Cricket

In a tiny courtyard just off the teeming alleys of Lahore’s old town, a young Pakistani boy in a gleaming white shalwar kameez picks up his Adidas cricket bat and proceeds to clout to all corners the plastic ball his pal is chucking down. Behind him on the wall the outline of three stumps is drawn, and the word Out! chalked there, more in hope you feel. In the corner a little schoolroom has emptied out and excited young boys and girls, books in hand, look on, giggling happily. Is this the new Imran? Almost certainly not, but we are in one of the holy places of Pakistan cricket, and in this troubled but vibrant country, only cricket comes close to Islam as a unifying passion.

Lions and weasels The Archers and Test cricket: words you rarely find in the same sentence and more’s the pity as there’s not much else that can give greater innocent pleasure. But could these magnificent institutions be in the midst of some existential crisis? On peaceful old radio, the writers seem devoted to purging The Archers of the Archers: David, Ruth and Jill could be junking Brookfield for Northumberland, Tom Archer hasn’t been seen in Ambridge since that unfortunate incident in the vestry; Elizabeth should be hounded out soon for sexual witchcraft; and then there’ll be just Shula and Kenton. Pretty much like international cricket, which is being stripped of some of its performers. Remember the West Indies?

A high proportion of wine-lovers also enjoy cricket, and vice versa. This might seem natural. Anyone with an aesthetic temperament will surely find his way to two of life’s greatest pleasures. But there may also be a parallel. Wine is made of decomposed grapes. Vignerons conjure sublime flavours out of long-decayed fruit. As you sniff a good red Burgundy, there will always be a scent of the farmyard. Those who make the great pudding wines extract transcendent sweetness from grapes which are already rotting before they are picked. Cricket is a beautiful and gracious game. I still have a mental picture of a cover drive by Barry Richards. He hardly appeared to move. A gentle half pace forward, a mere flick of the wrists, and the ball was rocketing to the boundary.

A typical Merchant-Ivory film, their biography informs me, features ‘genteel characters’ whose lives are blighted by ‘disillusionment and tragic entanglements’. No surprise then that Kevin Pietersen is proudly revealed as one of their biggest admirers. In an unusual choice of images in his, er, thoughtful new autobiography, ghosted by the redoubtable David Walsh, KP says comparing English cricket with the Indian Premier League is like comparing Merchant-Ivory with the latest Bruce Willis. It’s a fair point, but hard to imagine the teenage Kevin trawling the arthouse cinemas of Pietermaritzburg in the 1990s for the latest offering from the wistful duo. Few people of course know more about disillusionment and tragic entanglements than KP: Room with a View, anyone?

Kevin Pietersen's autobiography is the saddest book of its type I've ever read. By its end you begin to think that KP and the ECB deserved each other and realise that, a) no-one deserves that and, b) there's no way this marriage of convenience - for such it was - could ever have ended happily or with each side fondly wishing the other all the best in their future endeavours. And it was a contractual arrangement from the very start. Pietersen's book is clear about that: KP "tried too hard" to fit in with England and Englishness. He now realises South Africa is his "real home" and he should never have pretended to be anything other than "a South African with English heritage".

Seven years ago Kevin Pietersen produced his first attempt at autobiography, Crossing the Boundary: The Early Years in My Cricketing Life. Atrociously written, it demonstrated no awareness of the world outside himself. This time round Mr Pietersen has taken the precaution of hiring an excellent ghost writer, David Walsh of the Sunday Times. It is hard to overpraise Mr Walsh’s vivid prose. The book is a brilliant portrayal of Pietersen as a misunderstood genius continually brought down by lesser men: a Mozart beset by a sequence of Salieris. Three of his England teammates fare especially badly: Stuart Broad, Graeme Swann and Matt Prior. He describes their behaviour as egotistical, bullying and treacherous.

Seven years ago Kevin Pietersen produced his first attempt at autobiography, Crossing the Boundary: The Early Years in My Cricketing Life. Atrociously written, it demonstrated no awareness of the world outside himself. This time round Mr Pietersen has taken the precaution of hiring an excellent ghost writer, David Walsh of the Sunday Times. It is hard to overpraise Mr Walsh’s vivid prose. The book is a brilliant portrayal of Pietersen as a misunderstood genius continually brought down by lesser men: a Mozart beset by a sequence of Salieris. Three of his England teammates fare especially badly: Stuart Broad, Graeme Swann and Matt Prior. He describes their behaviour as egotistical, bullying and treacherous.

Twenty years ago, in 1994, I had a golden summer. I scored 375 against England in Antigua, a Test record that stood for nine years, and two months later I posted 501 against Durham, which remains today the world record in first-class cricket, as my team Warwickshire achieved an unprecedented domestic treble. I was in my mid-twenties, and of course I was very happy, but I was also very aware that in another part of the world, a great tragedy was unfolding. Every evening when I turned on the TV there were images of the genocide in Rwanda, and the contrast with my own feelings of euphoria haunted me.

Some years ago, when the last Conservative government was limping towards defeat, someone published a book called 101 Uses for a John Major. It was cruel and fairly funny, the premise being that since he couldn’t run his party, there must be some other way he could be employed. Perhaps an Indian publisher is considering a new version after the country wilted in the Test series this summer: 101 Uses for a Duncan Fletcher. What does the India coach actually do? He called his memoirs Behind the Shades, a vain and self-regarding title, but quite what has been going on behind those shades this summer has been a bit of a mystery.

Simon Barnes has written the diary in this week’s issue of The Spectator. Here are his opening two paragraphs: ‘Sport is like love: it can only really hurt you if you care. Or for that matter, bring joy. You can’t explain sport, any more than you can explain the Goldberg Variations: you either get it or you don’t. So it can be hard to justify a life spent among bats and balls and leaping horses. I spent 32 years writing about sport for the Times, the last 12 as chief sportswriter, all of which comes to an close at the end of this month when I become News International’s latest economy, doomed to wander Fleet Street (is it still there?) wearing a luggage label that reads ‘Please look after this bear’. What shall I write about in my last week?

Sport is like love: it can only really hurt you if you care. Or for that matter, bring joy. You can’t explain sport, any more than you can explain the Goldberg Variations: you either get it or you don’t. So it can be hard to justify a life spent among bats and balls and leaping horses. I spent 32 years writing about sport for the Times, the last 12 as chief sportswriter, all of which comes to an close at the end of this month when I become News International’s latest economy, doomed to wander Fleet Street (is it still there?) wearing a luggage label that reads ‘Please look after this bear’. What shall I write about in my last week?

On Friday night, I went to Althorp, childhood home of Diana, Princess of Wales, to speak at its literary festival. My first duty was to appear on the panel of the BBC’s Any Questions? in a tent there. It was 30 years to the month that I had first been on the programme. Then it was at Uppingham School, presented by David Jacobs, and the panel included Roy Hattersley and Esther Rantzen. This time, it was presented by Jonathan Dimbleby, and the panel was George Galloway, Nigel Evans (the Tory MP who did not rape any men), and a beautiful woman called Rushanara Ali, the Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow. She was nine years old when I put in my first appearance. In all that time, the show has changed very little.