England’s travelling support may be a tad thinner than usual this winter, largely thanks to the main course – India – having a reputation as one of the more challenging overseas destinations. An internal flight is rarely undertaken without several Hail Marys and a set of rosary beads; a ride in a tuk-tuk is much the same, but with the added threat of death by carbon monoxide poisoning; and at some stage your internal plumbing will almost certainly be subjected to a small series of nuclear explosions.
However, it’s fair to say that India is not without competition when it comes to overseas cricket tours capable of giving the stiff upper lip a bit of a test. In New Zealand, for example, you’ve a decent chance of freezing to death in Dunedin, while in South Africa you can discover the warm inner glow that comes from giving to worthy causes. Which in my case was not so much via the traditional route of encountering a tube escalator busker with a dog and a blanket, or a Big Issue vendor, as a not very friendly local wielding a large kitchen knife.
What is beyond argument, though, is the identity of the safest country to tour. You don’t have to have been in Australia for very long to realise that the government is determined to achieve a life expectancy of at least 150 for all its citizens, to the point where anyone caught sneezing on the street will be caught on CCTV camera, pounced on by a team of medics equipped with anti-flu syringes and hygiene masks, and carted off to an isolation ward for at least a month’s quarantine.
Nothing is deemed innocent enough to escape a government warning in Australia. Fancy a round of golf? You’ll find a notice on the boot cleaning machine informing you of four different ways of killing yourself while using the nozzle, including blowing bunker sand out of your hair, or using it for a practical joke.
Off to the cricket? If you go the SCG you’ll see a giant neon sign flashing up a warning to spectators of the dire consequences of mis-using their tip up seats, thus averting the potential capacity for a major catastrophe. If indeed several hundred mangled Barmies can be viewed as a catastrophe.
In which case, it was heartening to discover that the mother country is finally starting to get the hang of this nannying business from our Australian cousins, in that the ECB is now imposing strict measures on the wearing of helmets. First of all making them compulsory, even against spinners, and with a non-adjustable smaller gap between peak and visor. Much to the annoyance of the England captain, Alastair Cook, who takes the not unreasonable view that if his view of the ball is not as good as it used to be, there’s more chance of the thing hitting him.
There is a serious side to all this, of course, the idea being to prevent the ball from bursting through the gap as it did with Stuart Broad in the Old Trafford Test of 2014. But once nannying gets a hold it’s the equivalent of a bushfire, as any Australian – brainwashed into not doing anything as suicidally risky as parking their posterior on a seat until they’ve read a 20-page instruction manual – will tell you.
The ECB’s Health and Safety department has also decreed that close fielders are now obliged to wear helmets (although the slips are exempt for reasons not entirely obvious) which would doubtless have prompted a loud harrumph from Brian Close were he still with us. “Catch it!” Closey would shout when a full-blooded pull rebounded from his bare forehead at short leg, but these days it’s a clang and a dead ball. Preferable to a dead fielder you’d have to say, but now that the helmet rule also applies to a wicket-keeper standing up to the stumps, there’s no telling where it will all end.
If Geoffrey Boycott was opening the batting for England today, there’d probably have to be an investigation into whether blocking out maiden overs, like long-haul air travel, constituted a serious risk of deep-vein thrombosis. Probably resulting in a stern directive ruling that anyone planning to bat for an over without running at least one sharp single will be obliged to wear an ECB-approved surgical stocking.
Not that anyone will be able to run a sharp single in a few years’ time. Batsmen will be dressed from head to toe in full suits of armour, like those medieval knights who required ropes and pulleys to get them up in the saddle, and if they fell off, they had to lie there on their backs, like an upturned turtle, and hope that someone would come along to haul them back upright.
And if it’s safety we’re concerned with, what about spectators? Time was when a chap could turn up to the turnstile along with his whippet and his sandwich tin, get a cheery greeting from the gateman, and set off unmolested towards the members’ bar. Soon, though, it will be a case of “sorry Bert, can’t let you in with that cloth cap of yours. It says here you’ve got to have a hard hat. It’s for your own good – in case you nod off in your deckchair and a cricket ball lands on your bonce.”
This is not as far-fetched as it might sound, in that taking 40 winks in the deckchair after lunch is a recipe for waking up in A&E now that a hit for six has evolved from a comparative novelty into a regular event. And given the velocity with which a straight drive comes off one of these nuclear bats it won’t be long before the umpires are wearing helmets as well. In the end, it will just be the bloke over at cow corner, or long leg, that is left wearing a cap or a floppy hat on a sunny day.
It makes you wonder why they don’t do something about these bats. They’ve got more wood in them than a Highland caber, and if we’re not careful, cricket will pay the same price as golf has done for failing to rein in technology. As for helmets, people only started getting hit on the head when batsmen started wearing them. So if they want to make the game safer, instead of tweaking them, why not ban them?
This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper, Friday April 22 2016
