WHERE IS THE LOVE?
In an excellent new book called Love Game: A History of Tennis, the novelist Elizabeth Wilson makes a passionate, partisan and even at times slightly flushed and sweaty case that tennis should be treated differently from all other sports. In fact tennis shouldn't be treated like a sport at all, but should instead be seen as a kind of burlesque gymnastic seduction, a business of passion and, above all, of love. Tennis, Wilson argues, has been tarnished by being lumped in with more mainstream sports, with their linear scoring systems, their slavishly enacted win-lose-draw dynamic. It should instead be kept apart from the world in its own tennis-shaped love-box, allowed to bloom and bud as it wishes, a thing of beauty to be stroked and cosseted and made much of.
This is probably a good idea, if only because there are few activities in life that wouldn't respond positively to being treated like a sensually supercharged pastime of nubile young gods. But then, the Spin would naturally disagree on the details here. The fact is tennis may be a convincing country club flirtation, and Wilson makes an excellent case. But there is, let's face it, only one true summer game and it isn't played with a fuzzy Dunlop. In fact, if the current World Twenty20 in Bangladesh has revealed anything so far it is that even in its most coltish and untried form, and for all the macro-anxiety of the last few years, cricket is still the real game of love.
The Spin, for example, has always loved Darren Sammy, whose ability to play high-level international cricket to any great effect has for some time been an entirely secondary consideration to his constant and very obvious delight at being allowed to play any kind of cricket at all. From his Test match seven-for at Old Trafford on debut, to the last few years of occasionally very effective cartwheeling, six-hitting cameos in Twenty20s, Sammy has been most notable for his ability to convey a sense of sheer competitive exhilaration in the simple fact of being able to carry on doing this. Twenty20 has been portrayed at various times in England as an irrelevance, a childish diversion, even a malevolent influence. But it was impossible to witness Sammy sprinting out to bat against England in Barbados earlier this month, almost beside himself with the drama of the moment, and not feel a huge wave of fondness for a player who appears to be if not the nicest man in cricket, then possibly also the nicest man outside cricket too.
There was something equally thrilling earlier this week about the sight of Nepal's left-arm spinner Shakti Gauchan leaping around the Zohur Ahmed Chowdhury Stadium during his team's 80-run defeat of Hong Kong, the kind of basic sporting joy that will always take the hard edge out of suggestions the spread of Twenty20 might be throttling cricket at its source like an aggressively territorial oriental knotweed. Where there is energy and verve and love like this – even when it is expressed in garish coloured clothes, in a format of entry-level textural variations – it is hard to find too much in the way of non-negotiable imminent doom.
Except, of course when it comes to England. Ah yes. England, a team who have achieved the rare and even strangely admirable feat of taking the most agreeably lightweight format yet devised and transforming it into a lead-weight formality to be joylessly endured, and who seem certain to spend the next three weeks slumped in their plastic bus shelter teeth gritted, eyes rolling, trudging out to the middle like resentful schoolboys being forced to dance in school assembly.
Losing isn't the problem here – and England have won just two of their last 10 Twenty20 matches – so much as the manner of losing, the dogged refusal to engage, the tortured, fretful batting, the callow death bowling, sense at all times of being forced to undergo some horribly traumatic form of public humiliation. And above all the sense even now that English cricket at all levels from elite administration to head coaches really would prefer it if this form of cricket simply hadn't been invented in the first place.
Well it has! Suck it up! Albeit where England are concerned the sense of disconnect goes deeper than this. So much so it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a failure to embrace properly the shortest form has had a debilitating effect not just on England's ability to play Twenty20 cricket, but all kinds of cricket. If this is your sport's most visible, expansionist, energetic form, and you so obviously and publicly hate taking part in it … Well, it isn't hard to see issues further down the line. Not least at a time when English cricket already has plenty of problems that are entirely unconnected to an ingrained inability to bat successfully in the powerplay.
The broader issue is more a sense of alienation. What, really, is the point of England winning cricket matches? When India won the World Twenty20 it seemed to mean, at least to Indians, that India was a vital coming nation intent on remaking the cricketing world in its own neophyte postcolonial image. When West Indies won the World Twenty20 it seemed, however briefly, to re-state the relevance and adaptability of West indies cricketers, who may no longer be part of a Test match powerhouse, but can still produce a bold and skilful team of island nation world champions. If, say, Sri Lanka win this time around it will mean that something somewhere within a chaotic superstructure of scratch cricket, street cricket and a small cartel of private schools has been done right. There will be something to celebrate, to love even.
On the other hand, what did it mean when England won the World Twenty20? Looking back it seems to have meant not that the system was working, but that the system was being very effectively managed in the short term. Unfortunately, sporting provenance comes into this a little bit. This is a point not about passports or sporting migrancy but about systems and broader connections, and a national summer sport that draws all its current wealth from a declining but energetically exploited sense of being thoroughly embedded within the culture. In World Twenty20 terms it is a minor footnote of England's 2010 victory that only 18 balls of their two team innings in the semi-final and final were faced by a batsman with an English accent – Paul Collingwood: 10 and 12 not out – while men who learnt their cricket in Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg and Dublin demonstrated to the world that for the first time at an ICC tournament England's top order had worked out how to shed its inhibitions and play bold and fearless cricket – (specifically, by delegating the task to men from Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg and Dublin).
This is no big deal on its own and Craig Kieswetter, Michael Lumb, Kevin Pietersen and Eoin Morgan are all fair-and-square English cricketers. But it should come as no surprise that there is no equivalently-skilled generation at their backs. These are not products of any coherent and repeatable domestic sporting culture. They are instead gifts to the system, drawn to play in England by opportunity and happenstance. The ECB lucked out. Beyond this while England were busy enjoying their most successful period in modern times the sport itself was engaged in shrinking back from the broader public, insulated behind its TV paywall, increasingly absent from urban state schools, marginalised further by the selling off of public spaces and school playing fields.
In the end victory in the World Twenty20 was a victory that basically led nowhere. It remains the fact that no England team in cricket football or rugby union has ever won a major trophy twice and England scarcely look like breaking the habit over the next three weeks. Ashley Giles's team will contain five players who played in that final in Bridgetown, only one of whom, Stuart Broad, has actually improved in the last three years. But beyond the stagnant personnel, there is above all a sense of gloom, and of joylessness. Twenty20 only really feels like the death of cricket when you play it like England do. The current team isn't simply lacking in skills, but energy, innovation and any real sense of wanting to do anything but poop the lucrative cricketing party currently taking place beyond its own sphere of control.
This is already a hugely important year for English cricket, and for unusual reasons too. The issue here is not results. It is instead a question of identity, of disconnect, of a sport so wrapped up in its own self-serving plc management structure it seems to hover above the British sporting public like a distantly orbiting death star. What is English cricket for? How is it possible, really, to love unconditionally a team that seems to be cocooned within a self-supporting structure of vested interests: coaches, players, administrators, all whom appear to think this aggressively retailed blue Lycra machine that was once the England cricket team is there to do something other than simply serve and represent the public.
Cricket, like the railways, can never be renationalised. It was also, lest we forget, an occasionally farcical business in those pre-modern British rail days. Plus, of course, a few favourable results can still disguise once again a multitude of ills. But if cricket is still the game of love, this is a passion that needs to be nourished, and not simply by an endlessly conjoined and exploitative playing schedule. This sense of emotional disconnect – rather than, say, the lack of opening batsman, spin bowler and first choice wicket-keeper – is the biggest issue facing English cricket this summer. Playing with a little joy under pressure in Bangladesh would be a fine way to start.
• This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian's weekly cricket email. Sign up here.
