In Between Wickets — the book from which this column takes its name – the Australian cricket writer Ray Robinson says, “cricket was not invented merely so that a Bradman, a Hammond, a Compton, or a Hutton could play it.”
You can update that by naming the modern heroes. It is a throwaway line in the book, but a moment’s thought reveals its profundity. Cricket is much more than the adventures and accomplishments of its finest performers.
Or its most pernicious officials, for that matter. W.G. Grace is said to have told a bowler who had dismissed him, “Folks have come here to see me bat, not you bowl,” and bat on.
“No cricket fan has been quoted as telling an official, “We have come to watch the stars play, not you administer.” But it wouldn’t be a surprise if someone did.
While the many layers of cricket administration in India, from the BCCI to the COA to the CAC to the Special Committees for deciding a) which of the Supreme Court’s orders it likes and b) how to handle the business of the support staff for the head coach Ravi Shastri – while all these go about their business, we must not lose sight of what the game stands for.
And few writers remind us of that better than Ray Robinson, who died this month 35 years ago. That’s two whole generations of cricketers ago, perhaps more.
Robinson was the master of the telling detail. His mosaic on players, bright, attractive, colourful, was built on bits of information gathered over a long period. Like the canvas of a pointillist, the detail could overwhelm if you stood too close to the picture, but stand back and the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.
Painstaking research
There was charm, and more importantly, surprise, as the pieces came together. Painstaking research was his strength; that, and the ability to use the material with a light touch. It all looked so easy and casual, like V.V.S. Laxman’s batting, but like the batting, much effort went into the writing.
He wrote of Bradman: “If there was bowling to be whipped, a single to be stolen, a cheque to be written, Bradman was the one with the lash, dash and cash to do it.”
As a character sketch that is a brilliant compression.
Between Wickets appeared soon after the War, in 1946. His last book, On Top Down Under, on the captains of Australia, was published three decades later. In between he made four tours of Australia, and tours to the West Indies, South Africa, India and Pakistan. He wrote four more books and was operated for detached retinas in both eyes.
Robinson’s writing lacked the drama and the classical references of Cardus, nor did it have the technical certainty and lived experience of Jack Fingleton. But it had something else — sheer joy and a studied casualness in phrase-making.
Meticulous
The Cardus style fixes him in a specific era, much like Dickens or Thackeray. Fingleton has had his successors, player-writers like Michael Atherton who have both the lived experience and felicitous turn of phrase.
Robinson is unique, unmatched because he is unmatchable as the most meticulous note-taker of them all. He has not dated.
Shoe sizes were important to him (he discovered that Stan McCabe had small feet one size five and the other size six), as were the manner of dealing with fans or responding to questions, quirks and mannerisms and other “habits and styles and eccentricities” of players, as Jack Pollard pointed out while editing Robinson’s collection, After Stumps Were Drawn.
Few writers reward you afresh on rereading them. Ray Robinson does; not because the cricket of the past was pure and bereft of politics and scandals — the game has never been so — but because of the quality of the writing, and the possibility of discovering something you might have missed the first time around.
“At 24,” he wrote of Ray Lindwall, “he emerged from army service in the Pacific Islands. Tablets gradually cleared up the after-effects of tropical fevers, but throughout his career he was plagued by dermatitis in a place subject to chaffing.” Not surprisingly, Cardus called him X-ray Robinson.
Robinson worked on the Melbourne Herald during the Bodyline series (1932-33) and was probably the sub-editor on the desk who picked up “Bodyline” from the reporter Hugh Buggy’s telegram from Brisbane (where he had shortened “in line with the body”) and put it in the headline.
“When isolated happenings, sometimes unexplained, are fitted together they make a pattern which leads to a truer valuation,” he says in Between Wickets. He was speaking of Bradman, but he could be describing his own writing technique too.