Of mad dogs and gentlemen

Cricket, luv'ly cricket, conjures visions of white-garbed gladiators prowling manicured green pitches and the prospect of thinly sliced cucumber sandwiches on a sunlit, Sunday afternoon. But to aficionados of the sport the mere sounds and smells associated with the game, such as the sharp thwack of willow against spherical leather or the reassuring reek of linseed provide an indescribable thrill.

In the purists’ lexicon, however, cricket is decidedly more than just a game. To its devotees it is a creed, a religion of sorts, bordering on idolatry. The cricketing credo upholds a great many traditions and chivalrous attributes, fiercely adhered to even in this competitive age.

Kipling's lines lampooning the game and its adherents with “The flannelled fool at the wicket,Óhave been unable to deter generations of cricketing enthusiasts. Still, the game has more than its share of detractors, with perhaps the most derisionary comment being this one, immortalised by Noel Coward but based on a Bengali proverb: “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun”.

Cricket-crazy Englishmen will, doubtless, be pleased to note that mad dogs and gentlemen from parts of the world as diverse as Australia, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Zimbabwe the West Indies and Bangladesh have often managed to beat them at their own game.

And the sport in Brittania's former wide-ranging colonial empire, on which the sun never set, has reached pandemic proportions. In Sri Lanka, for instance, when the national team is engaged in an international test or one-day game, the whole country grinds to a halt. Yes, the battle of the willow has even taken precedence over the thrust and parry of parliamentary debate and matters of state in this nation.

It all goes to demonstrate the fact that the entire country, from Colombo's social parlours to the rustic backwoods, is more than a bit cracked about cricket. The average Sri Lankan is decidedly Anglophobic while yet professing to be nationalistic.

The game itself has created a stupendous number of armchair critics from every walk of life particularly after the national team's World Cup victory in 1966 became part of the mythology of Sri Lanka. Cricketers are a breed apart, men who exude a distinguishing sort of brio and panache.

They have about them a certain indefinable charisma, a feature seldom encountered among participants in most other sports.

Essentially, style is the name of the game. A batsman's cool, deliberate walk to the wicket to take strike, a bowler's run up and arm action, a fielder's prowling stalk, all typify the great civilized nature of the game.

It is a sport that calls for skill, technique, speed and pretty fast reflexes. A stylish batsman dancing down the wicket to dispatch the leather in a blur of red to the boundary, or a fielder making a seemingly impossible acrobatic catch are all part of the magnificent and always unpredictable sport. But there is a special elegance about a batsman in particular, who is able to play a varied repertoire of strokes: cuts, drives, pulls, hooks, glances, sweeps, lofts and cautious forward defensives. To the uninitiated, cricketing parlance may sound a bewildering complexity of the most fanciful terms and phrases. It may prove mind-boggling at the beginning but comprehension soon dawns on those determined to learn cricketing terminology.

Perhaps I could offer a few tips to the totally ignorant on the jargon which is often replete with seemingly ever-so suggestive terms and sometimes shades of double entendre. “Bowling a maiden over” is not another term describing the act of a successful lecher. It is simply a phrase used to describe a bowler who has completed his six-ball stint without conceding a single run. Again,'fielding in the slips’ has absolutely nothing to do with transvestites or men with similar aberrations rummaging through piles of frilly, feminine lingerie. It means fielding in a position behind the batsman, waiting for him to nick the ball. And a ‘nick’ should never be associated with a player's penchant to pilfer. A ‘square’ or ‘late cut’ is decidedly not a fresh, prime piece of meat off the butcher's block. A ‘cutter’ is certainly not a slicing implement nor is it an ancient schooner. In the same vein the word ‘googly’ is not trivial baby gobbledygook for a glutinous jelly or a jujube and a ‘flipper’ has absolutely no association with the affectionate dolphin of movie fiction.

There are other bizarre names for fielding positions such as ‘gully,''mid-on,''mid-off,''short leg,''square leg’ and ‘point.’ So don't for a moment imagine that the men positioned at ‘silly-mid-on’ and ‘silly-point’ are mentally retarded.

Commentators are not necessarily gay when they refer to a fielder as ‘fine-leg.'It has only to do with the terrain. Similarly, you don't have to feel sorry for players positioned at ‘short’ and ‘square-leg’, because they are decidedly not disabled nor crippled in any way.

And please be informed that one of the most classic and artistic strokes, which few batsmen are able to perfect, the ‘leg-glance,'has absolutely nothing to do with the surreptitious look one shoots at a girl's legs. A bowler who unleashes a ‘bouncer’ or a ‘wrong ‘un’ is hardly a cheque fraud or embezzler. The umpire is far from being ill-mannered or crass when he gives the batsman the ‘finger.'He is merely ruling him out. And neither is he being insulting when he calls a ‘no ball.'No. Nothing ribald is intended. He is merely penalising the bowler for overstepping the bowling crease.

It would also be inappropriate to assume that an ‘in-swinger’ is a contemporary playboy and an ‘out-swinger’ an ageing and burned out Casanova. Correspondingly, ‘reverse swing’ has positively no homosexual connotations.

A batsman ‘on-strike’ is not agitating for better working conditions or engaging in any form of industrial action. Nor, indeed, could the ‘non-striker’ be regarded as a corporate boot-licking black-leg. A cricketing friend recounts the story of how he was discussing an impending match with a player from the rival team at a party. He maintains that a dignified old lady giving ear to the conversation almost fainted when he threw the gauntlet at the player from the opposing team. He said: “I will knock your middle-stump out, with either my first ball or my second”.

It took a lot of explaining before the old lady was finally convinced that the seemingly offending expression was harmless cricketing phraseology. There are other stories about the game to tell but it would not be prudent to narrate them in a family publication.

Why? Because it just would not be cricket, old chap!

[email protected]