Farewell to cricket, will we meet again?

My club, the Yarras, will host the A-grade final. But with cricket’s rapid dwindling, we’ll be just about the only game in town.

Cricket farewelled the season prematurely in front of empty stands at the SCG and headed towards an uncertain future. Picture: Brett Costello

Under normal circumstances it would hardly be news that my club, the Yarras, will on Saturday host the A-grade final of Melbourne’s Mercantile Cricket Association at our Como Park home ground. But with cricket’s rapid dwindling, it appears we’ll be just about the only game in town.

I’ll be an onlooker, my C-grade season having petered out. Instead, I’ve spent the week involved in ancillary tasks such as erecting nets, giving throwdowns, bowling pies, contributing to the general bonhomie and listening to mates weigh up playing over not playing — the latter course having been recommended by Cricket Aus­tralia in light of the government’s anti-infection initiatives.

Watch Fox Cricket Classics on Kayo including the ‘97/98 Aus v RSA 2nd ODI & the 2015/16 Aus v India 3rd T20. New to Kayo? Get your free trial now & start streaming instantly >

Not playing hardly stood a chance, of course. Our A-graders finished top and would in the event of cancellation have won the premiership, but no cricketer with any soul wishes to prevail by default.

In any event, cricket is a game that might be felt to have pioneered social distancing, while we sure as hell won’t be gathering 500; probably 50 at best.

So ours is a risk that — fully informed, options thoroughly canvassed — we shall run.

But then? Presentation night? Nope. Association functions? Annual meeting? Sorry. Being on a bunch of other clubs’ mailing lists, I’m aware of the same decisions being made elsewhere. What will life be like by the time pre-season rolls round in four months? None can say. The coronavirus’s timing seems to have spared cricket relative to the football codes, but I’m not so sure.

In times of crisis, pleasures are, quite logically, sacrificed first on the altar of necessity. For a flavour of life in time of contagion, during the week I picked up Daniel Defoe’s classic Journal of a Plague Year, and was reminded of the ordnances imposed on London.

Prohibited were “all plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, buckler-play, or such-like causes of assemblies of people”; also “all public feasting” and “disorderly tippling in taverns, ale-houses, coffee-houses, and cellars” as “the common sin of this time and greatest occasion of dispersing the plague”.

These commandments were not, in other words, simply about preventing the spread of disease; they contained moral strictures intended to coerce the populace back to righteous habits.

There is a degree of this to the measures recently imposed. This is serious, they say. No sniggering at the back. No sneaking round the corner. Which isn’t to deny that they are reasonable and sensible. But they also involve instilling a sense of urgency and sacrifice in a society not, perhaps, used to such. Their symbolic quotient prepares us for further exigencies over however long crisis conditions are judged to continue.

How long that will be cannot be subject of overconfident prediction, especially as a vaccine seems at best 18 months away. Which is why for cricket in particular, COVID-19 feels like a truly existential threat.

That’s not for the reason advanced this week by the Australian Cricketers Association, which picked a strange time to assert the rights of cricketers to do what epidemiologists round the world are unanimously discouraging, which is to travel internationally for non-essential reasons.

Precisely because infection can be spread without a carrier being aware of it, peripatetic players would be endangering the lives of others, not only their own.

Issues of public safety here supervene issues of freedom of trade. And the greater threat lurks at the base of cricket’s pyramid.

In seeking a parallel with the present challenge, some have had recourse to comparison with the limitation on sport placed in wartime. Last week’s cessation of first-class cricket was, of course, history’s third, after the hiatuses of the world wars.

Yet there’s a key difference. Even in the spans of 1914-18 and 1939-45, a great deal of cricket was played at second-class and community level, and relished all the more for the diversion it offered from austerity.

This was despite the Board of Control — CA’s antecedent body — being suspended. The game was then, perhaps, more truly of “the people”, rather than subject to head office.

Will “the people” feel the same way about cricket now they are to be prevented playing at all?

Forty-five years of anecdotal experience of playing and organising grassroots cricket have suggested to me that the instinct to play cricket is a very particular one — it is about ritual, and routine, and seasonal cycle, the reassurance of familiarity, the gratification of patience.

It draws us out, brings us together; it is habitual.

And once the habit is broken, it is exceptionally difficult to re-­establish. It’s as my friends on The Grade Cricketer observe: once your weekend has been colonised by other activities, it is not easily given back to exasperating ducks, dropping easy catches and getting smashed all over the park.

So what if restrictions on public gathering last beyond winter, as they easily could? Cricket’s partici­pation numbers are already under pressure, with CA suspected of fudging them.

The 2019-20 season was buoyed somewhat by following a well-watched Ashes series over winter; the cricket itch was there to begin. Now there is nothing to scratch: nothing to play, organise, watch, celebrate or debate anywhere for the foreseeable future. Even watching The Test, Amazon Prime’s excellent inside view of the Australian team’s resurrection, feels dangerously close to ­indulgence.

Once the restrictions are relaxed, moreover, their imprint will remain — the idea that there are more urgent priorities, closer to home, nearer to practicality.

Some will hurry back to the game for a cherished reunion; others, frankly, won’t.

Even when you’re not playing yourself, it’s brilliant to partake of the feeling around a club readying itself for a final. There’s the culmination of effort, the tang of anticipation, the preparing for giving all in the knowledge that you won’t be playing again for a while. This week it was seasoned: nobody knows when they’ll play again, or even in certain cases if.