In and out of his crease

Review: What Sport Tells Us About Life: Bradman’s Average, Zidane’s Kiss and other sporting lessons by Ed Smith.
The Independent, 4 April

Contrary to the title, this is really a book about what life tells us about sport, in particular, what we can learn about elite sport by examples and analyses drawn from other disciplines. The author, Middlesex captain and sometime England batsman Ed Smith, writes clearly and with a welcome disrespect for sporting cliche. Very unusually for a cricket writer, he is careful to refine his arguments and set them out in logical fashion.

Also unusually, he has a serious knowledge of North American sport, especially baseball, the world’s second greatest game. In explaining “Why there will never be another Bradman”, he makes convincing use of Stephen Jay Gould’s work on baseball averages. He also goes further towards making sense of Zidane’s World Cup final head-butt than anyone else I’ve heard on the subject.

He’s wise on the role of luck, and rightly impatient with the “you can be whatever you want to be” school of thought: “to put a retrospective ‘meritocratic’ spin on your own success is unhistorical and self-regarding.” He sees motivation and performance in sport as fluid phenomena, and makes clear the general uselessness of the advice dished out to professional sportspersons.

In “When is cheating really cheating?”, he rightly notes that conventions more than rules determine the issue, and that conventions are inconsistent and changeable. Refreshingly, he believes an improvement in standards is as likely as a decline: “If the game becomes sick of fielders claiming non-catches, perhaps it will also re-examine its attitude to denying the truth in other areas.”

However, when it comes down to the case of the ball-tampering allegation that led the Pakistanis to refuse to take the field at the Oval in 2006, he is too easily satisfied with a culture clash explanation. “Darrell Hair thought he was dishing out a speeding ticket; Pakistan felt they were in the dock for drink-driving.” No. Pakistan’s objection was to Hair’s abuse of the umpire’s authority.

When it comes to south Asian cricket, Smith succumbs to a thoughtless orientalism. He effectively evokes the sadness of Bob Woolmer’s death, and what it suggested about the prices people pay for pursuing their vocation, but then adds: “Woolmer’s death also raises questions about culture”. He lumps Woolmer with John Wright and Greg Chappell as managers who sought to apply “Western methods and rationality” to the “inherently intractable” Indian and Pakistani teams.

In “Has the free market ruined sport?” Smith argues that the free movement of labour has ensured fairer rewards for players and improved the quality of competition. But he says nothing about the impact of market forces on fans (prohibitive ticket prices, remoteness of clubs from their social roots) or on access to the game for young people (property prices go up, playing fields get sold off). He leans heavily on baseball as his free market model, but omits mention of the critical role played by the militant baseball players union, which has used prolonged strike action to ensure its members a share of the spoils.

Despite his range of reference, Smith’s world sometimes seems a narrow one. Much of the focus is on “high achievers” and “peak performance” and the conundrums of success and failure at the top level. He answers the question “What do people see when they watch sport?” by interviewing “four distinguished … sports fans who had achieved great success in another sphere.” I’m not the only one who’ll be feeling left out here.

Sadly, the final chapter, on “Cricket, CLR James and Marxism” is poor stuff. Smith casually informs us that “socialism” (presumably in all its forms) “gives an administrative monopoly to one party” and Marxism “right from the start” was “predicated on an appointed inner sanctum of controllers.” Not surprisingly he is baffled by James’ Beyond a Boundary, a multi-dimensional study of the game and its historical context. Because James fails to conform to Smith’s Cold War caricature, Smith declares that James was not really a Marxist at all. In Trinidad, the old revolutionary will be turning in his grave.