Not bowled over

James Delingpole

Wednesday, 3rd June 2009

‘Shh! Cricket!’ my grandfather Ken Delingpole used to say whenever the cricket came on the wireless.

‘Shh! Cricket!’ my grandfather Ken Delingpole used to say whenever the cricket came on the wireless. It was a family joke, indicative of just how boring Delingpoles all found the world’s most boring game.

But then my father bred with a Price and the Prices are the exact opposite — county squash and tennis players, decent golfers, sporting nuts. As a result I’ve spent my whole life being torn apart by contradictory genes: crap at throwing, hitting, kicking and catching, but always well up for a game of tennis, footie, badders, squash, ping-pong, rounders…; very sniffy about people who talk sport all the time but — in secret — totally glued to the TV whenever a golf Major is on, or Chelsea are playing.

It’s the same with cricket. Though it’s about the one game I hate playing (horrid hard ball; your team getting cross when you don’t catch the horrid, hard ball as it plummets terrifyingly from really high; being bowled out before you’ve had a chance to settle in; the hay fever; never being asked to bowl), I’m still quite jealous of those tedious spods in stripey-banded panamas who know everything there is to know about W.G. Grace and Harold Larwood and Jack Hobbs and Bodyline.

So I was grateful for Empire of Cricket (BBC2, Sunday) for filling in a few gaps. It helped me make up my mind about Bodyline: that Jardine may have been a gent but he was also a cad, and I don’t think it was cricket beating the Australians by aiming at their heads. It taught me useful stuff about styles of cricket, like the off-drive being considered a proper gent’s stroke because it looks elegant, whereas hitting it the other way is generally thought oiky and underhand and wrong. And so on.

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