Review: Archie Henderson

Howzit! Howzat! – Bites of cricket, by Nick Cowley (Southern Right Publishers)

Nick Cowley is offering, as the sub-title of his book says, bites of cricket – morsels, you’d think. Instead he provides a feast.

Our cricket has a rich, if chequered history. On the field it produced a series of inconsistent results, more often losing than winning. Off it, there was often heartless discrimination (the deliberate exclusion of Krom Hendricks from the 1894 tour to England and the enforced exile of the more famous Basil D’Oliveira being the most notorious).

Cowley does not belabour those issues, which have been extensively dealt with in many other books. Rather he goes after some of the fascinating tidbits, often hidden in the minutiae of scorecards. John Arlott, who brought the game into many homes on the wireless with his articulate, leisurely and distinctive burr, described the cricket scorecard as “at once the most compressed and the most expansive form of literature”.

Surely no other sport has contributed more to English literature, as Cowley points out in the chapter on “Greyhounds in the slips”, an allusion to Shakespeare’s Henry V, who describes his soldiers’ eagerness for battle, rather than fielders waiting for the batsman’s edge to carry to their eager, and hopefully safe, hands. Arlott would often use such vivid imagery in his commentary.

Along with such nostalgia, Cowley focuses on our cricket history since unity in 1992. It wasn’t an easy birth, with suspicions on both sides of the great racial divide. How many South African cricketers were denied the opportunity to play for their country? Hard to be exact, but Cowley singles out CEB Rice as the best never to have won a Test cap. There might have been others, contemporaries of Rice or predecessors. Even today there will be debates, but no one can say the chances have not been equal – more or less.

There has also been the existential crisis of Hansie Cronje’s knavery – a scandal that brought the game close to terminal collapse. It might have, if not for government and officialdom’s gerrymandering to cast Cronje as the sole villain of the piece.

Arguments over selection are less tendentious and will never end, but we can at least agree that the cricket we have seen over the past 30 years has been fabulous, occasionally verging on the epic. The “438 Game” at the Wanderers in the autumn of 2006 will often spring to mind. In that one-day international, Australia seem to have scored an impregnable 434 – until South Africa wiped it out, Herschelle Gibbs leading from the front with 175 (allegedly with a hangover).

Even the opponents have enthralled us. There has surely been no better exhibition of batting than in the New Year’s Test of 1997 at Newlands when Sachin Tendulkar, partnered by his skipper Mohammad Azharuddin, made 169 before falling to a spectacular catch on the boundary by Adam Bacher. Tendulkar’s astonishment at the feat was memorable – and Cowley recalls it brilliantly.

Don’t get the idea that the book is parochial. Cowley distributes his memories and praise across the globe, but allow me to add a tail-end bit to this delightful anthology. It concerns the art of legspin, revived in our lifetime by the great Shane Warne – and occasionally on the final day of a Currie Cup match at Newlands by Denys Hobson of Western Province (like Clive Rice, another unfortunate victim of the era of exclusion).

In 1906, South Africa had one of those rare victories, beating England 4-1 in the five Tests, thanks to the art of legspin. The wrist-spin artists of the day were Aubrey Faulkner (an allrounder so brilliant he still finds a place in the Greatest South African XI of All Time), Reggie Schwarz, whose memorial is outside the Wanderers clubhouse, Berg Vogler, and Gordon White. Four legspinners in one team!

White may be relevant today. Towards the end of World War 1, he led a group of South African soldiers on an enemy (Turkish) position. The soldiers were coloured but the South African government had refused to arm them, so they were part of the British army. The position was captured, but White was killed in the action. His grave still lies close to where he fell, but it may not still exist. He was buried in Gaza.

Enough self-indulging. Cowley has done phenomenal work and research in putting this book together. It is a leisurely read for the summer and I’m sure even John Arlott, a discerning critic, would agree.