English cricketers break into higher levels of game at an age

Outside the terminal, it was raining. Which is not news. Weatherbugs will tell you it rains only 12 months a year in England. Two inches every month January through September, three inches in October and November, and back to two inches in December. Is it any wonder the English are a bleak and dour race?

The Bard, who is not only the flavour of the year but has found favour of the millennium, may have waxed about the “darling buds of May,” but cricket writers will tell you of the bowling duds of May, when the moving finger numbs under the English chill and reduces supple and spry men to stalagmites.

Truly, timing the World Cup for the early English summer was a master plot, as clever and inventive as the moving forests of Dunkirk. Most times, it tends to be infernally wet and cold. Of the cricketing nations, there is only one, perhaps two, which are not at odds with such conditions. The English, as all those who were colonised will swear, are a cold blooded peoples. Of the major cricketing nations, at least four are tropical or sub-tropical (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, West Indies) while two (Australia and South Africa) are temperate. That leaves only England and New Zealand (we will respectfully omit minnows like Bangladesh and Scotland).

The Kiwis, according to a large bird which is distinctive to the country, play cricket to tone up for a more strenuous game called Rugby.

So does make England the favourites for the World Cup? Far from it. The expectations from this English team is abysmally low. They are not the doughty lions but doubting lions. And aging lions too.

The average age of the English team is said to be over 27. Indeed, English cricketers are breaking into the higher levels of the game at an age when cricketers in the sub-continent are retiring to open coaching academies or taking to golf.

Why mighty England has fallen on such hard times is difficult to explain or comprehend. Too much cricket? Too little money?

Maybe both. The English play cricket nonstop six months a year seven days a week with mechanical precision. English first class cricketers who are professionals are so poorly paid (about pounds 18,000) that they might as well be called the Stately Hobos of England. All this has contributed to the nation which gave us colonial cousins the game becoming a third-rate power, as one Indian leader so artlessly and cruelly put it in another context. The sheer ordinariness of the English cricket team is evident from the fact that not a single Englishman figures in any World XI. The only remote star on the firmament is a young talent named Andrew Flinthoff who is sending desperate cricket aficionados into transports of delight. The buzz is this beefy tyro is belting the ball into distant village steeples and railway lines and taking wickets by the bushel. But the English cricket writers, as mean and unsparing as their great bowlers of yore, are careful not to celebrate prematurely. The last hero to be thus welcomed, aBotham wannabe by the name Darren Gough, disappeared almost as soon as he came, leading one wag to gag “Easy come, easy Gough.”

Felled by an injury after he took six wickets and smashed a half century on debut and reduced to more mundane achievements, he has now been rehabilitated against more modest expectations.

So among English scribes, who are also as brilliant and skillful at their trade as their cricketers are not, there is a sense of shall we say, premature defeat. Their expectations are based more on hope than conviction, somewhat like us Indians. Besides, after seven editions of the World Cup, two records stand out: The inventors of the game have not won the cup ever. And nor has any host nation.

It’s a long shot that it will change.