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wider range of cricket more seriously the modern game can no longer be reduced to the ashes and little else on and off the field cricket more than any other sport in britain and australia deals with the postcolonial and reducing this to snide stereotypes of exiles and masters is a deeply uninteresting approach to this in australia engaging aboriginal communities is hardly likely to be aided by an australian self identity as plucky colonials as well as obscuring events such as the tour to england by a team of indigenous players in 1868 with a fog of baggy green nationalism in both countries there are significant south asian communities who are deeply engaged in cricket but for whom the ashes centric international focus can seem narrow as kamran abbasi has recently described similarly england australia women s cricket has only recently entered the mainstream and its long history is still often obscured despite the work of scholars like raf nicholson the history of the ashes then is manipulated in two ways by being press ganged into a narrative of eternal rivalry and consequential conflict and by being reduced into a simplistic series of familiar events useful for selling the current series through association and nostalgia this is not necessarily a new thing but there is no reason we cannot do better there is much fine writing and commentary out there but it struggles to define the discourse perceptive analysis over controversy and statistics as records would be welcome online on television and in the press the predominance of former players in commentary teams ought to provide valuable insight but there seems to be a reluctance to allow them to be analytical and without insight surely knowledgeable journalists would provide better colour a lay audience is as likely to be alienated by chummy in jokes as by technical analysis and historical context without its history test cricket would surely struggle who now would want a five day sports match even the ashes supposedly immune from the pressures of low attendance faced by other series and nations relies on its past to sustain it this history however has been misused and reduced to a neat story of heroes and battles easily swallowed and little questioned it is not too late to rescue the interesting and informative whilst appreciating the significance of the present and widening our gazes when the former australian opener arthur morris was asked where he was when bradman made his famous final innings duck at the oval in 1948 he answered truthfully i was at the other end morris made 196 his innings also four short of centennial neatness at the moment we are like morris asked to remember moments quirks and freeze frames let understand the contexts the details the men and women at the other end the game will be better for it posted in cricket history and politics tagged ashes cricket england history memory sport leave a comment dancing in the dark a day night at the test posted on august 23 2017 by christian drury the eric hollies stand was full of vestments but the west indies never had a prayer the third day of the first day night test match in england featured a steady fall of wickets never a flood but a drip drip of edges misses and misjudgement nineteen west indian wickets fell with eight batsmen dismissed twice in a day as the quality of the england attack never wavered james anderson was as skilful as always his control over line length and movement thoroughly examining the wonky techniques of the west indian top order late in the day stuart broad produced one of those spells where his knees rise in his run up he runs through the crease powerfully and the ball seems to pick up pace off the pitch the comprehensive castling of shane dowrich was an impressive way to pass ian botham as england s second highest wicket taker ben stokes bowled with pace and control and toby roland jones moved the ball whilst bowling an aggressive length moeen ali complemented the seamers well his work with saqlain mushtaq visible in his control and his modified quick stepping run up that england won comfortably wickets shared round following runs from joe root and alastair cook is hardly surprising the real interest was in the format a floodlight final session and a pink ball throughout in the end it had little impact on the result kemar roach s testing spell on the first evening was the only passage of play that seemed influenced by the alternative conditions it rained on the second evening on the third the gulf in class rendered the conditions irrelevant the consensus seemed to be that the pink ball held up reasonably well on a normal edgbaston test pitch and that the appeal of day night cricket attracted a larger crowd including many attending their first test for the spectator i watched the third day from the hollies stand the experience was an interesting one the pink ball was initially a little tricky to pick up in the afternoon light only really becoming visible when it slowed down one ball from anderson early in the day hit kieran powell on the thigh pad the ball appeared bright against the whites as it had fallen from the batsman s pocket part of this was undoubtedly due to my position side on but the ball was definitely clearer to the spectator later in the day the hollies stand aside from being side on the action is also an odd social space good fun as long as you don t want to watch the cricket too closely as andy bull noted it has something of the airport departure lounge in its attitude to socially acceptable drinking at any time of day for all its fabled atmosphere it seems oddly detached from the cricket when stuart broad was on a hat trick the roar that accompanied him to the crease was a wonderful example of why the england players love playing at edgbaston engaged and passionate but much of the time it was loud because it was full of drunk people not because it was uniquely supportive of the england team the insipid west indian performance hardly helped but a disregard for etiquette such as only leaving your seat at the end of the over doesn t create an attachment to the events on field it was interesting to see that the pace of the day seemed in sync with a day test the singing and banter peaked around half past six the raucous final session of a normal day at the cricket over before tea you had to remind yourself that there were forty overs left to play edgbaston chose to keep the breaks as lunch and tea but ignoring semantics it might be better to reverse the length of the sessions lunch felt too long too soon tea a rush to get some hot food for the night session perhaps the reluctance to extend the second break was linked to the numbers of people who left before or during twilight when the novelty failed to keep people in the ground they will be sad to have missed it because the novelty the marketing draw was genuinely special i sat grinning at the sight of players in white on a twilit cricket ground the lights making play possible but merely enhancing the shades of an english summer s dusk the bright early internet e s of the edgbaston lights shone against the pastels of the sky dark clouds on pink and orange the evening is usually the best part of a summer s day and watching cricket from half past six to half past eight was a treat i agree with mark nicholas s suggestion of extending play to half past seven as a matter of course perhaps even an hour further if a pink ball is used playing at night under completely artificial light as with the last few overs at edgbaston seems a novelty too far the lights required and the size of the ground made it feel like a car park at night t20 can be neon in the night its colours and the white ball stand out in totally artificial light the players whites seemed overlit at edgbaston i would love to see a midsummer test using a pink ball and playing until nine o clock floodlights would be needed but would augment not dominate it would never get totally dark and would be a wonderful centrepiece for a summer of cricket particularly if it was say the first test of an ashes series at lord s cricket has long played with ideas of modernity a cricketing solstice would be both novel and linked to deeper traditions of english summer lord s an appropriate setting for a meeting of pastoral time and the reclamation of the night the real reason for the day night test of course is that test cricket needs to change if it is to have any kind of long term future all this twilight is perhaps a rather heavy handed metaphor for a game retreating to the shadows looking back on what used to be that it is the west indies playing a team both overshadowed by its predecessors and let down by administrators both in the region and at the icc only adds to the gloom the irony is that for all the effort that has gone into making day night cricket possible and playable it is ultimately a cosmetic change quite literally tinkering with television schedules and an aesthetic shift only influence so much a one sided match was a reminder of the challenge faced to make test cricket competitive meaningful and attractive posted in cricket tagged cricket day night cricket edgbaston england sport west indies leave a comment stroke of genius review posted on october 20 2016 by christian drury if you re reading this you ll know the picture you ll probably know it by the name of its subject victor trumper for the image and the man have become melded in the cricketing imagination reduced and enlarged to encompass each other it shows a cricketing vitruvian man the batsman extended to his limits balanced and bursting with potential energy the front foot is raised poised to land a step committed to but with all the possibilities of success and failure as yet unrealised the crease is a yard behind his back foot the abandoned abode of the cautious gideon haigh s wonderful new book stroke of genius is a history of an image charting the creation and influence of jumping out george beldam s iconic photograph of trumper it is not simply a biography of the man because the image has consistently changed in meaning since trumper s death moreover it is a history of how cricket has been seen how a game which is inherently difficult to watch has had to be brought closer to the spectator in a process which is still ongoing it is also a history of how cricket and sport more generally has contended with its inherent tension between aesthetics and achievement how or how many one of the reasons for the appeal and wide dissemination of jumping out is its malleability posed outside of a match it is contextless and therefore far more flexible than an image of a live moment trumper becomes an ideal cricketer representative of how the game should be played during his lifetime this exposed the tensions between amateur and professional but over time trumper became a symbol of prelapsarian innocence the lack of match context reflects the conditions in which the image was created the photograph had to be carefully staged the photographer george beldam was himself a first class cricketer and dismissed trumper in a match not long after taking another series of photographs of trumper there is a hint of the modern bowler armed with the knowledge of a batsman s technique thanks to the demystification of technology it is not the only suggestion of today s relationship between camera and cricket beldam s first cricketing photograph was of his uncle batting in the garden beldam s uncle was notorious for never accepting the word of whoever was umpire and so the photo captures the exact moment he is struck on the pad it looks exactly like a modern freeze frame it only needs the stumps to be superimposed and the removal of doubt the technological judgement is similarly modern beldam s ability to capture cricketers in action however posed also allowed the study of technique to develop two leading batsman cb fry and ranjitsinhji set the standard for aesthetic batsmanship with ranji s exoticism and fry s careful study announcing a shift to visual appreciation of batting tied into the new revelations of photography trumper was crucial to this previous stars of batting like wg grace had been notable for the volume of runs and the stamina required to score them trumper was notable for how he looked this trope was to reappear when bradman began to dominate the game bradman was regarded as cold and mechanical lacking the exuberance of trumper usually based on jumping out trumper s visual legacy bradman himself compared the two men writing that trumper got one century every 9 8 innings where i obtained a century every 3 4 well quite bradman s batting was often seen as a product of its age batting fordism as opposed to trumper s fin de siècle vitality this is particularly notable in the mythologizing of writers such as neville cardus whose suspicion of modernity led him to eulogise the golden age of trumper and co yet this is misleading jumping out is a deeply modern image to begin with it was taken at the oval seen then and now as the people s ground far more accessible to a mass audience than exclusive lord s moreover the ground was accessible in a practical sense served by the new tube and tram network and surrounded by the buildings of the city the famous gasholders and factories foundries and breweries trumper himself grew up as a street cricketer breaking sydney windows jumping out s amateur elegance came from an urban background and was set in an urban setting this was a long way from the pastoral reverie of cardus the composition of jumping out is also striking trumper s swing was often interpreted as the carefree elegance of the golden age as compared to bradman s mechanised manner but the image fits more comfortably with modern art than with traditional cricketing imagery many of beldam s photographs capture the details of technique but jumping out goes beyond that technology enabling the capture of the aesthetics of batting beldam s photograph brings to mind the new range of modern art depicting sport as an aspect of modernity overlapped with industry and advertising and loaded with motion the looming sporting life banner hints at robert delaunay s 1913 l équipe de cardiff the blurred crowd foreshadows jean metzinger s 1912 au véledrome as a moment of sporting stillness it prefigures harald giersing s sofus heading of 1917 victor trumper bourgeois australian becomes avant garde at the crease as haigh puts it beldam pre empted the whole grammar of athletic motion and of mass spectacle in the modern sporting image with hindsight we see that trumper is not the antithesis of professionalism but rather part of a tradition of batting that blends prodigious output with aesthetic charm as cb fry s wife beatie wrote trumper was a poet of cricket but his timing has the exactness rhythm and fit of the oceangoing ship s piston rod as both poet and piston trumper reached the heights of athletic prowess memorable for style ...
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