The Nightwatchman
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SAMPLE EDITION WINTER16 2016 THE NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY SAMPLER THE NIGHTWATCHMAN THE THE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY Nightwatchman Issue 16, out now, features the following: Cricket’s past has been enriched by great writing and Wisden is making sure its future Matt Thacker introduces issue 16 of The Nightwatchman will be too. The Nightwatchman is a quarterly collection of essays and long-form articles and Anthony McGowan reinvents the passeggiata is available in print and e-book formats. Keshava Guha explains how greed killed romance in Indian cricket Co-edited by Anjali Doshi and Tanya Aldred, with Matt Thacker as managing editor, The Nightwatchman features an array of authors from around the world, writing beautifully and Sarah Shephard looks forward to cricket’s Olympic future at length about the game and its myriad offshoots. Contributors are given free rein over Benjamin Brill From Scarborough, with love subject matter and length, escaping the pressures of next-day deadlines and the despair of cramming heart and soul into a few paragraphs. Alan Tyers follows Hong Kong’s cricketing progress There are several different ways to get hold of and enjoy The Nightwatchman. You can Richard Beard explains why French cricket is never the solution subscribe to the print version and get a free digital copy for when you’re travelling light. If you don’t have enough room on your book case, you can always take out a digital-only Tom Holland on the ancient heptarchy that might just save T20 subscription. Or if you’d just like to buy a single issue – in print, digital or both – you can John Schofield ponders creaking limbs finding joy in the Canadian wilderness do that too. Take a look at the options below and decide which is best for you. Behind closed doors – the view from the dressing-room Mike Phillips on how cricket connects two Eurosceptic lands WINTER16 2016 Full subscription Daniel Norcross hopes dice cricket can rescue 2016 THE Annual print Digital subscription NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY Nick Hogg peels back the paint of a famous Viv Richards picture subscription (with Annual e-book only free e-book versions) subscription Tim Cooke contemplates the importance of being Graham/Graeme £27 (+P&P) £10 Peter Prendergast considers how club cricket saved him and made him Click to Buy Click to Buy Tim Wigmore on why fielding will soon be a statistician’s delight Adam Collins reveals how a radical poem became England’s anthem Rob Johnston reflects on the glory of winter nets Single copy Telford Vice flays South African cricket WINTER16 2016 Single issue (with THE writes a love letter to Ottawa Digital single copy free with free Justin Robertson NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY Single issue e-book version) John Crace relives the agony of the cricket dinner (e-book only) £10 (+P&P) £4 Click to Buy Click to Buy THENIGHTWATCHMAN.NET ADAMSAMPLER COLLINS THE NIGHTWATCHMAN WAS JERUSALEM BUILDED HERE? Adam Collins unearths the fascinating story behind our non-national anthem The coin was tossed, the players gently The soft opening was a source of strolled out, the Test match would frustration for npower after it assumed start. Just like that. No fuss. No fanfare. primary sponsorship responsibilities The only venue to play any sort of song in 2001. Kevin Peake, then marketing was Adelaide, where tradition dictated tsar for the company, was anxious its Tests began with national anthems about his investment. Sure, cricket on Australia Day. Other music, from was conservative, but did it have to the steel drums of the Caribbean to be so damn drab? “They just kind of the brass band of Port Elizabeth, was trundled on; there was no sense of a happy accident. It was a different oomph,” he recalls. “I was starting to world, and not that long ago. wonder what I had done signing a three-year contract.” This included in England. Especially in England. Graham Gooch said in This is where Peake’s background – far the mid-1990s that he liked what he from a cricket man, he says himself – saw in Adelaide and wouldn’t mind was an advantage. While there has it becoming a ritual. But it never always been a contrast between Lord’s happened. By the early 2000s, as the and Wembley, what about Lord’s and, ECB tinkered with start times, the first say, a professional wrestling ring? “At ball of a Test would be bowled in front the time my son was into WWE quite of half-empty grounds. Thousands heavily,” he explains. “I went to one of missed Dominic Cork’s first-over-of- those nights with him and saw how the the-day hat-trick for England against wrestlers came out and I just thought: West Indies at Old Trafford in 1995. ‘Wow! This is fantastic! Why can’t we do THENIGHTWATCHMAN.NET THENIGHTWATCHMAN.NET 5 ADAMSAMPLER COLLINS THE NIGHTWATCHMAN this in cricket?’” A bit of arm-wrestling and the nation’s poet laureate Robert “And did the Countenance Divine, we have built Jerusalem on England’s Shine forth upon our clouded hills? and this nonconformist idea had Bridges commissioned composer Sir green and pleasant land.” And was Jerusalem builded here, won the day. There was a consensus Hubert Parry to put music to the words. Among these dark Satanic Mills?” inside the ECB that the song had to Music that would lift the nation through It’s that last line, the green and pleasant be “stirring” but distinct from football its war weariness; a quintessential land; that’s what hits the spot. Doubly so terrace anthems. clarion call. From the moment it was But it’s a Barmy Army thing, right? That when England play away, when the song played at the Fight for Right campaign may have been your response to that is “owned” by the Barmy Army. For those Enter “Jerusalem”… at Queen’s Hall in London later that year, wrestling tale. And you would be right, minutes, the corner of turf marked by it was precisely that. to the extent that the Barmies were the tourists does feel palpably English. • • • all over this well ahead of the formal Perhaps never more so than as England In peacetime, it became the hymn adoption of the song as England’s waltzed to Ashes-winning victories at “And did those feet in ancient time, of the Women’s Institute. And after cricket anthem in 2003. Melbourne and Sydney in their 2010–11 Walk upon England’s mountains green: the Second World War Clement pasting of the locals: a result beyond the And was the holy Lamb of God, Attlee expressly promised to build the Graham Barber – or “Big G” as he is wildest dreams of Gooch in Adelaide 15 On England’s pleasant pastures seen!” proverbial “New Jerusalem” if elected lovingly known – remembers the ill- years earlier. Labour prime minister over Winston fated Ashes tour of 1998–99, when the Did a young Jesus Christ spend some Churchill’s Conservative government words were taught at the end-of-tour It’s a tour tradition that continues. It’s time hanging out in Glastonbury with in 1945. Attlee’s government was a bash after members of their crew had what the Barmy Army does. Always his uncle proclaiming later that the pioneer of the welfare state but also taken to belting it out while England after the first ball of the day (always). rolling hills reminded him of his home something else: “Jerusalem” had been were in the field. Indeed, they sang it Never as back-up singers to the formal town? Look, probably not. But it claimed for politics, and since then all the day Dean Headley ran through version at home (never). has never affected the popularity of three major political parties have used Australia at the MCG to win their only the pastoral-cum-industrial anthem it for their own ends. Test that summer. • • • “Jerusalem”, 100 years since it was put to music. Think royal weddings. Think As author Peter Silverton wrote in the “That was when it became our standard,” “Bring me my Bow of burning gold; the bookend scenes of Chariots of Fire Independent to mark the 100-year says Barber. “To start with, it wasn’t Bring me my Arrows of desire: – a film named after the song to begin milestone in 2016: “There’s something brilliantly received as people thought Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! with. Think the London 2012 Olympics in it for everyone. For believers, an it was a bit too public-schoolish. But Bring me my Chariot of fire!” opening ceremony. Think state funerals. evocation of the possibility of a second since then it has grown and grown Think your grandparents’ funerals. coming. For socialists, the horror of and grown.” A bit too public-schoolish. 2005. You get wistful pangs just saying it dehumanising factories. For nationalists, We’ll return to that later. out loud. The greatest summer of them The song’s centenary prompted some the notion of England as God’s chosen all. The Greatest Series Ever™. And, for parliamentarians to push for it to be acres. For conservatives, nostalgia for They prefer “Jerusalem” to the national our purposes, the summer inextricably adopted as England’s formal national the days when those acres didn’t have anthem. For starters, they already linked to “Jerusalem” for ever after. anthem, something David Cameron as theme parks and roadside litter trails. For repurposed that to mock Australia’s prime minister – a man who admitted to feminists, it’s the battle anthem of the antiquated constitutional arrangements But it was a summer that also asked shedding tears to the tune when Wills Women’s Institutes.” Or as another left- with the number “God Save Your plenty of questions about identity and Kate tied the knot – was open to.