When the Observer reviewed Leonard Cohen’s posthumous 2018 book of Poetry, The Flame, they called it ‘the last word in love and despair’, which is also, as far as I am concerned, the single best description of my cricketing career that I have ever come across.
Cohen’s poetry, I should point out, makes his popular songs look like an evening with Billy Connolly. Try, for example:
The flowers hate us
The animals pray for our death
As soon as I found out
I murdered my dog
I recognise this, by the way, as do my dogs, who consequently look nervous and ill at ease when I come back to the house after another of my ‘performances.’ At least with golf, the little crappy things that you do are private or, at worst, between you and one other person.
Lurching into my seventh decade, though, there are just enough moments each season to remind us why possessors of a bus pass turn up year after year. If one knew how to access these events at will, one would be blessed indeed; as Cohen himself said: ‘if I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often’. The last two White Hunter games have fallen into this category.
Last weekend, I played high up in the Surrey Hills against once of our oldest and most-loved oppositions, who we went on to thump, in a slightly embarrassing and most un-Hunter-like way. Someone who shared my surname captained, and played very well, which helps, and we all then trooped off to the Plough at Coldharbour and discussed with optimism what a world might look like when Covid has gone away.
Yesterday, we were back at our spiritual home, Brockwood, playing against a team with no less than 10 people in it called ‘Hobbs’, which made one feel for the one (Ambrose) who wasn’t. The fact that we were even able to play after the recent deluges made us unreasonably happy. The fact that the opposition were so irrepressibly cheerful made the problem of them being much better than us a mere detail, something that the scorebook could record with tact and discretion once we had all forgotten the result. As far as I was concerned, Cohen told me to ‘act the way you’d like to be and you’ll soon be the way you act’, so I tried acting as Jason Roy but was very soon back in the pavilion drinking lager, which is really what I had wanted all along.
But what will live long in the memory will be the two or three closing overs, when twelve year old Monty went out with rather ironic instructions ringing in his ear to bat for a draw. What followed was brilliant. The Hobbs’, who probably could have seen him off with one of their strike bowlers, instead bowled just well enough at him not to leave him patronized, but not well enough to humiliate him. More important, they sledged him just noisily enough to make him feel like he was a man doing man’s work, but kindly enough to allow him to be reassured that he was among friends. And his partner, Simon, ensured all the while that Monty knew that he was an equal in the challenge, and that what he did for the next quarter of an hour could change everything. With six balls to go, he scooped his first ball high over square leg for two, and then studiously blocked out the next five to earn the draw.
We cheered them all in to the echo, and no one can tell me that those fifteen minutes won’t have changed Monty’s sporting life for ever. And ours, just that little bit.
‘There is a crack in everything,’ said Mr Cohen. ‘That’s how the light gets in.’
This is why we do it. For that tiny crack.
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