Lawrence Booth, in his
enjoyable Cricket, Lovely Cricket?
(one of several light works about the game I have re-read whilst, er, resting
from Will Self’s put-down-able page-closer Umbrella
– one likes to keep fine books as well as fine cricketers on ‘rotation’)
dedicates one chapter to the language of cricket. A pleasant paragraph is spent
wallowing in commentators’ clichés such as Flintoff as ‘England’s Talisman’,
and all leg-side shots played by subcontinental batsmen as ‘wristy’.
Clichés can be
maddening to the cricket viewer, particularly in these times of stable team
selection, where during a long Test series one can feel trapped in a
nightmarish cycle of the same phrases about the same players in the same order
all summer and winter long. Matt Prior has for years now been eternally
‘selfless’ and ‘surely now the world’s best wicket-keeper batsman’. Alastair
Cook still doesn’t sweat much, apparently and is, would you believe it, in an
excellent run of form.
Well thank goodness
for short form cricket, which at least brings a change of cast that forces the
see-speakers to think on their feet for a while.
One of the relative
newbies to the international scene this winter was James Tredwell, Kent’s
30-year-old off-spinner, who first came to prominence beyond the county circuit
when making his debut for England against Bangladesh in 2010. Tredders remains
very much Graeme Swann’s understudy, and looks a long way from the Test team
since the renaissance of Monty Panesar. But he’s been used increasingly in ODIs
over the past couple of years and has an impressive record.
Without getting too
bogged down in statistics, it’s worth considering that, having played only the
world’s best ODI teams since his wicketless debut in Dhaka, Tredwell has 22
wickets in 14 matches at an average of 24.4 and economy of 4.66. This includes appearances
in the last world cup and a significant role in the drawn series against South
Africa last summer.
So why then was this
strong performer consistently greeted by such a drab parade of lacklustre
praise. Time and again we were told of Tredwell’s skills as an ‘honest’ and
‘reliable’ cricketer, two words that seem more fit to sell a used car than
describe a top flight sportsman. While they’re at it they might as well tell us
that while he’s got 5,000 overs on the clock, he’s only had one careful owner
(Kent) and he’s a nice little batter.
‘Honest’ is a
particularly interesting case, in its relation to cricket’s endless occupancy
of the moral ground, which it unabashedly maintains in the face of numerous
match fixing scandals and increasingly poor player behaviour. What honest
really means, of course, is dedicated. It trips so easily off the tongue next
to ‘toil’, which speaks to cricket’s patrician past where batsmen were the
elegant gentlemen and bowlers were the hired hands brought in to do the graft
of bowling to them.
‘Reliable’ on the
other hand means unspectacular. So he’s not going to get continental degrees of
drift, or Mandelsonian quality spin, but he’ll probably drop it on a decent
length and make ‘em work for their runs. Well fair enough, and that’s true.
James Tredwell isn’t going to generate the same excitement as a Graeme Swann or
Shane Warne, not just because he doesn’t have their star quality, but because
he doesn’t have their show-stopping skills. He will still perform well and
clearly has a knack of picking up wickets, but they don’t come in ways that get
uploaded to Youtube.
However, there’s still
something wrong with the way he’s discussed by the ex-pros. As an English grad
I’m thinking here about the relationship between signifier and signified. It’s
all very well me saying that Tredwell is more than an honest and reliable
performer, and cricket fans who spend time watching the performances will
understand this. But this kind of language becomes pervasive, and in the public
imagination, which has only so much time and attention to give a second string
international player, that relationship between signifier and signified can
blur or be effaced altogether. The man described enough times as a journeyman
may become just that; not through his actions on the field, but through a lazy,
self-perpetuating consensus of people repeating what they’ve heard and read
others say, until the narrative becomes reality.
I’m not suggesting
that people can make Tredwell a worse cricketer by not praising him adequately,
but there are things other than cricketing ability affected by this. The value
put upon a player by the outside world, whether it be other teams and
franchises, advertisers or broadcasters, can have a massive impact on the
success of their career and their future once their playing days are over.
Happily, it seems the
England management and selectors are not interested or concerned by the
clichés, and they clearly value Tredwell for his ability to come in and out of
the side and perform to his full ability in some of England’s most prominent
ODI fixtures. It takes a special talent and special temperament to be able to
do that. Tredwell may not make the ball perform magic tricks, but what he does
he does extremely well and we should be as grateful and fascinated to watch him
go about his business as we are to some of the bigger names in world cricket.
There are many ways of getting the job done and it’s part of cricket’s endless
appeal that a bowler like James Tredwell can be the top performer in a team of
established stars with much more overtly appealing bags of tricks. I hope we see much
more of the same and look forward to his tenure as Kent’s new captain.
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