Tom Holland

Pitch perfect | 21 July 2016

Jon Hotten captures perfectly the essence of the English summer: a village green, and the sound of leather on willow

One day, many seasons ago, Jon Hotten was on the field when a bowler took all ten wickets. In his memories, the afternoon has the quality of a dream. The ground was deep in the countryside, surrounded by trees. The boundary line was erratic and the sightscreens weathered. The match was won beneath a ‘perfect sky’. Hotten’s prose, simultaneously spare and lyrical, conjures up the scene as magically as Edward Thomas’s poem evokes Adlestrop.

What happened to the people who played with him on that day, Hotten wonders. ‘Have they had good lives since then? I hope so. Nothing ties us except that game, but I doubt that anyone who played has forgotten it.’ The reflection is one that cuts to the heart of why people who play cricket regularly over the course of their lives should so love and treasure it. Other sports too, of course, weave shared memories for those who participate in them; but there really does seem a peculiar quality, which Hotten captures as well as anyone who has ever written about the game, to the tapestry woven by cricket.

There are particular reasons why this should be so. Cricket — a sport dependent on good weather played in a country where it often rains — lends itself readily to the elegiac. Recollections of playing or watching it tend to shimmer like a heat-haze recalled in winter. Hotten’s truest theme, it can often seem, is less cricket than memory. Stuck in traffic one day, he writes, the road he was sitting on all of a sudden became familiar in a way that might have been either real or imagined. ‘Through a couple of fence panels that had warped and come apart from one another, I caught sight of a blade-width of green field and a fragment of a two-storey pavilion, then, in the next gap, a section of scoreboard.’

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