Appreciating your opponents is part of the great game

 

Someone told me that as we get older, the time we have spent watching cricket is subtracted from our age. He’d read it somewhere, he said. You can imagine one of the great philosopher reporters of the game, Neville Cardus or John Arlott, perhaps, or even our own Charles Fortune, saying that.

I’ve tried, but I can’t find the reference. I think it could be true though, and I was reminded of  it when I spotted Harry Shapiro at the side of the field at the St David’s Fasken Time Cricket Festival on Friday. He’s 82 now, he told me, and still coaching and running clinics for coaches. I remember doing the Cricket SA level 1 coaching qualification in my first year of teaching some time during the last century and the bit about teaching spin bowling was handled by Harry.

It was good to see him. When I asked him how he’s doing, his response was to criticise the field placings in the game he was watching, “that’s a T20 field, not a two-day one,” he said. That’s the response you’d expect from someone who has spent a lifetime in and around the game.

Few games have more customs, quirks and traditions than cricket has. A unique one is to show appreciation for what your opponents do. Applauding milestones reached is an example, as is a batsman acknowledging when he has been beaten by a really good ball, and fielders going across to congratulate a batsman when he leaves the field after a good knock.

You see less of that on TV now in these times of cricket on steroids, but there was enough of it on show over the first two days of this festival to show that it’s still being taught at the sorts of schools that are playing here.

And to reinforce that lesson, the organisers have introduced a great custom. “Man of the match” awards don’t really belong in a festival, but one of cricket’s peculiarities is that it’s a team game made up of individual performances, and those individuals should be recognised and encouraged.

So, the thinking was, why not let the players of the opposing team decide who the standout player in the other team was? The Fasken Purple Cap is the result. At the end of each day’s play the captain presents a cap, to be worn the next day, to the player who has impressed his team the most.

You can tell by the body language at those hand-overs that it’s something the players are really enjoying.

It’s been two long days at the cricket already, and there are still two to come. But at least I can subtract them from my age as I get ever older.