Today’s cricket front-pager in The Sprats Grauniad is Freddie missing the bus to visit Ypres last weekend. (If you want to look at cricket, poetry and war, try http://www.ashespoetry.net/2009/07/08/one-day-we-will-lose-2/) The soft lad slept in, and the press thought he might be on the sauce again – the first para above is hung-over predictive texting let loose…. I’m writing this staring at Derby Roundhouse on platform 6 waiting for the Birmingham train. It’s on my old fujitsu personal organiser which has hardly had an outing since the 5-0 Ashes strinewash 2006-7 down-under. The predictive text function brings up memories – as I type ‘me’ of ‘memories’ up comes ‘Melbourne’ – 106,000 in the MCG to watch England go 4-0 down, one to play, inside three days. Painful memories if you’re an English cricket fan, (but not nearly as painful as those who have suffered loss from war.) Of course Freddie has problems getting up, he’s such a big bloke it must take an age for all of him to wake up all at once. Then again, let’s consider ourselves lucky that we can castigate him for sleeping in ahead of those who’ll never rise again.

If I’d have been Freddie, I’d have  slept in and celebrated too. When the press haven’t been on Flintoff’s back, his ankles and knees have given way under the strain of his massive action. To go under the surgeon’s knife and arduous rehab thrice is bloody hard work, so if he misses the bus to visit Ypres, he may, in the words of skipper Strauss, ’stuffed up,’ but does anyone who isn’t looking for copy to fill a paper really give a stuff? When all is said and done, it’s just a game, which war, not least WWI, isn’t.

 Simon Jones is the player I feel sorry for. He’s gone through as much surgery, rehab and agony as Flintoff, yet hardly played since 2005, and is  out for yet another season. His late reverse inswinger which did Michael Clarke shouldering arms at Old Trafford was my memory of the series – the batter’s sheer look of disbelief hearing the death-rattle behind. England won because they had four good quicks which meant there was no let-up even after the ball became old. No one has yet to replace Simon Jones.

“Aussies rocked as Lee ruled out” is The Metro back page headline picked up on the train from Matlock to Derby. Tough on Binger to tear a rib muscle: the fast bowler’s fear, so easy to do, so long to heal. Probably done in rediscovering reverse swing as he scalped five Young Lions. “Take five and eat your heart out, Dave Brubeck,” I wrote, referring to the 1950s jazz classic in 5/4 rondo time. Reverse swing, googlies and doosras are the bowlers’ jazz. ‘Schragemusik’ (trans: jazz music) was the Luftwaffe term for the angled upward-firing cannons fitted to night-fighters, which radared under RAF Lancs and other heavy bombers to shoot them from the night via an unprotected underbelly. Gone without even realising death was beneath them. ‘Stress’ said Ashes hero Keith Miller, ‘is flying a Mosquito over enemy territory with two Messerschmidts on your arse.’  We’re lucky to live in a land and time of relative peace to enjoy sport just as sport.

The Dug Out

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen, cold,
Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep-shadow’d from the candle’s guttering gold;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head …..
You are too young to fall asleep for ever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

Siegfried Sassoon. St Venant, July 1918

It touches me as much as it did then, nearly forty years ago, when I first studied it for O-level. Two years ago I attended the Armistice Remembrance Parade and service in Bakewell.

11th November 2004

It’s Sunday morning, just beyond early light,
the first frost sharp throughout, enough
to strip each branch of their legion colours.

The sun shines low, a single clear signal
to head a day of remembrance
as Bakewell readies itself to remember.

The town marks time in its market square;
shops, pubs, cars, ourselves near enough still
as gravestones

till we leave.

Those with most to remember or forget
let us follow, in train, behind the lines.
Young lads in uniform, not quite in

or out of step. Their pudding girls grin
at the parlour door, full lace prinnies
ironed starched white, almost waving them off

lest they forget.

The bugler calls,
so we march, and march; sing and sing.
Commands barked against cold bare skin
wreathed more than breathing a long held silence.

Names read out

Their letters addressed in order of dispatch,
the last post and final delivery
They did not rush to catch.

Did it matter if the sun shone
when they went over the top?

Earlier this year I met with Mark O’Connor, a fine Australian poet who took part in the Sydney Olympics – not running a sub-four minute sonnet, Mark was the Olympic poet, reviving a tradition where the muse was part of the ancient games but lost till 2000. Here is an Australian view of 1914-18.

Pozieres Cemetery (WW1 France)

- Our fathers: did they dream as yabbying boys
on their farms in Deniliquin, Horsham, Scotshead, Yass,
of so deep a subsoil waiting for their bones?
. . . Instead two old men hobble down the rows
dreaming of young men whom they knew; while honour and folly
hold the ground under the gently piddling skies of France.

Written on The Somme, 1977 Mark O’Connor

What’s this to do with cricket? Had the French and Germans taken the game at all seriously would it have prevented 1870, 1914-18, 1939-45? Difficult to prove, or disprove.

In all seriousness by the time you read this I’ll probably be wearing a t-shirt inscribed ‘I speak of bats, balls & wickets’ at an Australian Test Match not near you in homage to Virgil’s kick-off line to his classical epic the Aeneid. It’s a way of telling people who I am and what I’m doing. The uniform of an Ashes poet in residence, in the same way cricketers wear whites, stewards florescent jackets or Tommies’ khaki battledress.

 
Who do you reckon will win? People ask me as though I might know. Don’t see how. I’m a poet, not a cricket correspondent, yet they do. And more interestingly they say ‘Don’t come back without the Ashes.’ It means a lot to a great deal of people. Probably far more than poetry.

Their Premier’s XI stuffed us in Canberra, watched by Mark O’Connor amongst others. ‘Yes, I was there,’ he said, not needing to say more. Some would say that Howard’s selection for the PM’s XI is the best thing he’s ever done for the country. Could Graveney and Fletcher do worse than Brown and Blair? I couldn’t possibly comment, but note in the traditional equivalent fixture in England, the Australians play the Duke of Norfolk’s XI at Arundel (don’t ask why it’s Norfolk in Sussex.) Class, gentlemen and players, hearts of old England, play up, play the game. Yeoman stock Kevin Pietersen might reflect on duty and Sassoon to cut out the hook shot, but the signs are England have ferried their half-day international form from India to Australia.

One day we will lose. At least we’re consistent and consistency is everything, like they say about custard.

I’m not saying Freddie Flintoff and the Barmy Army would’ve finished off the Trojan wars inside three days, nor that injury-struck England on current form could do with Hector, Ajax, Achilles and Agamemnon on their side. More that cricket isn’t war. George Orwell said ‘sport is war without weapons’ perhaps because as Eric Blair he won a scholarship to Eton, with its regime of rugger, cold showers and the Eton Wall game – where the cream of the upper classes run straight into a brick wall. Deuced good practice for going over the top and running straight into a hail of machine gun bullets. You need leaders in those situations.

Jardine went to Eton. If sport is war without weapons, I think war is sport without love. Douglas Jardine led England on their notorious bodyline series, where within the laws of the game England bowled straight at Australian batsmens’ hearts – literally. Justification came from the same logic as the carnage of the trenches: it lay within the rules of war. Officer and a gentleman, leader of men etc etc but no sense of feeling, not even animosity. World War One and The Ashes were just something to be won.

The abiding image of last year’s series is Flintoff consoling Bret Lee at Edgbaston after losing two runs short of an amazing victory which would’ve all but kept the Ashes with Australia.

You can also post comments and ideas for Ashes Poetry, website and newsletter by clicking the comments man ikon, and firing away.

Cheers

A Sunlit Day near Middleton

 

Behind the bowler’s arm
at Headingley
towards the end of the last century
the ball took the edge
of Ealham’s angled blade
to speed past slips.

Still as the dead, almost too late, dead
quick Mark Waugh takes the catch,
a single hand behind his back
turns with the batsman’s glare
to make the miraculous seem easy.

All still, till the batsman walks:
I’ve told you how it happened,
but if you were there
you’d not believe your eyes.

For the better part of a century
or more, a turnpike stone takes guard
on the Friden Road between here and there
in a parish remote to Headingley
to mark other ways to destiny.

It stands a fielder to fields
dead to the world. Stooped,
angled, leaning, ready, nearly
eager as a grave stone
to tell you how the past happened
behind its back.

Well hidden by bushes and grass
(jumpered umpires of time)
You just have to wait
for the sun to catch it
like an edge to the slips.

From this I was asked by the Sites of Meaning project – http://www.sitesofmeaning.org.uk/ – to write a poem to be inscribed in a fresh distance marker – literally a literary milestone ……………..

View from my study window in winter

Gardening With Afridi

With a wave of the hand the umpire signals four
to move the scorers’ score behind their boundary edge
while commentators caw at the kites’ wait
to escalate up and down a local thermal’s ledge
which sentinels the parched dry sky above the city.

Waves of air bowlers seek to bend off straight,
sun beats shadows, police beat stands, heart beats still,
ball beats bat, audible snick, the crowd’s roar
a signal beyond the ionosphere
lobbed back by the keeper of the BBC
through a field of critically stationed orbiting acolytes:
close-in astral catchers pouch each chance
to sledge the edge thousands of miles back to me

alone admid mid-November scruffiness;
the undug plot a leafless scoresheet, unweeded,
ready to be broken by spade and forked
over to break again, frost opening a perennial innings
near the start and heart of earth’s eventual disintegration
to nothing. Long waves halfway around the world.

A bombscare. The entire ground stops to stare
and Shahid Afridi plants his boots on the length of the pitch
to turn over earth like me – no one else watching.

Given the intent of the marks he made,
could he not do with my fork and spade?

Words are spoken, a shrug and a glare mid-wicket,
“This isn’t cricket,” they say on the air,
“He’s sure to cop it.” Rogation to follow his boots’ rotation,
a worm at my feet tries to wriggle away.

Close of play edges the start of my day,
shadows stretch across the ground
as the same sun sneaks up the hill of winter-stripped beeches
behind me. In Faisalabad, Derbyshire, I hear
the mullahs call the faithful to prayer.
Minaret horns blare from the wireless world
before they go off air. Alone Shahid slips
the field to face his maker’s mark and means.
Together we stop to flick sweat from our brow
at the wonder of it all. I’m gardening with Afridi.

Shahid, a pathan as well as a Pakistani, comes from the troubled lands of Afganistan, so it all seems quite trivial now. In the new year I succumbed to calcium pyrophosphate deposition disorder, and spent about four months not doing much but listening to cricket on the radio. ‘Once I’m better,’ I thought, ‘I could write poetry about the next Ashes series.’  Arts Council England, East Midlands thought it was a good idea too, which is why you’re reading this now.

It must have felt great to hold the trophy aloft at the home of cricket in front of a pretty full house – well done, England’s women, and well done, the England and Wales Cricket Board for having the vision to hold the men’s and women’s finals on the same day. Too often cricket is held up as fuddy-duddy-dom, yet was the FA Cup preceded by the Women’s FA Cup? Strange too, UK women’s soccer has more or less returned to amateur status when there is so much money in the game as a whole….

I like 20/20. In forty or fifty over games, there’s usually a sector around the innings’ mid-point when you may as well watch paint dry, while it’s still in the tin. Batters and bowlers almost make a tacit deal: three to four runs an over is more or less okay, and suddenly the crowd get thirsty for beer not just action.

Maybe the longer format of the shorter game is doomed. Instead of one innings each of forty or fifty overs, why not two each of twenty? It’d be like a test match in a day. The chance of redemption in the second innings; exactly how far ahead do you try to go if you get a first innings lead? In eighty overs the pitch may well start to wear …. if you fail to reach half your opponent’s tally first knock, would you be asked to follow on? Could you save those who didn’t bat for the second innings too? In other words, someone could bat twice. Imagine having to get a Dhoni, Afridi or Pietersen doubly out. Equally you could bank up your bowlers – eight out of twenty overs from Murali…  Not just ordering, the marshalling of resources, so integral to test match cricket, becomes critical.

Call it 20/20 squared

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month we commemorate those lost in two world wars, the first of which was the war to end all wars. Poets write about war. Homer’s Iliad is the story of Troy, the Trojan Horse, Paris, Achilles, and Helen the fairest of them all. Perhaps the first and only war to be named after a poet – the Homeric wars. World War One poets fired me to write poetry. Siegfried Sassoon, in particular: Mad Jack, country squire, homosexual and winner of the Military Cross. He fought, to be shell-shocked out, and then went back to the front because, though he loathed the conduct of World War One, Sassoon believed it was his duty to his men. As a poet he is an Archie Jackson to Don Bradman:-

The Dug Out

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen, cold,
Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep-shadow’d from the candle’s guttering gold;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head …..
You are too young to fall asleep for ever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

Siegfried Sassoon. St Venant, July 1918

It touches me as much as it did then, nearly forty years ago, when I first studied it for O-level. Two years ago I attended the Armistice Remembrance Parade and service in Bakewell.

11th November 2004

It’s Sunday morning, just beyond early light,
the first frost sharp throughout, enough
to strip each branch of their legion colours.

 

The sun shines low, a single clear signal
to head a day of remembrance
as Bakewell readies itself to remember.

The town marks time in its market square;
shops, pubs, cars, ourselves near enough still
as gravestones

till we leave.

Those with most to remember or forget
let us follow, in train, behind the lines.
Young lads in uniform, not quite in

or out of step. Their pudding girls grin
at the parlour door, full lace prinnies
ironed starched white, almost waving them off

lest they forget.

The bugler calls,
so we march, and march; sing and sing.
Commands barked against cold bare skin
wreathed more than breathing a long held silence.

Names read out

Their letters addressed in order of dispatch,
the last post and final delivery
They did not rush to catch.

Did it matter if the sun shone
when they went over the top?

Earlier this year I met with Mark O’Connor, a fine Australian poet who took part in the Sydney Olympics – not running a sub-four minute sonnet, Mark was the Olympic poet, reviving a tradition where the muse was part of the ancient games but lost till 2000. Here is an Australian view of 1914-18.

Pozieres Cemetery (WW1 France)

- Our fathers: did they dream as yabbying boys
on their farms in Deniliquin, Horsham, Scotshead, Yass,
of so deep a subsoil waiting for their bones?
. . . Instead two old men hobble down the rows
dreaming of young men whom they knew; while honour and folly
hold the ground under the gently piddling skies of France.

Written on The Somme, 1977 Mark O’Connor

What’s this to do with cricket? Had the French and Germans taken the game at all seriously would it have prevented 1870, 1914-18, 1939-45? Difficult to prove, or disprove.

In all seriousness by the time you read this I’ll probably be wearing a t-shirt inscribed ‘I speak of bats, balls & wickets’ at an Australian Test Match not near you in homage to Virgil’s kick-off line to his classical epic the Aeneid. It’s a way of telling people who I am and what I’m doing. The uniform of an Ashes poet in residence, in the same way cricketers wear whites, stewards florescent jackets or Tommies’ khaki battledress.

I’m not saying Freddie Flintoff and the Barmy Army would’ve finished off the Trojan wars inside three days, nor that injury-struck England on current form could do with Hector, Ajax, Achilles and Agamemnon on their side. More that cricket isn’t war. George Orwell said ‘sport is war without weapons’ perhaps because as Eric Blair he won a scholarship to Eton, with its regime of rugger, cold showers and the Eton Wall game – where the cream of the upper classes run straight into a brick wall. Deuced good practice for going over the top and running straight into a hail of machine gun bullets. You need leaders in those situations.

Jardine went to Eton. If sport is war without weapons, I think war is sport without love. Douglas Jardine led England on their notorious bodyline series, where within the laws of the game England bowled straight at Australian batsmens’ hearts – literally. Justification came from the same logic as the carnage of the trenches: it lay within the rules of war. Officer and a gentleman, leader of men etc etc but no sense of feeling, not even animosity. World War One and The Ashes were just something to be won.

The abiding image of last year’s series is Flintoff consoling Bret Lee at Edgbaston after losing two runs short of an amazing victory which would’ve all but kept the Ashes with Australia.

Sport is war with love because winning isn’t everything.

Who do you reckon will win? People ask me as though I might know. Don’t see how. I’m a poet, not a cricket correspondent, yet they do. And more interestingly they say ‘Don’t come back without the Ashes.’ It means a lot to a great deal of people. Probably far more than poetry.

Their Premier’s XI stuffed us in Canberra, watched by Mark O’Connor amongst others. ‘Yes, I was there,’ he said, not needing to say more. Some would say that Howard’s selection for the PM’s XI is the best thing he’s ever done for the country. Could Graveney and Fletcher do worse than Brown and Blair? I couldn’t possibly comment, but note in the traditional equivalent fixture in England, the Australians play the Duke of Norfolk’s XI at Arundel (don’t ask why it’s Norfolk in Sussex.) Class, gentlemen and players, hearts of old England, play up, play the game. Yeoman stock Kevin Pietersen might reflect on duty and Sassoon to cut out the hook shot, but the signs are England have ferried their half-day international form from India to Australia.

One day we will lose. At least we’re consistent and consistency is everything, like they say about custard.

first crack at writing at a match – about 1500 words 
From Grace Road To Ikea.
England vs India 1st Women’s Test, 3rd Day’s Play.

Grace Road Leicester Thursday 10th August