I regret, if not exactly deplore, the cancerous growth of the shorter versions of the great game. They should not be dignified with the name of cricket. Licket and lashet may be appropriate for One-day and Twenty/20 contests – both sport in the sense of a good fete.
Licket and lashet can be very exciting. But that is the point – all, at best, they can be is exciting. They do not have the scope to be anything other or more than that. The whole essence of the thing is a nail-biting finish and if there isn’t one, the proceedings lack any interest. When these games become a foregone conclusion, which they often do, there is absolutely nothing more boring in the whole of sport. Real cricket is quite different.
It provides much more varied and subtle passages of interest and pleasure. Even within a drawn game there may be treasures of batting and bowling as well as subsidiary dramas and crises which give considerable and lasting satisfaction. You can look for no such thing in licket and lashet. Everything is sacrificed to an exciting climax.
There is more, or rather less, to come. There remains a niche for dashet. Already we have 6-over matches when Twenty/20 games are curtailed by rain. In the dystopian future which fast approaches we are sure to be entertained by one/1 games and an entire World Cup will be played off in an afternoon of raucous, meaningless fun and fireworks. Cricket for an age grown frantic.
I know I sound old and out-of-date and grumpy (lemony, as Australians describe this well known condition) but I would not want to be misunderstood. I often enough enjoy watching the limited over game, not least the Twenty/20 version. Watching games of every sort is a big and important part of my life and I certainly do not exempt licket and lashet. I exulted when Guyana won that first Stanford Twenty/20 tournament. I leaped for joy when Guyana so splendidly beat Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados to win the first West Indies Twenty/20 championship. I recognize that in lashet we have a game in which West Indies may well surge to the top long before we become champions again at Test cricket. I am proud that the greatest practitioner of lashet is a West Indian, the marvellous hitter Keiron Pollard. So I do not for a moment dismiss these games as worthless. Indeed a great hope I have is that these knock-about entertainments will be the cash-cow which ensures that Test cricket remains at the pinnacle of sport.
However, these games really are an inferior sport. One recent Twenty/20 match was a revelation to me. It was the Guyana versus Mumbai Indians game in the Champion’s League in South Africa. That was the game in which Pollard smote nine sixes in an innings of 72 in 30 balls which completely sunk Guyana. But it was also the game when Sachin Tendulkar made a half century. And that was the revelation. Here was Sachin Tendulkar, one of the very greatest, and certainly the longest-lasting, cricket champions of all time – he of the sublime stroke-play, the delicious leg-side deflections, the sweetest of late cuts, the cover-drives of almost Kanhai-like beauty, the up-on-the-toes balletic square cuts, the effortless ease past the right hard of mid-on. Here was the best and most graceful all-round batsman who ever lived. And what do I see in this game – a batsman called S. Tendulkar, captain of the Mumbai Indians, playing one of the clumsiest innings I have ever seen, using the bat like a club, cross-batting shots on all sides, timing so terrible that often he could do nothing else but look at his bat with distaste, flubbing simple pulls and cuts, dropped twice from mighty heaves, retiring at last with what seemed to me a head hung in shame. I swear that tears near came to my eyes. Marvellous Tendulkar reduced to this.
One of the more depressing developments in the modern world is how instant this and instant that have become the dominant fashion. It is, of course, part of the rapid and unstoppable growth of the consumer society which has been set up as the one great model all the world must follow – more and more and more of less and less and less of anything that really has substance and value and lasting significance. Licket and lashet are part and parcel of this terrible trend. In their own way they are as much a sign of the times as fast-food outlets.
From the outset, these crude variants of the game were aptly named. Limited over cricket. Correct. Limited in every sense of the word. So much that is beautiful and subtle and intriguing in the original game is missing. Variety. Plot and sub-plot. And elegance has departed, elegance and grace.
In the third part of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757, there is a heading titled Grace. “Gracefulness,” Burke writes, “is an idea belonging to posture and motion. In both these, to be graceful, it is requisite that there be no appearance of difficulty: there is required a small inflection of the body whose various parts should be not angular, but melted as it were into each other.”
Burke might have had in mind what so often we have been, and are, privileged to see in the great game of cricket. Sadly, in his Enquiry he would have found little of interest in these new inventions designed to milk the market.
