So often poets' enthusiasm for the game of cricket outstrips their ability to write about it
THE POETRY GAME
In the top right drawer of my desk, tucked in among the bric-a-brac that I can't bring myself to throw out and the bills I never brought myself to open, sits one of my most treasured possessions. It is an old BASF tape cassette, and the spools of magnetic ribbon wound up inside its plastic case contain Harold Pinter's final interview.
One evening late in October 2008, almost three years ago to the day, I was in Pinter's study. Back then I was a terrified 26-year-old, utterly out of my depth in the company of a man who had always been - and still is ? a hero of mine. He had agreed to meet me because I had told him I only wanted to discuss one thing - cricket. Which we did, over two hours or so and a bottle of white wine. He spoke and I listened. Eight weeks afterwards, he died. I learned later that he had just been told by his doctor that he had to quit alcohol, but I still remember the relish with which he lifted the cold bottle and poured us each a glassful. I guess he knew by then that he did not have long to live, and was damned if he was going to deny himself a few final pleasures.
They put 500 words or so of that tape on the front page of the Guardian two days after his death, but the rest of the conversation has never been heard or read by anyone but me. I keep telling myself that some day there will come a suitable time and place to set it all down in print and publish it. This grey November morning isn't it. But I have been thinking lately about how I left him that evening. Exhausted and unsteady, he could hardly make it down the steps from his study and across to the front door to see me off. So he asked if he could lean on my arm as we walked. "Of course." His weight was heavy on shoulder.
We had to cross a courtyard garden to get from his study to his house. It was a clear night with a bright moon, and the grass was slicked wet with rain. We moved together, treacle slow, one painstaking step at a time. And as we went he began to recite a poem, Test Match At Lord's, by Alan Ross:
"Bailey bowling, MacLean cuts him late for one.
I walk from the Long Room into slanting sun.
Two ancients halt as Statham starts his run.
Then, elbows linked, but straight as sailors
On a tilting deck, they move. One, square-shouldered as a tailor's
Model, leans over, whispering in the other's ear:
'Go easy. Steps here. This end bowling.'
Turning, I watch Barnes guide Rhodes into fresher air,
As if to continue an innings, though Rhodes may only
Play by ear."
It is, I think, the only really good poem that has ever been written about the game. Now a less esoteric readership may well wonder just how much competition for that title there is, anyway, but, Guardian readers being such an intelligent bunch you'll all no doubt know that the answer is: a lot. Poets have been trying, and failing, to capture the game on the page for almost as long as people have been playing it; the first surviving match report was written in 1704, in Latin hexameters, by the Bristol schoolmaster William Goldwyn. "And o'er the grassy surface sweeps; with bended knee the batsman keeps a forward stance, to watch its way and mark it rise then sans delay his arms descend with lightning fall to smite again the ringing ball."
So starts the inglorious lineage of cricket poetry. Since then masses and masses of the stuff has been churned out. For some people it seems to be a compulsion. I've an anthology on my shelf that runs to all of 550 pages. Most of it is insufferable. Never more so, in my opinion, than in Herbert Farjeon's The Old Pavilion Bell, with its memorable refrain: "A faint high tinkle sounds a ghost-like knell / The tinkle of the old pavilion bell / Bong-bong, bong-bong, / bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong."
It is a little unfair to single out Farjeon. Plenty of better writers have also tried and failed. Pinter wrote plenty of mediocre verse on the topic as did Lord Byron ("Drive o'er the sward the ball with active force / Or chase with nimble feet its rapid course"), Lewis Carroll, GK Chesterton, Siegfried Sassoon, William Blake and, of course, dear old Sir Henry Newbolt with his "But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote ? 'Play up! Play up! And play the game!'" As Godfrey Smith has pointed out, what sort of captain worth his salt would say that? "'Drop your bat on everything and leave it to Blenkinsop!' would be a sight more sensible."
Some had more success than others. Generally the comedians have had more success than the tragedians. But still, so often with poets the enthusiasm for the game outstrips their ability to play it. And more often still their ability to play it outstrips their ability to write about it.
Nothing good can come of the impulse to write poetry about cricket. It is an exercise in self-defeat. All the more reason then, to stage a little competition. If you feel brave enough to put a poem on the page beneath this article, please go ahead. There'll be a prize for the one who wins the most recommends from the other readers. And if you're feeling fretful about putting your work up in public, draw strength and inspiration from this mini-masterpiece by Pinter:
"I saw Len Hutton in his prime / Another time, another time"
Flushed with excitement at what he had done, Pinter faxed that to 24 of his friends. A while later he rang one of them, the playwright Simon Gray, to ask what he thought of it. Gray's reply? "Er, I haven't finished it yet."
JUST SO STORIES: HOW GADDAFI STADIUM GOT ITS NAME
Lovers of esoteric stadium names will surely be sad to hear that it seems likely that one of the strangest of them all - the Gaddafi stadium in Lahore - will shortly be no more. Eight months after the UN security council first referred Muammar Gaddafi to the international criminal court because of his "murderous attacks on the Libyan population", and 12 days after he was shot dead, the Pakistan Cricket Board has finally decided that the name of the deceased despot just doesn't carry the right kind of connotations for a cricket ground.
It is all a bit of an inversion of a familiar old theory. It feels like a tornado in Texas has created a breeze that has ruffled a butterfly's wings in Brazil. Various papers are polling the Pakistani populace for suggestions as to what the new name might be.
But how did a cricket stadium some 3,525 miles away from Tripoli come to carry the name of a Libyan dictator anyway? To find the answer we have to go back to 1974, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was three years into his first term as Pakistan's first civilian leader and Gaddafi had been head of state in Libya for five years. Ali Bhutto was hosting the second Islamic summit conference in Lahore, a grand get-together of the heads of state from 37 Islamic nations. They were an eclectic bunch, including the Shah of Iran and Yasser Arafat, and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of Bangladesh. This was only three years after the end of the war of independence. As a way of wooing the Muslim world into supporting the Pakistani state at a time when India was conducting its first nuclear tests, Bhutto announced that several locations in Lahore would be renamed in honour of his fellow Muslim leaders. Lahore's Charing Cross district became Faisal Chowk, after King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and Lyallpur was renamed Faisalabad.
Thousands of Pakistanis filled the Lahore stadium, as it was then known, to see Gaddafi, who had been lauded by Bhutto as a great friend and benefactor of the nation, give a thunderous speech in support of their nation's right to pursue a policy of nuclear development. And so the gratified Bhutto rechristened the stadium in Gadaffi's honour. Soon after Gadaffi allowed tens of thousands of Pakistani professionals to immigrate to Libya, and started giving financial aid to Bhutto's government.
That would all be undone soon after, when Bhutto was succeeded by Zia-ul-Haq in a coup d'etat. Bhutto was hanged two years later. And yet somehow, even though Gadaffi exiled all the Pakistanis he had allowed into Libya and gave public support to the dissidents who opposed ul-Haq, the name stuck. Until now.
And so a curious little piece of history is about to come to an end which means The Spin can now salute Dick's Sporting Goods Park as the undisputed holder of the title for the most inappropriate stadium name in the world.
? This is an extract from The Spin, guardian.co.uk's weekly cricket email. To sign up click here.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/nov/01/harold-pinter-cricket-poetry
Christian Ehrhoff Oliver Ekman-Larsson Keaton Ellerby Taylor Ellington
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