Cricket & Tobacco: A Match Made on a True Pitch

Thursday, 4th February 2010

I have many more enthusiasms than convictions (in any sense of the word) but I am certain about some things and enthusiastically so. Cricket and tobacco, for instance. They're as natural a fit as ham and eggs. If the government really wants to clamp down upon smoking they should probably consider banning cricket - for in no other sport does Lady Nicotine provide such a useful, nay vital, service.

There are the cigarettes you smoke when you're waiting to bat and the wicket looks a little lively and the other mobs' fast bowler has a vindictive look about him and you're just hoping that he'll have exhausted his allotted overs by the time you shuffle in to bat or that, failing this, you'll be out before the bastard comes back. These might be considered fretting cigarettes.

Then there are the tabs you consume after you've played a damned silly shot and been dismissed in single figures for the ~~sixth~~ seventh consecutive innings. These are cigarettes filled with regret and fury and self-loathing and the terrible fear that you'll never do anything right ever again. Also, the troubling but perhaps not unwarranted suspicion that you're just a damn fool who always gets out in the same damn foolish ways. So you make a promise: next season no cover-drives, and then in April you break that promise and it's all rubbish all over again and so are you. You need a cigarette then too.

And then there are the cigarettes you puff on after you've been sawn-off by the other team's umpire or run out by one of your idiotic team-mates*. Those are the fags you smoke to calm down for fear that without them you'd end up in court having done some damage to the next fellow who innocently suggests "That was a touch unlucky".

And of course, there are the cigarettes you smoke to kill time while it's raining. Or when it's all actually a little bit boring. These too are soothing creatures.

In each and every case the tobacco valve is useful.

All of which is to say that thanks are due to Andy Bull for this piece and, most especially, to him for linking to this celebration of cricket and tobbaco written by the grand-daddy of all sports writers Frank Keating. These were the days, not just of English cricket but of tobacco too:

Each of these boyhood saints smoked - the phrase was, and is - like a chimney. Like the two captains, some were pipemen: dapper Bill Edrich puffed on a sleek, stylish and creamy meerschaum; doubtless his tobacco, too, was also a singular brand, a St Julien fine leaf or Gallagher's rich dark honeydew; from life-and-soul Godfrey Evans's flamboyant hookah-type knobbly briar plumed clouds from, we fancied, a fashionable Dunhill mixture sold in London's St James's, or perhaps Gold Block Virginia, or Three Nuns coiled; and the even more pungently ripe emissions from the short-stemmed, small-bowl furnace of popular pied piper and tubby Black Country leg-spinner, Eric Hollies, suggested at least Condor extra-strength or Afrikaaner dark shag.

The two must-have autographs that day were those of Test debutants - Derbyshire miner and brooding new-ball bowler Les Jackson and (at 18 years, 149 days) still England's youngest player, Brian Close. They were Woodbine men. Before Brian (sheepishly) signed my book he asked me to hold his ciggie's still-burning dog-end.

Preux chevalier Denis Compton was not signing, but I saw him readily offer from his gold cigarette-case a Senior Service to every new adult acquaintance who jostled to join his group. Alongside him, almost as handsome, Trevor Bailey chainsmoked his own Senior Service. The world knew Len Hutton advertised both the downmarket Black Cat cork tipped and Phillips's "Special Sport" tipped, but now we noticed, detached in sole private conflab with one friend, the pale maestro was chainsmoking upmarket John Player untipped. And so, taking their smokescreens with them, these gods went in to change, and we hared to claim our place-bagging picnic bags left on the Warwick Road grass.

As Mr Keating - one cannot be so familiar as to call him Frank - notes, only one of these men failed to reach 70 before being dismissed by Old Father Time. But without cricket, without tobacco, what price their lives? Or ours?

*Jeshuran: Not that I'm thinking of anyone in particular or remembering a particular game in County Kilkenny last year. It was my call for fuck's sake. And I did call. No! Loudly. I haven't forgotten and nor has Oborne Junior who, you will recall, you also ran out that day.

[Thanks to NR for the tip.]

Filed under: Cricket (157 more articles) , England (128 more articles) , Smoking (51 more articles)

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Austin Barry

February 4th, 2010 8:35am Report this comment

One of the intriguing aspects of baseball, cricket's bastard child, is the almost universal use of chewing tobacco. Great streams of rancid juice are projected thoughout a game from the wadded, hamster-cheeked players, umpires and coaches. Curiously, the American public, surely the most rabid anti-smokers and hygiene-conscious people on the planet, seem not to care a jot about this unspeakable habit, but then I guess second-hand tobacco-juice although nasty is unlikely to kill you.

Paul

February 4th, 2010 8:57am Report this comment

You've missed the fag you smoke in the manner of the unforunate gentleman in the old Hamlet cigar ad, when you've been run out without facing a ball by a wicked deflection of the bowler onto the stumps at the non-striker's end. This cigarette is often smoked wistfully, while wandering the boundary's edge, picking up as you go a few words of consolation for your bad luck from the man with his dog near the tree.

AndyinBrum

February 4th, 2010 12:13pm Report this comment

You missed the 7 packs smoked / chewed on during England grimly holding on for a draw yet again. Twas a great article by Andy Bull

Austin Barry

February 4th, 2010 12:29pm Report this comment

I've played club cricket with a bearded middle-aged chap who'd puff-away on a pipe while fielding on the square leg boundary. He added an air of languid introspection to the game and would make spectacular catches while his jaw resolutely gripped the pipe like Popeye. Then one year he shaved-off his beard, ditched his pipe and the square-leg boundary became just another piece of geography and bland modernity.