This is Martin Amis, writing about chess: "Nowhere in sport, perhaps nowhere in human activity, is the gap between the trier and the expert so astronomical."
Is he right? In the field of human activity, at least, I can think of another arena in which the knowledge gap between amateur and pro is vast - that of theoretical physics. The latest man to try and bridge it is the particle physicist and former keyboard player with D:Ream (best-known hit - "Things Can Only Get Better"), Dr Brian Cox.
He has a new TV series called The Human Universe, and he kicked it off with an interesting analogy for beginning to understand exactly what theoretical physicists are on about.
"Cricket" he began, is "unfathomable" to those who don't understand it, yet "bewitching" to those that do. "And all of [cricket's] complexity emerged from a fixed set of rules."
He held up the single page of a scorebook on which he'd written down the formula for the Standard Model of Particle Physics and the Theory of Relativity, and then flicked through a copy of the Laws of Cricket. "By this notation at least," he said, "cricket is more complex than the universe."
Maybe that's because Einstein never bothered with an equation to sum the Laws up, yet it's a clever way of illustrating that an understanding of the rules of anything doesn't necessarily lead to an understanding of the subject that those rules govern. To return to chess and Martin Amis, here he is on a match between Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short: "They are trying to hold on to, to brighten and to bring to blossom, a coherent vision which the arrangement of the pieces may or may not contain."
Cricket and chess are superficially simple. Sit someone in front of a chess board and you can explain the basics of the pieces and the moves in a few minutes. Show them a cricket bat and ball and a set of stumps and the idea and aims of the game become apparent. Where the genius lies - and where Cox's analogy holds quite nicely - is in the infinite small variations that these simple structures contain. The complexities mount when the knowledge and ability of the players grows: as Amis said, they are trying to bring about a vision from within the rules that isn't actually there until it happens.
This is obvious in cricket, where the game is built around endless repetitions of the same actions - the ball is bowled, the ball is hit (or not) - which, under different conditions and with various personnel, become increasingly complex as they happen again and again until stories emerge from within them.
The other day I watched a rerun of the 2005 Ashes. Once again, it gripped. Of the 1778 Test marches played before the ones in those series, along came, at random, four in a row that finished in teeth-grinding tension. Taking a wider view, they were barely different from all of the other games of cricket in history: it was simply the appearance of these very tiny complexities, one after the other, that made them what they were.
Sometimes we can feel these patterns emerging, at others we're simply too close to make them out. The brilliance of the design of the game provides a framework that stretches off into the future. We, as players and spectators, are finite, but cricket itself is universal.
Martin Amis was fascinated by chess because he felt it was "unmasterable", and it was, by any individual. "It is a game that's beyond the scope of the human mind," he wrote. And yet the human mind has devised computer programs that are able to analyse any game and beat any player. Theoretically at least, machines have reached "the end" of chess.
Despite the obsession with stats, that fate can't really await cricket. It may not be quite as complex and unknowable as deep space, but it needs a bigger book of Laws. What an invention it is.
------Further Thought by Samir Chopra in Cricinfo
The renewability of cricket
My Cordon colleague Jon Hotten writes, in his recent post, "Cricket: complex, unknowable cricket":
The brilliance of the design of the game provides a framework that stretches off into the future. We, as players and spectators, are finite, but cricket itself is universal.
I think Jon must have meant something other than "universal", because otherwise the contrast made here doesn't work. I suspect he wanted to say something like "cricket is infinitely extensible" or "renewable".
Be that as it may, I want to suggest here that "we, as players and spectators" have a great deal to do with the perceived complexity of cricket. Quite simply, this is because we change over time; we do not bring, to our encounters with the game in the middle, a stable, enduring entity, but one subject constantly to a variety of physical, emotional, psychological, and of course, political variations. This perennially in flux object brings to its viewings of cricket a variety of lenses; and we do not merely perceive, we interpret and contextualise, we filter and sift. (As John Dewey, the great American pragmatist philosopher noted, "Thought is intrinsic to experience.") These interpretations and contextualisations change over time.
The 45-year-old man, the professor, the older version of the once-15-year-old schoolboy, sees a very different game of cricket from his younger counterpart. And as he continues to "grow" and change, he will continue to "see" a different game played out in front of him. He will renew cricket, make it extensible and renewable. The seemingly infinite variations possible in a 30-hour, 450-over encounter between 22 other humans, each playing cricket ever so differently from those that have preceded him, will provide ample fodder for this extensibility and renewability.
A game of cricket exists within a larger symbolic order of meaning. When a young spectator sees men in white pick up bat and ball, he understands their activities within a perceptual framework in which active fantasy and wishful longing play an active part. As he grows, matures, acquires a political and aesthetic sense, and hopefully expands his intellectual, emotional and romantic horizons he will revise this, and come to understand the game differently. He may go on to watch umpteen variations on the fourth-innings chase theme, and each one will be uniquely located within this under-construction framework.
Anna Karenina is a classic precisely because in the face of changing readings it continues to speak to us, across time and space and idiosyncratic translations
Consider, by way of analogy, the reading of the classics, great works of literature, which continue to be read for years and years after their writing. Read Anna Karenina as a youngster, perhaps for a high-school class in literature, well before you have ever dated, or been in a serious romantic relationship; you will experience the heartbreak - and tragedy - of the adults at the centre of its story very differently when, 15 years later, you have acquired a few scars (and perhaps a child) of your own. Of course, Tolstoy's masterwork is a classic precisely because in the face of such changing readings it continues to speak to us, across time and space and idiosyncratic translations. This is why Susan Sontag - like others before her - suggested the classics were worth reading several times over; each reading was likely to be a new one, a co-operative, joint construction of meaning by the reader and the writer.
Cricket's games do not exist in isolation. They are played within larger political and economic realities, ones that affect its spectators and its players; these too change our understanding of the game. The benefactions of empire in the past are now the property of its subjects; witness the turmoil this has caused in our recent relationship to the game. The conflict in the middle can come to be understood very differently in these circumstances. Where the youngster might have seen heroes in the past, he now may see villains.
These remarks above suggest another way in which cricket could continue to renew itself over time: it could be embedded within more cultures and societies; it could be written about, and understood by, a broader cross section of humanity than it has been thus far; the language of description for it could expand beyond its current repertoire. (I have been fortunate enough to talk about cricket in English, Hindi/Urdu, and Punjabi; trust me, the game is viewed very differently through these alternative linguistic lenses.) We might find, too, that the conversations that surround it in new climes and locales enrich our previous understandings of cricket.
Imagine a rich cricket literature in not just English but in other languages too. Who knows what new classics, new understandings of cricket, we might find there?
No comments:
Post a Comment