This week saw the culmination of Allen Stanford’s super-series. The billionaire has been pumping money into the dying beast of Caribbean cricket for years, and he stepped up this year by offering $20 million in a winner-takes-all, three hour extravaganza between the English team and the Stanford Superstars, a team of West Indians whose reputations by and large ill-fitted their billing.
I was not the only one who thought this affair a little tawdry. The England team were uneasy about the whole thing, as were the hitherto blindly loyal Barmy Army, who declined to support their team en masse. Stanford’s aim was to get American audiences into cricket, (the game was broadcast live on ESPN), a demographic of sports fans generally used to baseball as the longest possible sport, weighing in at around four hours per game.
A Test confrontation lasts as long as the players are mentally strong enough to make it last, and an individual battle lasts as long as those involved can stay out there.
There will be no having a breather when the ball is up the other end. There are few honourable draws as the final whistle blows; one of you needs to submit. Limited-overs cricket cannot match this. It is no epic victory for a bowler when he dismisses someone who just walked across his stumps and swung and missed in an effort for quick runs. In Tests, your only imperative is to survive as long as possible. And a battle for survival for survival’s sake is far more compelling than for the crude sake of a few runs. Tests are the purest test of your cricketing skill. That’s probably how they came to be so called. The contest ends when you are not good enough to continue.
I watch a hell of a lot of sport, to the chagrin of my family, and my tutors, and I can think of few sports that afford such an intense raw conflict as a Test Match. Tennis matches, come close, and like anyone who saw it, I was gripped by Federer-Nadal at Wimbledon this year, but cricket’s real hook is the asymmetry between the competitors. Federer-Nadal was great, but they were for long stretches merely negating each other by both, to be crude, hitting a ball hard at each other. Batsmen, are, obviously, not bowlers, and the skill-sets demanded of each are totally different. The mutual incomprehension between great bowlers and batters is what makes the contests great.
Contrast cricket’s great confrontations. We all have our favourites. My personal one is Atherton-Donald in the Nottingham Test in 1998. Both had a match to win. The only way Donald knew how was to run in and bowl extremely quickly, and he must have wondered how Atherton could stand up to him, and why he would even want to. Both subsequently admitted in their autobiographies thereafter that for that hour on the fourth day, neither of them were truly thinking about the match, but about beating each other. There was time for winning matches tomorrow, but just then, it was just them. Nobody who has seen it ever forgets it, and nobody who only ever watches limited overs cricket will ever see anything like it. And that would be a tragedy.
Cricket is far from physical. Having played a lot of cricket, I’ve found it is actually pretty difficult to get genuinely tired whilst playing, even if the next day your body screams at you. It is small bursts of energy, expended frequently. In that way, it is less demanding than, say football. You can’t make Torres play five days in a row, because he’ll die. Anything good he is going to do, he’ll do it in the ninety minutes, and the nature of football is such that even in his best game, there will still be less time spent watching him than watching other people. Footballers’ great deeds are a flash of lightning in a 90 minute stargaze.
Cricket manifests brilliance in a different way. At its best, it gives an opportunity to watch sustained brilliance for hours on end. It isn’t that Shane Warne bowled the odd stunning ball which made everyone gasp. We gasped again and again. The point is even more acute for batsmen. It is a skill that shouldn’t be forced or rushed. Asked what the greatest innings they have seen are, I know of few cricket fans who talk of Jayasuriya running wild in one-day games, even if he was a sight to behold at his best. Far more often, Lara’s 153 at Bridgetown comes up, an innings set against the backdrop of three days of intense cricket, not just three hours. I don’t really remember great one-day innings I have seen, especially from 20/20 games. More than anything else, swinging with your head in the air and connecting is partly dumb luck, even if, as Gary Player says, the more you practice, the luckier you get.
Limited-overs cricket has its place. It does bring in much needed revenue, and generate new interest in the game. But it should still only be a support act for the Platonic form of cricket, Test matches. An American associate of mine who only last year started liking cricket, at my bidding, got into Test matches first. When he watched his first 20/20, he said to me “it’s a little bit pornographic, don’t you agree?” Porn has its place, and Plato’s Republic has its place. That one is more immediately gratifying than the other is no reason to abandon it.
CHERWELL’S TOP 5 TEST MOMENTS:
1. England vs Australia 2005: one of the greatest Test series in the last 50 years. Workplace productivity plummets as Cricinfo traffic soars. A silly-haired South African becomes a Great British hero
2. Donald vs Atherton 1998: Chasing 147, Atherton gloves a bouncer from Donald but is given not out. Donald goes berserk and fires down the most hostile hour of bowling ever seen. Atherton gets bruised, battered, shouted at, but doesn’t blink.
3. Brian Lara vs Australia 1999: His unbetaen 153 at Bridgetown reminded everyone why the term ‘god-like’ had ever been applied to Lara. Scoring just under half the team’s runs, he led the Windies to their 4th innings target of 311, with just one wicket to spare.
4. India vs Australia 2001: A spellbinding 2nd Test saw India win after following-on and posting an epic 657 in the second innings, with Laxman’s finest ever innings producing 281 of the most elegant runs Kolkata is ever likely to see. An exhausted Australia then succumbed to Harbhajan, sending 1 billion Indians into raptures.
5. Anil Kumble vs Pakistan 1999: Kumble, looking to go home early, bowls 26 overs of vicious legspin, taking all ten wickets, and putting himself up with Jim Laker as only the second man to so utterly dominate a Test match batting line-up.
Uniting the Nations
For many students, a gap year presents the opportunity to discover what the world has to offer. In the case of Sam Daws, now Executive Director of the United Nations Association of the UK, his gap year – spent working at a hospice in Calcutta and with an environmental project in Ladakh, in Northern India – marked the start of his career by sparking his interest in international affairs. It is a career that has sent him around the world: to the 38th floor of the UN (the domain of the UN Secretary-General and “one of the floors,” Daws notes, “former US ambassador John Bolton thought the world could do without”), and to countries such as China, Japan, Switzerland and Sweden, in which he travelled as note-taker to former Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Daws is full of praise for his former boss, calling Annan “an individual of integrity and intelligence, and of humility and extraordinary serenity”. He recalls how Annan would greet cleaners in the hall in the same way he greeted Presidents and Prime Ministers.
So what was it that attracted Daws to working in international relations? “As a student of social anthropology, I was fascinated by the question ‘What does it mean to be human?’. This evolved into a wider interest in how human beings interact and shape the world around them. It then seemed a natural jump to be interested in how countries cooperate.”
Daws knows what it’s like to be in the thick of action. He was in New York on 9/11 and saw the first World Trade Center tower in flames while on his way to work at the UN.
In August 2003, he lost a close friend and several former colleagues in the bombing of the UN compound in Iraq. Daws says the attacks angered him, but also recognised the need to channel that anger into a renewed commitment to making the UN work and addressing the root causes of such atrocities.
As stressful as his work is, Daws also derives great enjoyment from it, saying, “I have always proceeded on the basis of doing what I most loved doing at a particular point in my life, and where possible to maintain work-life balance.”
In The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, co-authored with Professor Thomas Weiss, Daws describes the UN story as being “one of continuity and change”. Since the UN’s inception in 1945 its membership has burgeoned, swelling from 51 to 192, largely as a result of the process of decolonisation and national independence that the UN itself helped to steward. A perennial challenge for the UN, according to Daws, is therefore to adapt to the changing landscape of international politics and to manage the diverse expectations of its member states. Yet in Daws’ view the UN Charter and its framework of international law remain highly relevant, in a large part due to the “realpolitik marriage of power and representation in the UN Security Council.”
Daws believes that the current Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, “has shown impressive tenacity” and gives him special credit for his robustness and persistence in tackling the problems in Darfur. The challenges currently facing Ban and the UN are formidable. The organisation needs to find and implement solutions for those immediate threats – like hunger and civil war – which make life for many “a living hell”, but it must also confronting longer-term, existential threats like climate change.
Furthermore, all of this is now occurring against the backdrop of the global credit crunch. Daws fears that governments will use the current financial turmoil as an excuse to renege on their pledges to alleviate poverty and protect the environment.
When asked to comment on the common charge that the UN is paralysed by excessive bureaucracy, Daws is dismissive, “The UN employs fewer people worldwide than Disneyland and Disney World. It does a great deal with limited resources which are dwarfed by the magnitude of the problems the UN is asked to fix.”
Daws believes there will always be a need for the UN to address what Annan described as “problems without passports” – issues like avian flu and climate change-induced migration, that have no respect for national borders.
The UN’s success depends on many factors. One, according to Daws, is strong citizen engagement in the UN and in the wide range of issues it deals with. He therefore encourages those interested in international affairs to join their university’s UNA-UK group and to participate in Model United Nations conferences. Another driver of the UN’s effectiveness is the quality and dynamism of its staff.
Daws recommends that students setting their sights on a career with the UN undertake internships in relevant NGOs or with the UN itself.
Given the intensity of competition, breaking into the UN is not easy, but Daws has some reassuring advice for would-be UN employees: all you ultimately need is competence and persistence – two strengths Daws has clearly honed in his 20 years serving the UN.