Me Being Me
Those who know me well will understand I have a certain fascination for the game of cricket. (I believe cricket is far more a game than a sport, sport usually seeming very boring to me.) I enjoy cricket’s capacity not to conform to what usually passes as a sport: that is a kind of plug in activity which does all it can to distance itself from the effects of the weather, the crowd and so on so that the competitors are able to do their thing. Cricket does almost the opposite. Matches are delayed because of the rain (regularly). The ball is designed to behave differently depending on how wet the grass is, or how soft it is. Pigeons, dogs and tigers have stopped play. In fact special laws have been devised to account for animals interfering with play – or for stubborn things like oak trees that are allowed to remain within the field of play (which happens even at almost the highest level of the sport).
Cricket has umpires who apply and interpret laws, rather than rules. These days they are aided by technology which, because of the kinds of decision they are asked to make, only seems to make the process of deliberation more complicated. An umpire misjudging the direction of a ball is one thing; discovering how impossible it is for technology, interpreted by people, to do much better is another. … or for that matter to realise how wrong many umpires have consistently been (LBW decisions, where a batter gets their leg or some other body part in the way of the ball and the stumps, now being regularly awarded to off-spin bowlers whereas in the past these were rarely believed to be possible).
Anyway. This is all a kind of preamble to a thought about what makes people tick. To tick like the most extraordinary watch, a hyper-chronographic atomic marvel of a thing that delights not just in its reliability but in its flair. A watch like a suit by Cristobel Balenciaga.
An English batter, Johnny Bairstow, recently performed some ultra-extraordinary feats. He put them down to ‘me being me’. Not to be distracted by pundits, technicians and coaches who may have known a lot about cricket but in the end knew very little about him. For him to tick he needed to work with people who knew what made him tick. I watched him bat and saw someone less tense, more immediate, more decisive, more powerful and more inventive. More assured. Even when he made a mistake he then did something that seemed to stop it continuing as a mistake might (the effects of mistakes can in fact be wonderful).
Life is full of people who will tell you how to do life, but be careful of listening to people who haven’t taken the time to know you. Their take on life simply may not fit. And as anyone who enjoys clothes will tell you, any suit that doesn’t fit is a problem, but the ones that almost fit yet don’t are the worst. They blur something.
Any cricketers out there, I would love to work with you.