My cousin Peregrine, a cricket fanatic, is visiting us. Well, not us, exactly. Out from England to watch the current Australian tour, he is unabashedly bumming on us.
“Wandaful to be with you, ha! ha!” he cries, the soul of perfidy, as he arrives. I respond with a smile that is, erm, wan.
From what he says, it seems that our Proteas are playing a series against the Australians. Responding to his enthusiasm, I have begun to follow the series. Despite my better judgement, I am succumbing to patriotism and vocally rooting for ‘us’. This is not easy, I must tell you: you can shout “vasbyt, bokke!” at a TV screen, but finding the right battle cry for a collection of flowers is another matter entirely. “Go, my posy!” is too naff to cut it, and “pollinate the budders” too esoteric.
I decide to put my problem to Peregrine. “Perry,” I begin affectionately, but he brings me up short. “‘Peregrine’, please,” he expostulates. “I am not a Yank.”
“Falcon hell!” I hear Noah say, sotto voce. This must be what he said. It squares with his personality. Noah can be ornithological if he chooses. He frequently gives me the bird.
I am quite thrown off track. In an effort to get back on it, I ask him if he is enjoying the tour. He preens himself. “Yes, very much indeed. It is in the finest spirit of the game.”
“What might that be, cuz?” chirps Noah. My impression is that the familial spirit has passed him by.
“Cricket,” says my cousin, “is the apex game. Much more than in any other game, the outcome depends on the conditions in which it is played. The state of the pitch makes a big difference. So does the weather, and so too the vagaries of the light.”
“‘Vagaries’, ‘vagaries’? What are they, for goodness sake?” I ask myself. I promise to look up the word when next I visit Grok. I forget to do so, but breaking promises is, I subsequently discover, one of the vagaries of life. Well, kind of.
Peregrine can scarcely be expected to respond to my musings. He doesn’t, and is in full flow.
“Unlike other team games, cricket pits the individual against the group. Out in the middle, the batsman is a solitary soul who must face a hostile force of eleven men who desire nothing more than to send him back whence he came.
“Rugby, football, hockey and so on match team against team. The sports are group versus group. Golf, tennis etc match individual against individual. But cricket confronts the individual with a group, everyone’s worst nightmare. This solitary figure, utterly isolated, this poor creature totally bereft, is forced to face a ravening horde spearheaded by a catapulting maniac who desire nothing more than to send him, if necessarily bloodied, back whence he came.”
“Come off it,” says Noah testily.
“Obviously you have never been in this position,” says Peregrine. “It is the place of total loneliness. It is worse than war by other means; in war, one army faces another, in this it is one against the rest. Think Horatio on the bridge, the gladiator against the lions, the ….”
“Enough!” cries Noah. “Enough. We are concerned with a game, just a game. This is not warfare, you know.”
“Sure, but it engages the same spirits. In both the players and the crowd. The same sense of purpose, both group and individual. This is us together, we take it for the team.”
I am moved to protest. “I wrote a piece recently in which I suggested that invoking patriotism or nationalism in support of sport was a mistake.”
“Did you, by God?” says Peregrine. “Well then, you made a big mistake. If diplomacy is war by other means, sport is even more so. One group of savages ranged against another until a victor emerges.”
“To understand as much can hardly please you,” Noah says, an edge in his voice.
“How so?”
“Well, if you are the stranger or foreigner your name suggests, you have no one with whom to identify.”
“Ah, what’s in a name?” says jesting Perry, but does not stay for an answer. For his welcome, however, he showed no reluctance to stay. Even outstay, I thought rather gloomily, as I waved him off on his peregrinations.
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