Gentlemen and Players

In his press conference cum inquest after the Melbourne Test, Andrew Flintoff offered the praise for his team and its retinue that they were ‘a fantastic blend of people’, which made it sound like he had put together a particularly successful dinner party. On the other hand, the combination of personalities does matter in a touring side. Yesterday, after my daily 2000 words, I popped out to Yarraville to watch composite teams from the Victoria Turf Cricket Association, in which I’m a player, and Free Foresters CC, the wandering English amateurs, whose wanderings have brought them to Australia this summer.

Free Foresters are one of those English clubs - see also I Zingari, Incogniti, Frogs, Cryptics, Yellowhammers et al - whose provenance and purpose leave Australians slightly puzzled, engendering tremendous loyalty with apparently no more than a dazzling blazer (crimson, green and white), mysterious symbol (a Hastings knot, loosely tied) and paradoxical motto (‘United, Though Untied’). Its origins lie 150 years ago in the Forests of Arden, famous as the backdrop to As You Like It, and of Needwood, not famous at all, and known only to tree tragics.

Eighty-eight Foresters have played for and thirty-three have captained their country, including Douglas Jardine, Gubby Allen and Colin Cowdrey, even if this is now more a vestige of the Gentleman/Players distinction: star player on this sojourn is Cambridge blue 'Nutter', who made a stroke-filled 114 yesterday, before his father-in-law Phil the Farmer came in to save the day with a forward prod or two.

Australia does not have a wandering club tradition, believing in associations, grades, fixture lists and home grounds, although that’s a historical and geographical outcome rather than a deep cultural aversion: when club cricket was organizing in the twenty-five years or so before the First World War, Australia was a pretty hard country to wander round. With travel cheaper and people more prosperous, that could change: Perth-based Forester Jerome Griffin is in the process of setting up an antipodean chapter of the club.

By all accounts, too, the touring party of players, wives, kids and friends have had more pleasure from Australia than Freddie’s ‘fantastic blend’, from youthful Joe the Teacher, who wore his Foresters tie for the duration of the flight from England, to elder statemen John the Slip and Jeremy the Veteran, apparently locked in intense rivalry over the number and variety of injuries they can sustain. They had just come from playing in my hometown, Geelong, and were full of praise for Darren Hauenstein and the South Barwon CC: ‘a great bunch of young guys who were everything good about club cricket’. The VTCA turned on an excellent afternoon tea – of a quality, it must be conceded, seldom seen in the association itself (albeit strangely devoid of that traditional Australian delicacy, the Barbecue Shape).

The ghost at the feast was Flintoff, whose team this season have so bitterly disappointed English hopes. Many heads were shaken, many chagrined words muttered. Free Foresters represent a love of cricket strong enough to travel long distances at considerable expense to unfamiliar grounds and an uncertain welcome; what do the rich and pampered England cricket team represent?

At his last press conference, Flintoff referred to the steadfastness of the Barmy Army, still singing, still chanting, still cheering despite all that has befallen his team: an endearing phenomenon, it is true, but a deluding one. English people, it is true, don’t necessarily scorn a beaten team; this, however, has been the kind of tour when one could very easily grow completely fed up with English cricket. What will it take to get through to England’s captain, their coach and hierarchy, how badly they have let their supporters down this summer?