Peter Prendergast on batting

Another piece of Peter Prendergast wit, this time he discusses batting:-

Both sides of the coin

 

Peter Prendergast

Recently I decided to be less neurotic about my batting. First off I intended to rid myself of all superstitions. Previously I wore a particular pair of shoes on match days, selected a particular bowler with whom I warmed up. The right pad went on before the left. Regardless of weather conditions, I batted in a sleeveless sweater. Never would I put on my batting gloves before I was thirty yards or so from the crease. Upon reaching the wicket, the umpire gave me guard of middle and leg through I bat on leg stump or outside. The list had broken through two lean seasons. Rather than recognise that my superstitions were nothing more than hokum, I kept adding to them in the hope of finding the right combination. Sometimes I stole other people's superstitions, then jettisoned them once they didn't work. Ha! I'd think, no wonder that guy never gets any runs. Now it's July, I've missed half the season through injury and I'm right back where I started. Only now I won't bat in a cap and I suspect that my new Pony Cricket boots have a hex on them.

Peter Prendergast and his Pony boots

Unlike most things, batting doesn't seem to get any easier the more I do it. I often suspect there is some sort of joke being played on me. Cricket shows me a glimpse of the purest pleasure in the form of an off drive and then it's right back into the trough of mediocrity again. Some days every shot I play ends up at extra cover, two days later square leg has a pain in his face picking up the ball and tossing it back to the bowler. I go to the nets to iron out a particular fault and stumble across another far more worthy of attention. It can be very confusing. Five knocks in a row last season I was caught at mid-off, and now that I've solved that one, first slip has been having a fine time of it. Somewhere along the way I pick up some runs and I'm in buoyant form for a week. Sustaining a run of form, however, that's a more difficult task.

Cricket brings out the basest instincts in me. As soon as I'm out, in the immediate aftermath of a cheap dismissal, I want to go home. If I owned the ball I think I'd stick it in my pocket and stalk off out the gate. No! I'd tell the other twenty-one, I'm sorry, but you knew what you were getting into. And this from someone who has held selfish players in contempt. I've watched opponents loose games for their team through playing for themselves and part of me has been delighted with the proceedings, but there's always been another part which has wished for a big lummox like McClean to pick the guy up over his shoulder, march to the boundary and toss him headlong into Johnny Barry's back garden. Yet failure makes me petty myself. It's a dreadful game to become intense about. There seems to be some sort of fascination about cricket that it attracts so many of us who take it personally, who mull over failure to a ridiculous degree, who tolerate all the lousy days in the hope that there's a good one on the way.

For most of one recent season I'd been watching cricket. On St Patrick's Day some clown kicked a football at precisely the same moment as I did and broke my foot. For two months I missed the involvement, the company and the competition and felt grateful to be relieved of the tension, the soul-searching and the feeling of having let others down when I failed. It's not easy to watch. I wanted the team to win and for others to do well, but not so well that I wouldn't be wanted when I was fit again. Injured players are entirely irrelevant; they regard themselves as part of the team but they have nothing to do with the day's play. Other people are kind. They ask you about your injury and say they hope to see you playing again. Then they talk about something else but you've no interest. They've come to enjoy the game and to see their friends and they watch without the same investment of emotion that you do. When injured I stayed out of the dressing room because it hurt not to be involved, away from the spectators because I was in some odd state of agitation and had nothing to say for myself. Instead I walked around the pitch alone. And after the game I declined to go for a drink. The same bar, the same people, but it's different. It's different because I haven't been tearing my guts out hoping for others to succeed where I've failed, because I haven't been muttering and swearing when a catch goes down or sniggering when Fitzer takes one on the shins at extra cover. It occurred to me that there are spectators and players and the things are fine once you know which you are.

Being injured did, however, give me the chance to consider why I play cricket. Two solid months thinking about this and I'm still none the wiser. Why put myself through the wringer? I hate fielding and no captain is foolish enough to allow me to bowl. Batting is probably enjoyable when you're 150 not out on a belter of a wicket tonking some poor medium pacer to all corners of the ground but I've never been in that position. For the most part it's fraught with tension. Part of the reason is that I've nothing better to do. In fact I probably have nothing at all to do. For those of us who have been part of a team since we were children, it's part of our identity. The game affords us companionship and sometimes respect. But more critically, I think that on occasions, cricket has forced me to be braver and to show more nerve then I would otherwise be inclined to. Though it’s very cruel as a game, it exposes people and I suspect that that's the part I'm addicted to, ill-prepared though I often am for the bounce of failure.

I think I'm going to play as long as I can. Another year of Senior cricket maybe and then it's off to the seconds where no doubt I'll be just as neurotic. I'm thirtysomething now - easing into middle age quite gracefully.

I think - and in a way I'm looking forward to dropping down the sides. If my knees hold up I intend to play soccer until I'm forty. My uncle, kind but old duffer that he is, recently offered to buy me a set of golf clubs and I think I'll take him up on the offer. One recent Sunday Deryck and I got to talking about golf and he explained how he liked the way golf was entirely down to the player himself, that there was no one else to blame when things went wrong. It's not a game that particularly appeals to me, however. I'll play when there's nothing else for me to play and only then. The truth is that I can't see much point in hitting the ball when no one else's hopes are riding on where it lands. I suspect I'll be a solitary figure on the course, tramping off at a forty-five degree angle after my ball, thinking about the good old days when I was tearing my hair out over cricket. There's much I would change about my career - for a start I'd bowl ten overs a game, and I wouldn't have been in Greece when Deryck caught Rod Green's skier off Fergal O'Mahony's head - but in a strange way I won't want to forget the failures either. They're part of the involvement and I think that's probably what I'll really be trying to hang on to.