Cricket: A Little Anthology

I hesitate to inflict it on the discerning souls who browse here, but - as the Ashes get under way (and what a start it's been!) - the English Cricket Board has unleashed something described as a 'poem'. Here it is:

#RISE

History will soon be made,
Upon the board,
Their honours engraved.
Nerves on edge, muscles tighten.
Jaws are set, knuckles whiten.
A dot ball passes, atmosphere heightens.
Those left standing: gods among titans.
They’ll deliver the fight, session by session.
The nation’s pride their only obsession
For one. For all.
The bat. The ball.
Old scores. New clashes.
Together we’ll Rise
For The Urn.
The Ashes.
For those unfamiliar with the game, I should explain that a 'dot ball' is one from which no run is scored (and for those unfamiliar with poetry - like whoever wrote this thing - a few rhyming line endings do not make a poem).
There's a fairly honourable tradition of cricket poetry, including the very strange At Lord's, written by the unlikeliest of sporting poets Francis Thompson (the opium-addicted vagrant best known for The Hound of Heaven). At Lord's was inspired by an invitation to watch Lancashire play Middlesex at Lord's - but Thompson didn't make it to the ground, preferring to sit at home and write the poem:

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,

Though my own red roses there may blow;

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,

Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.

For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,

And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host

As the run stealers flicker to and fro,

To and fro:

O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago !

It's Glo'ster coming North, the irresistible,

The Shire of the Graces, long ago!

It's Gloucestershire up North, the irresistible,

And new-risen Lancashire the foe!

A Shire so young that has scarce impressed its traces,

Ah, how shall it stand before all-resistless Graces ?

O, little red rose, their bats are as maces

To beat thee down, this summer long ago !

This day of seventy-eight they are come up north against thee

This day of seventy-eight long ago!

The champion of the centuries, he cometh up against thee,

With his brethren, every one a famous foe!

The long-whiskered Doctor, that laugheth the rules to scorn,

While the bowler, pitched against him, bans the day he was born;

And G.F. with his science makes the fairest length forlorn;

They are come from the West to work thee woe!

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,

Though my own red roses there may blow;

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,

Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.

For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,

And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host

As the run stealers flicker to and fro,

To and fro:

O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago !

 

The great Australian poet Les Murray wrote an uncharacteristically dull poem called The Aboriginal Cricketer:

Good-looking young man

in your Crimean shirt

with your willow shield

up, as if to face spears,

you're inside their men's Law,

one church they do obey;

they'll remember you were here.

Keep fending off their casts.

Don't come out of character.

Like you they suspect

idiosyncrasy of witchcraft.

Above all, don't get out

too easily, and have to leave here

where all missiles are just leather

and come from one direction.

Keep it noble. Keep it light.

And then there's A.E. Housman. Who but he could have written these lines (from A Shropshire Lad)?

Twice a week the winter thorough

Here stood I to keep the goal:

Football then was fighting sorrow

For the young man’s soul.

Now in Maytime to the wicket

Out I march with bat and pad:

See the son of grief at cricket

Trying to be glad.

Try I will; no harm in trying:

Wonder ’tis how little mirth

Keeps the bones of man from lying

On the bed of earth.

Well, there is a vein of melancholy, an elegiac as well as an idyllic strain, to cricket - something to do with nostalgia, the briefness of summer, of life. It's there, mingled with happiness, in the Duckworth Lewis Method's Mason on the Boundary... It is one of the many things lacking in the emptily triumphalist 2013 Ashes 'poem'.