By Richard Williams/The Guardian
A lot of people remarked that Stuart Broad’s eight for 15 in Australia’s first innings at Trent Bridge was the sort of thing you might expect in a schoolboy match. That was precisely what made it so enchanting. Here was cricket, at its most exalted level, reminding us of the innocence of the game in its pristine, prelapsarian state.
You don’t have to be a top-class bowler to know the feeling that arrives on a day like that, when everything comes right: the body feels good, the conditions are offering just a little assistance, the ball goes in the right place time after time, and the batsmen can’t seem to help themselves as they fall one by one. A combination of factors that could be ascribed to luck is really a reward for all the days on which fortune doesn’t smile. As Broad walked towards the applause of the Trent Bridge members, with the opposition all out and still 20 minutes to lunch on the first morning of an Ashes Test, he would have felt no different from a 12-year-old accepting the congratulations of his schoolmates.
Broad is not the easiest man to warm to, particularly if you fall into the category of people who think that Dave Podmore, the caricature of an English professional cricketer – mediocre in talent, married to a lap dancer and obsessed by the size of his sponsored car – created for this newspaper and Radio 4 by Andrew Nickolds, Christopher Douglas and Nick Newman, was not that much of an exaggeration. Right from the beginning of his career Broad has been a “spokesman” for this obscure leisure centre or an “ambassador” for that brand of supermarket wine. But at Trent Bridge, with his team needing him to excel in the absence of Jimmy Anderson, all that nonsense fell away and he rejoined the company of those who play cricket purely for the love of it.
Joe Root gives the impression of never having left that company, and his unbeaten century before the close later that day brought a second helping of joy to those lucky enough to be there. Root is 24, and has already passed his 30th Test, but the air of a gifted and carefree schoolboy clings to him. Perhaps it always will. His youthfulness, however, is tempered by a tough streak that will surely make him an outstanding successor to Alastair Cook, whose own experiences in this series remind us that it is exactly a year since the jury of former England captains was calling, with virtual unanimity, for his head.
The sunlit pleasure of Trent Bridge is echoed in the pages of Half-Time, a new book in which the author, Robert Winder, looks back at the summer of 1934, when Hedley Verity took 14 Australian wickets in a single day at Lord’s, Fred Perry and Dorothy Round captured the Wimbledon singles titles and Henry Cotton won the Open Championship at Royal St George’s. What it makes the story resonate eight decades later is that those feats were achieved at a time when, in Winder’s words, “the world felt heavy and uncertain”: as the forces of Nazism gathered in Germany and millions died in an engineered famine in Ukraine, anti-poverty protesters were marching from Scotland to London, where Blackshirts rallied.
Last week’s sporting drama took place against a backdrop featuring the charismatic barbarity of Isis, an undeclared proxy war in Ukraine, the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and a widening gap between rich and poor at home.
But still it was a day of days, the greatest day of a summer in which English cricket struck back not only against the oldest enemy on the pitch but against the forces attempting to change the nature of the game in the cause of modernisation, some of them exposed in a documentary which went on limited cinema release on the very weekend of the drama in Nottingham.
“The eternal pursuit of more” is the telling phrase coined by the makers of Death of a Gentleman, Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber, to describe the greed of those men in India, England and Australia seeking to keep the game’s now vast profits out of the hands of smaller nations, not least by reducing the opportunities for those countries to participate in the big tournaments. The ICC’s Narayanaswami Srinivasan and the ECB’s Giles Clarke – the two principal targets of a superficially larky but fundamentally serious film – seem to exist in a universe very different from that of the average fan, who would surely welcome cricket’s inclusion in the Olympic Games, not least because it would ensure automatic funding in places where the game is trying to establish itself.
If the first day of the fourth Test at Trent Bridge seemed like a return to an age before the ICC moved its headquarters to Dubai, then so has the whole summer, with the two series against New Zealand and Australia forming a manifesto for the preservation of Test cricket in the face of those declaring it obsolete. First came the Kiwis, persuaded by their captain, Brendon McCullum, to play the game with such a wonderfully progressive and adventurous spirit that England could only cast aside their anxieties and join in the fun, even if it meant Cook taking nine hours over an innings of 162 at Lord’s while Ben Stokes made merry at the other end.
Then came the Ashes, and a roller-coaster sequence of truncated matches in which every session has seemed to provide constant excitement, showing the influence of T20 on the long-form game. At Trent Bridge this was to the detriment of Australia, whose batsmen mislaid the techniques of digging in and grafting, of watching and leaving, that are the traditional escape routes from a parlous position. It may be that in next week’s fifth Test they will borrow England’s habit of salvaging some honour in a dead rubber at the Kia Oval to give Michael Clarke a final victory before his international retirement.
By claiming a series victory against such opposition, England have not necessarily become world-beaters in the course of a single summer. But their feats have enabled them to dismiss a number of the more tiresome sub-narratives, not least by ensuring that the shrill cries for the return of Kevin Pietersen will never be heard again, for which they deserve our heartfelt thanks. And in a world that feels no less “heavy and uncertain” than it must have done in 1934, they made the sun shine.