Don’t swot Swanton

Cricket’s World Cup will be an interminable slog in every sense. It began on Tuesday, 13 March; the final is still six weeks away (28 April). With only a month to sort out 32 bristlingly competitive teams, football’s World Cup is comfortably more user-friendly, while rugby’s version already has plans in hand to compress itself severely for the 2011 finals and so eradicate such laughable mismatches as 1995’s New Zealand 145 – Japan 17 or 2003’s Australia 145 – Namibia 0. Might there be some similarly jokey walkovers in cricket’s Caribbean marathon? Are Scotland’s supporters bracing themselves for  headlines such as ‘Calypso-Collapsos’?

Mind you, of all the minnows Scotland has the richest cricketing pedigree, providing more than a handful of talented county championship players down the century as well as, of course, two England captains in handsome bat Mike Denness and the notable, not to say notorious, Douglas Jardine. Nor have England fielded many better leg-break bowlers than that most appealing of Aberdonians, vintner Ian Peebles. Having bamboozled Bradman for next to nothing in the 1930 Old Trafford Test, Ian languidly combined his cricket and wine with sports-writing, and all through that decade shared London rooms — 8 King’s Bench Walk, in the Temple — with two other aspirants in the press-tent trade, Henry Longhurst and E.W. Swanton. They should put up a blue plaque there. The trio became worldwide luminaries of their games and their newspapers. A generation or two later, each went out of their way to be jolly encouraging to a tyro oik like me — which is why I took badly Leo McKinstry’s snide sideswipe at the late Jim Swanton’s memory a couple of weeks ago in the Spec’s World Cup cricket special.