Showing posts with label pretend. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pretend. Show all posts
Thursday 2 November 2023
Wednesday 6 August 2014
Cricket - The fear of the ringer
Cricket, probably more than any other sport, encourages the ringer. Everybody who has ever played at any kind of amateur level knows that Sunday morning feeling, either calling round mates and mates of mates to see if anybody fancies making up the numbers, or getting an unexpected phone call from somebody you last saw in a bar at university ten years earlier seeing if you fancy a game.
It happens in other sports as well, of course, but cricket, as an individual sport dressed in a team game's clothing, seems more conducive to the ringer. A footballer or a hockey player suddenly introduced to an unfamiliar team will stand out a mile, the holistic nature of those sports meaning he won't be making a run he needs to, or he'll be providing cover where none is needed. In cricket, though, you pick up the ball and bowl, or pick up the bat and bat, and - apart from knowing the idiosyncrasies of how other batsmen run or the vagaries of who fields best where, essentially you can just get on with it.
Even better, because of the self-regulatory element of cricket, the way a batsman can retire, or a bowler can be taken off if he's bowling so well he threatens to unbalance the game, it doesn't really matter if there's one player who's far better than everybody else. It doesn't really matter if there's one player who's far worse: even good players score ducks, so the weak link doesn't stand out as he would in another sport.
The best ringer I ever played with was the West Indies offspinner Omari Banks who, aged 16 or 17, for reasons I can't recall, joined our college team for a tour. He was an up-and-coming star, we were told, a bowler who was expected to play Test cricket sooner rather than later.
A first glance was confusing. He belted the ball miles and clearly had a superb eye, but his frequently short offbreaks were remarkably unthreatening. He must be a quick taking it easy on us, we thought; five years later, he was taking three wickets (for lots) and scoring 47 not out as West Indies chased down 418 to beat Australia in Antigua. There was something rather comforting in that: he'd seemed far more like a batsman than a bowler to us.
Clean though his hitting had been, the truth is Banks had been a little bit of a disappointment to us. Hearing we were getting a West Indies bowler, we'd assumed we could play along and then chuck him the ball as soon as a partnership began to get annoying, effectively guaranteeing wins.
Absurdly, the following year, I found myself cast unwittingly in the Banks role - in relative terms; nobody would ever have pretended I was on the verge of a Test debut. I'd just finished my Masters and was temping at a data entry centre in Sunderland. A mate was working at the City of Newcastle Development Agency and called me one day to see if I fancied playing against British Airways the following day. By starting work early and taking only 15 minutes for lunch, I was able to get up to Ponteland, to a bleak field near the airport, in time to play.
"What do you do?" the captain asked. The honest answer would have been, "Nothing very well," but I grunted, "Bits and pieces."
He nodded and, having won the toss and opted to bat, asked me to open. I had occasionally opened for my college Second XI as an undergrad, so it didn't seem that odd, although at Durham I'd tended to bat at seven or eight for the Graduate Society. On a horrible, sticky pitch, I ground my way to 27 at which, having heard the grumbles from the boundary, I slashed at a wide one and was caught at deep cover. My slow start having forced others to play overly aggressively, I ended up top-scoring as we made 90-odd in 20 overs.
That, I assumed, was that. I fielded at backward point and took a catch, but the game seemed to be drifting slowly away from us when the captain suddenly asked me to bowl the 13th over. This seemed very strange, but I wasn't going to say no. The batsman was set, had scored 30 or so, and looked far better than anybody else in the game.
My first ball, a pushed through offbreak, was blocked. The second he clubbed through midwicket for four, although it had turned a little and it had come slightly off the inside edge. The third ball I tossed up, it didn't turn, he played for spin that wasn't there and chipped it to cover. "Thinking cricket," said the captain, apparently in the belief there'd been some element of skill of planning in what had just happened.
What happened next was mystifying. The new batsman blocked out the over. They blocked out the 15th over as well. Ludicrously I had figures of 2-1-4-1. Suddenly they needed over a run a ball. The third over, the batsman, having to force the pace, came down the track, yorked himself and was stumped. Two balls later the new batsman did the same thing. We ended up winning by 12 runs and, without really knowing how, I'd taken 3 for 14.
It later turned out my mate had rather oversold me, or rather, our captain had assumed the level of college cricket at my university was rather higher than it was. After I'd batted so sluggishly, he'd assumed I must be a bowler and so had decided to give me four overs at the death. He'd even let on to the opposing captain that I was a ringer, with a suitably inflated suggestion of my abilities. When I'd then fortuitously dismissed their best player, it confirmed their fears, which explained the nine successive balls nobody had tried to hit. Slow straight bowling had become infused with mystery and terror.
None of it was real, of course. The wickets had been conjured by fear of the ringer. It was a valuable lesson: pretend you know what you're doing, and opponents might just destroy themselves by believing you.
Saturday 17 December 2011
Why pretend we know everything? It's time to embrace uncertainty
It is certainty that we need to worry about, as extreme ideologies prosper in these uncertain times
Who knows if David Cameron's refusal to sign the EU treaty is a good thing or not. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters
I don't know what I am talking about. And, quite frankly, you should be relieved that I know that I don't know. The world is full of people proclaiming about stuff they don't know much about. My trade depends on it. Pundits, politicians and economists, too, all depend on some kind of bladder-busting meta-analysis to keep us quiet. In fact, they are just winging it.
Too many nights I have watched economists on television being treated with undeserved reverence. "Economics is largely a made-up pseudo-science!" I want to scream. After all, it has been almost entirely useless in predicting the mess we are in. Indeed, by coming up with grotesque calculations whereby rich people's investments were effectively risk-free and financed by the jobs and homes of the poor, many economists were cheerleaders pre-crisis.
This is not another anti-bank rant. It is now self-evident that banks did some bad stuff, but the diplomatic immunity they were granted was not merely political. Anyone who makes out that they know what they are doing and can turn a fast buck and believes, yes really believes, in something – anything, themselves even – is facilitated by society. And, yes, this is usually backed up by a narrative of questionable facts.
What is valued is certainty. What is devalued in such a world is uncertainty. Those who aren't sure are weak. Poor. Faithless. Uncertainty is often worrying and feminised. Real men know real things. So they have been lining up to tell us that David Cameron's refusal to sign the EU treaty is the best thing ever to have happened, or the worst thing ever to have happened, when, actually, no one is quite sure. Reconciling a belief in the democratic process with the recognition that the euro is still in big trouble and Greece may well go anyway, means it is impossible to line up clearly in the Eurosceptic versus Europhile shadow boxing. It is up in the air.
As this year has been a news tsunami, it would be far more interesting to acknowledge what we did not know rather than what we did. Most experts did not predict the riots, the Arab spring, the extent of the economic meltdown. I recall meeting a learned professor in Tel Aviv three years ago who explained that Iran not Egypt was now the centre of the Arab world and everything would start there. Like many others, I thought recession would produce some kind of resistance but had no idea how that would manifest itself. As for the financial crisis, our lack of foresight is mind-boggling.
But in public, and especially in politics, an admission of uncertainty is seen as problematic. At a dinner I attended a few years ago, a young politician was asked a question to which he had no answer. He said: "I don't know about that; I will go away and find out." It was Ed Miliband as it happens, and I was impressed. But the guys I was with crowed: "We got him there!" This relentless reduction of politics to point-scoring, this public-school obsession with certainty, is a turn-off. Look where it leads. Not so long ago, George W Bush said that if America "shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift towards tragedy. This will not happen on my watch." Apart from war, this "certainty" helped to produce the debt crisis.
It is certainty that we need to worry about, as extreme ideologies prosper in these uncertain times. Yet there have always been ways of thinking that properly refute certainty. The school of "weak thought" coming out of Italy via Gianni Vattimo follows a clear line from Nietzsche onwards that pushes against finality, and urges us to understand historical circumstance. "There are no facts, only interpretations and this too is an interpretation," Vattimo has said.
The work of Nassim Taleb also confronts us with the idea that the economic models used by the banks were based on the idea of stability. The ecology of the banking system could not predict risk properly at all (although Taleb did, actually). Then we have a genius such as Zygmunt Bauman, who has long been telling us that we live in "liquid modernity", that individuals can no longer plan careers and progress in linear, certain ways. Yes, it is like the weather: changeable.
Of course those who most understand the value of uncertainty are scientists themselves. As the delightful Jon Butterworth wrote this week, science has nothing to fear from uncertainty. The sexy little Higgs Boson particle, which may have flashed up in the data in Cern (I imagine it as a burlesque sort of particle) has meant we have listened to physicists telling us very excitedly about how much we just don't know.
This has been wonderful. The opposite of political discourse: to hear clever people talking about the limits of their own knowledge. How weighed down is public life with its emphasis on certainty. How dumbed down is belief. The big divides are not between different beliefs, but the differing degree of certitude in which those beliefs are held.
No one knows. No one has the answers. Uncertainty is where we are. It is to be embraced. Christopher Hitchens, when asked which word he had most overused, said he was shocked to find on rereading his work that it was "perhaps".
I love that. Perhaps, right now, is the best word. I'm sure of that. Perhaps.
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