Why cricket is the greatest of all games

Ian McDonald in Cricinfo 

No other sport compares in terms of the number of skills displayed, and the blend of subtlety, entertainment, sudden thrill and sustained intellectual interest on offer


Twenty-two yard theatre: a good Test match is the equal of a five-act masterpiece of the stage © Getty Images

I have been looking at a great deal of cricket lately from across the world: Test cricket - the Ashes, India versus Sri Lanka - and ODIs and T20 cricket from all over. I am more than ever convinced that cricket is the greatest game that exists for the delight and fascination of mankind. I am also confirmed in my settled view that of all forms of this great game, Test cricket is by far the most interesting, satisfying and lastingly memorable.

When I was young I played a little cricket. Indeed, one of my most precious memories, a memory now nearly 70 years old, is of playing for my school 3rd XI on a rough pitch up near Mount St Benedict in Trinidad and taking five wickets in one eight-ball over with some slow, cunning legbreaks that did not turn - they were an early incarnation of the doosra. However, much to my regret, I never became a serious cricketer. I played tennis hard and grew to love the game. And tennis was certainly good to me, filling my life with much pleasure, excitement, challenge and reasonable achievement. It was a game that introduced me to many lifelong friends and taught me, I think, a few of life's important lessons.

And yet always, in my heart of hearts, I have thought that cricket is the greatest, the most splendid, game of all. If I had been given the choice by some benevolent God between winning Wimbledon and hitting a match-winning century at Lord's for West Indies I always knew which I would have chosen.

I have no doubt that cricket is in fact the greatest game yet invented. No other sport compares with it in the number of skills displayed: batting skill; bowling skill; throwing skill; catching skill; running skill. It requires fitness, strength, delicacy of touch, superb reflexes, footwork like a cat, the eye of a hawk, the precision and accuracy of a master jeweller. It involves individual skill and nerve and also unselfish team play. It calls for short-term tactics and long-term strategy. In the course of a good cricket match there is a mixture of courage, daring, patience, aggression, flair, imagination, expertise and dour defiance that is certainly unequalled in all other, more superficial, games. It is not at all surprising that cricket has inspired by far the best and most varied literature of any sport.

If I had been given the choice by some benevolent God between winning Wimbledon and hitting a match-winning century at Lord's for West Indies, I always knew which I would have chosen

There are games that take more strength, more speed, ones that require a higher level of fitness, and ones that require deeper resources of endurance. But no game equals cricket in its all-round development of all the aptitudes. There are games that contain a greater concentration of excitement per playing hour. But no game approaches cricket in its blend of subtlety, entertainment, sudden thrill and sustained intellectual interest. Cricket, like no other game, takes the whole of a man - his body, soul, heart, will and wits.

Cricket - real cricket; that is, Test cricket - has been stigmatised as being too slow, too leisurely, lacking in colour and excitement. I believe this is simply one more aspect of the malignant modern appetite for instant stimulation and quick-fire titillation. The slash-bang games may satisfy the craving for a quick thrill, but they bear about the same relationship to a good game of cricket as instant food does to a superbly cooked gourmet dinner.

It is like the difference between lust and love. There is, it is true, the temporary excitement of a passionate one-night stand. But who can doubt that the more mature, the more beguiling, the longer-lasting love affair provides the more challenging and the deeper experience?

So it is with Test cricket. Like any lasting love affair a good Test match has its moments when the play is ordinary, slow-moving, and even boring. But the complex interplay of emotion, psychology, collective bonding and individual character, allied with the sudden bursts of excitement and the unexpected twists of fortune, add up to an experience that far outweighs the temporary and quick-fading lust for instant gratification that so many other sports supply.

One of the glories of cricket is the way the drama of a match develops, how the pace varies from the leisurely to the suddenly lethal, how the plot thickens, and the subplots are interlinked as the play goes on, how the heroes and the villains take the stage with time enough to act out their roles. A good Test match is the equal of a five-act masterpiece of the stage. Even the best of the other games can really only compare with one-act spectacles that attract those whose attention span is brief and whose imaginations are lacking. It may be that the latest pop star with his highly charged and hectic act can attract much larger crowds than Shakespeare's King Lear or Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, but we all know that the one will fade into oblivion long, long before the others' glory ends. For me, T20 cricket is a very popular, quickly-fading-in-the-memory game whose main purpose is to generate the money that will keep Test cricket active.

T20 money may keep Test cricket alive in other countries, but in the West Indies the dissolution of its Test team is a threat to be feared © Caribbean Premier League


Sadly, it will not keep Test activity alive and well in the West Indies. It is becoming clear the we will never again compete at the highest level of Test cricket. Increasingly our players are opting out of Test cricket for the sake of T20 gold. More and more our administrators will concentrate on the shorter, easy-to-make-money game. And more and more of our fans will only be interested in T20. And as these tendencies grow, the forces leading to a break-up of the West Indies team into its constituent parts will gain strength and eventually the countries will find their way in the shorter cricket world as Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Barbados etc. It is sad but there seems no stopping this. The current sorry lot in charge of West Indies cricket are presiding over the death not only of West Indies Test cricket but also over the dissolution of the West Indies cricket team.

I think there is a large measure of truth in what the old men say - that in cricket today there is too much playing for self, playing for averages, playing for money, and that therefore a lot of the variety, spice, spontaneity and sportsmanship has gone out of the game. Lord Harris, a former England captain, wrote some famous words about cricket:

"You do well to love this cricket, for it is more free from anything sordid, anything dishonourable, anything savouring of servitude, than any game in the world. To play it keenly, honourably, generously, self-sacrificingly is a moral lesson in itself, and the classroom is God's air and sunshine. Foster it, my brothers, so that it may attract all who can find the time to play it, protect it from anything that would sully it, so that it may grow in favour with all men."

These words summon up a view of cricket that, sadly, seems now much too idealistic and almost completely outdated.

And yet, and yet, I wonder. Cricket is a game great enough to rise above the limitations of this overly commercial age. In cricket we will always have dramas and performances to match any in the past. You can be sure there will be games of cricket that generations to come will wish they had seen.

Cricket contains the pure stuff of human nature. As Neville Cardus and CLR James advised long ago, you must go to this best of all games with your imagination's eye, as well as your physical eye, open. To the dull of spirit who merely looks at the scoreboard when, say, a Sobers is batting:

"A Sobers at the crease's rim
A simple Sobers is to him
And he is nothing more."

But to the cricket lover of sensibility this Sobers, and his fellows, are artists all and the game they play is the wonderful game of life itself.

India on stage and in-yer-face

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent

In 2007, I went to the Royal Court to see Free Outgoing, a play by Anupama Chandrasekhar, from Chennai. It was directed by the then rising star, Indhu Rubasingham, who has recently replaced Nicolas Kent as artistic director of London's Tricycle theatre.

The central role of a distraught mother was played flawlessly by Lolita Chakrabarti, whose own first play, Red Velvet, is getting rave reviews at the Tricycle. Chandrasekhar sparkled in the constellation of Royal Court emerging playwrights and hers was the first contemporary Indian drama to be staged at a non-fringe venue in Britain. Five years earlier, she had been on the Court's International Residency programme and there she learnt to hone her work, raise her game. And how.

The play's subject was taboo – sex between unmarried, Indian teenagers and the revenge of society, its hypocrisies and repressive customs that push against modernity even in hubs of new technology. Deepa, a "good" girl and bright pupil, has sex with a schoolboy. He records the juicy moments on his mobile and the clips circulate. She, her widowed mum and brother are horribly ostracised. The audience, mostly white that day, seemed discombobulated, I thought. A comprehensive school teacher asked me if the sex was "realistic or believable". She sounded almost as disapproving as the cruel keepers of virtue on stage and miffed that India was not conserving its old self for the Occident to romanticise and to vacation in. In contrast, I and my Asian friends felt the opposite: Indian drama was finally getting away from Bollywood clichés and religious masques, speaking truths, repudiating conformity. Chandrasekhar's works are not generally staged in India, though some do sneak into small, rebellious venues. Other young talent is similarly thwarted by censoriousness, the lack of resources and spaces for inventive and daring work.

This week at the Royal Court five more such writers will have their plays performed as rehearsed readings. I saw them all as full productions in Mumbai in January at the Writers' Bloc Festival of new writing from all over the country. Some were edgy and tragic, others sharp and funny, all profoundly affecting. 

Artistically brilliant, urgent, energetic, authentic and eloquent, they touched nerves in the body of their nation, made it twitch. They were among the most powerful examples of modern theatre I have ever seen.

The Royal Court collaborated with Rage, a Mumbai theatre company, to create this festival. Rage was set up in 1993, by Shernaz Patel, Rajit Kapur who are both esteemed actors, and writer Rahul da Cunha. The multitalented ensemble commissions, directs, produces and constantly stretches the parameters of the possible.

Da Cunha explained why and how it all started. Being in Mumbai, a city that "progresses and regresses at the same time" and in a nation "going forwards and backwards and still holding together and to its democracy" is what kicked the Rage trio into action:

"We were driven, restless, felt it was time for modern India to find its voice, its own stories and put them on stage. We didn't have our own English-language theatre except, of course, for Shakespeare, Pinter, Osborne and so on. We started Indianizing the great Western plays, but what we really wanted, and young urban audiences were hungry for, were Indian dramas in English. In a crazy, haphazard way we thought, we knew, the time had come for that to happen. Some people thought drama in English would be elitist. We didn't – what we wrote and directed would have to be in the English Indians actually speak, their intonation, expressions and articulations."

Just as their ideas were shaping up, the Royal Court's artistic director Dominic Cooke and associate director Elyse Dodgson, turned up in Mumbai for a night after conducting a workshop in Bangalore. Call it karma. Da Cuhna, grabbed them, introduced himself and Rage and using his immense persuasive powers got them to promise workshops in Mumbai. They did, and a partnership was forged, with valued help from the British Council. Dodgson, other Royal court nurturers and Phyllida Lloyd went over and released more pent-up creativity than they could ever have imagined. The incipient dramatists were given tools, taught essential skills. At the first Writers' Bloc festival in 2004, in Da Cunha's view, "The level was pretty stunning. Young people saw the results and were totally engaged." Chandrasekhar's disturbing festival play about an Indian talk-show hostess who has acid thrown at her proved that she was both brave and singularly gifted.

Rage's founders carried on making their own remarkable work too. One gripping play I saw in 2010 was Pune Highway, written by Da Cunha and with Kapur in the lead. It was a pacy buddy thriller exposing India's furious and thoughtless globalisation and its ethically vacant middle class, again cutting edge and unsettling for Indians who prefer PR or patriotic art.

India's theatre tradition began in classical times when religious stories were enacted in Sanskrit or as mimes in villages and communities. Gods, improbable heroes and myths were loved by high and low and kept them god-fearing. They are still performed during festivals and at auspicious times. A parallel tradition was drama in local and regional Indian languages. The works, whether classic, extraordinary, worthy or barren, were and still are loved by millions. Parsi theatre was another popular strand. Parsis are descended from original Zoroastrians who fled Persia when Muslims took over that land. They settled in India and under the Raj, this small, urban and successful community became famous for its well-produced and popular comedies and farces in Gujarati.

From the 19th century onwards, playwrights wrote questioning and more complex works – the greatest of them Bengal's polymath Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. By that time, Shakespeare and other European masters were being read and performed by Westernised urban Indians. After independence, those cultural bonds remained intact. Felicity Kendal's family were nomadic players who took the Bard to rural areas; the Sixties film Shakespeare Wallah told the story.

Since then prestigious drama and music schools have been established and become centres of excellence. I have seen some of their fine productions too, though these seemed to me to keep assiduously within the boundaries of "acceptable" art – unlike the breakout works produced at the Writers' Bloc festival.

In the week I spent at the festival, I saw how Dodgson and her team and the transformative Rage company interacted with writers and directors, never letting standards slip, never slipping into patronising allowances. Their intensity, honesty and sense of purpose stimulated astonishing creative heat and resolve in the artistes and writers. Dodgson is a force of nature and was described to me as the "godmother" of the creative cohort. One of the youthful actors said to be it was "like being in the fastest car, feeling the breeze and excitement, but never losing control because you are trying to reach somewhere where nobody has gone before. It's about control and real freedom, giving expression to things kept locked up. Escape from the usual. You don't know how the young of India need that."

The five readings selected for London include Mahua by Akash Mohimen, which was originally written in Hindi and has been translated. Incredibly young and gifted, he chose as his theme extreme rural poverty and addiction to hooch. It made audiences weep silently. Ok Tata Bye Bye by Purva Naresh, also a translation from Hindi, is about feisty, smart sex workers selling their bodies to truck drivers. The other three deal with property developers and broken communities, the conflict in Kashmir and ruthless modernisation. None of these plays is maudlin or sanctimonious. They are real and engaging, reveal aspects of a country still barely known by Brits. And best of all, not one of them features a noisy wedding or call-centre story.