One day, many seasons ago, Jon Hotten was on the field when a bowler took all ten wickets. In his memories, the afternoon has the quality of a dream. The ground was deep in the countryside, surrounded by trees. The boundary line was erratic and the sightscreens weathered. The match was won beneath a ‘perfect sky’. Hotten’s prose, simultaneously spare and lyrical, conjures up the scene as magically as Edward Thomas’s poem evokes Adlestrop.
What happened to the people who played with him on that day, Hotten wonders. ‘Have they had good lives since then? I hope so. Nothing ties us except that game, but I doubt that anyone who played has forgotten it.’ The reflection is one that cuts to the heart of why people who play cricket regularly over the course of their lives should so love and treasure it. Other sports too, of course, weave shared memories for those who participate in them; but there really does seem a peculiar quality, which Hotten captures as well as anyone who has ever written about the game, to the tapestry woven by cricket.
There are particular reasons why this should be so. Cricket — a sport dependent on good weather played in a country where it often rains — lends itself readily to the elegiac. Recollections of playing or watching it tend to shimmer like a heat-haze recalled in winter. Hotten’s truest theme, it can often seem, is less cricket than memory. Stuck in traffic one day, he writes, the road he was sitting on all of a sudden became familiar in a way that might have been either real or imagined. ‘Through a couple of fence panels that had warped and come apart from one another, I caught sight of a blade-width of green field and a fragment of a two-storey pavilion, then, in the next gap, a section of scoreboard.’ At once, he felt that he had played on the ground. He could remember the black hair of an opposition batsman, and the way that he had hit the ball, ‘not slogging exactly but swinging’, as overhead the summer clouds darkened. But was this memory, so fresh, so vivid, actually real? Hotten does not say. He drives on, and the view through the fence is lost. ‘These are the ghost grounds of half-remembered games, and sometimes they reappear, the place itself solid and real, the memory less so.’
It is possible that my appreciation of these meditations is enhanced by the fact that, for the past four seasons, I have been playing alongside Hotten for the Authors CC, and so am presumably now myself part of the mulch of his memories? I doubt it. I was a reader of his blog, ‘The Old Batsman’, long before I met him, and had come to admire him as the Montaigne of sports-writers well before we sat down to share our first cricket tea. His book is a distillation of everything that has made him such a distinctive voice: for Hotten understands, in his own humane and dryly humorous manner, that cricket is not disqualified from serving as a focus for serious reflection simply because it is a game.
The opposite, in fact. As he deftly demonstrates, the quality of cricket that can make the memories of it so equivocal renders it a perfect vehicle as well for exploring a whole host of ambivalences. The history of the sport, like an individual’s memory of the games in which he has played, can often seem far too rich and fantastical not to take on the character of myth. I defy any cricket-hater to read Hotten’s account of the fixture in 1846 between a one-legged team and their one-armed rivals (in which the one-legged XI’s number 11, Baldrick, was run out twice), and not glimpse the fascination of a ritualised activity that is capable of being simultaneously so entertaining and so cruel. The same tension is evident in much that Hotten chooses to write about. It is there in his account of Mark Ramprakash’s frustrating, gilded career; of the ability of cricket, exceptionally among sports, ‘to drive its participants to despair’; of his own teenage realisation that he would never became a first-class player.
Naturally, this is a book for cricket fans, and will be read, I would imagine, pretty much exclusively by them. Appreciation of Hotten’s talents, though, should not be confined to those who understand the LBW law. His next book, I hope, will be one that ventures beyond the outfield.