Declaration

5 April 2010

Odd. I was genuinely thinking about cricket as I accessed the random word website (thought it was about time I gave them a plug) and lo! It has delivered.

If acting is my winter pursuit, in summer I tend to become obsessed with the original beautiful game*. Not that I should suggest that I'm not obsessed with it the rest of the time- just slightly less so. When I was younger most of my travels tended to be linked into where the England cricket team was touring. Where they went, there I went also. I can attest that hanging around in a tropical country watching test matches is a very agreeable way of passing the time.

But the season is approaching, which means I move from watching to playing. I'm part of a Sunday team. We play "friendly" matches (they're not always, I assure you) on Sunday afternoons, so there's no league, no points and - theoretically - no real bench mark for success. But of course there always is one.

How many games did you win?

We had a bastard of a season last year. I think we won 4 games out of 22 or something. Evil. And it did lead to something of a spat later in the season when we played a team out in far north London. We didn't have much confidence by that point, but this team had never beaten us, and probably couldn't quite countenance the idea that we might be a bit ramshackle and, frankly, slightly shit. So when we batted for a long time to make sure we had enough runs (postponing the declaration), they thought we were being unsportsmanlike and had a massive hissy fit, calling the captain a prick and generally throwing cakes around the clubhouse. Like I said, so much for friendly. In the end they nearly won and were forced to concede that the declaration was pretty much on the money. But they didn't apologise for the "prick" bit.

The fact that a draw was a highlight of our month just shows how low our spirit was. Being crap at something is hugely depressing. Or it is when you know you're crap. Sport - and particularly cricket - is very ruthless in that regard. You have constant benchmarks. Number of wins, number of runs, number of wickets, catches, pace of scoring, number of fours hit, batting average, bowling average, number of times LBW... It's very easy to see a pattern, and it's normally forming a stylised bit of sky writing reading out "YOU'RE SHIT" in big fat bubble letters.

On the other hand you meet people who can't act, or can't sing, and they don't know it. They are utterly oblivious to their limitations, because there's no real way for them to tell. I'm not sure if I envy them or not. While it would be nice to have that level of unshakable confidence, do you really want to spend your life doing something that you're terrible at? I don't mean in a "well if you enjoyed it" sort of way, but doing it because you thought you were good when you were in fact about as gifted at it as Paris Hilton is at quadratic equations. That just sounds a little bit sad. In the traditional sense of the word. Though it works the other way too.

So, this summer I will mostly be doing something my success at which can be fully backed up by statistical analysis. Wish me luck. I'll need it. I am the captain.


* I did read somewhere that the phrase was originally coined about cricket, but it might be wrong. But while trying to find out if I could find reference on the internet, I found a British Council article from 2005 talking about cricket. The lovely thing about BC articles is that they include a wee glossary of any terms that might be considered a little colloquial, or specific to UK usage of English. In this case they had definitions for makeover ("a change to make something better than it was before"), complicated ("difficult to understand because it has lots of different rules") and nail-biting ("very exciting!").

More puzzling was their description of "generation". Here's the context:

"For the first time in a generation, England beat their oldest rivals, Australia.."

And here's the glossary entry:

"all the people born around the same time"

Let's put that together:

For the first time in all the people born around the same time, England beat their oldest rivals, Australia..

I'm not sure they're really going to improve the language skills of putative English speakers across the globe with that level of linguistic sensitivity. A generation is about 25 years. I was not born "around the same time" as someone born in 1995. It's not only meaningless, it's wrong. Silly bastards.

I wonder if someone has ever been tempted to put in an entirely fake glossary to see if anyone notices? We could do one for this very blog entry.

Pursuit - something that passes the time, a hobby
Unsportsmanlike - not behaving in manner appropriate to the fact that it is only a game; see also Bavarian Frog Tossers.
Hissy Fit - the Prime Minster of Uganda 1983-1987
Stylised - Gordon Ramsey's left buttock, or a leading brand of Norwegian yoghurt
Colloquial - a type of brown monkey with distinctive face patches
Silly Bastards - A collective term for the European Parliament.
Glossary - a subjective and misleading mini-dictionary designed to confuse foreigners.