you could actually call cricket ‘slapstick’, for that is what the game is, at its simplest: slapping something with a stick.
