Quotes

Oral gold from the great, the good, and also some of our players as well.

  • P G Wodehouse: ‘Missed’  an epic poem on dropping a catch. See here for the full text
  • From Vitaë Lampada by Sir Henry Newbolt 1862 – 1938: “There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight – Ten to make and the match to win” – click here for the whole poem
  • Clarkster: “The turning ups the thing lads” – (who turns up in a big black Beemer, whereas I can only afford a Ford. Ed)
  • The Nurdler : “I’ve been playing cricket for 20 years. If I was going to get any better it would have happened by now.”
  • Rodders: “You should see the outfield, it’s covered in dog shit” (unlike the game at Parliament Hill, where a dog actually shat on the wicket as we were playing. Ed)
  • Dr D: “Lend us a tenner Paul” (on being asked for his club sub)
  • Cicero or someone : “Vescere bracis meis” Latin for “Eat my shorts.”
  • Lord Mancroft (1914- ):  “Cricket– a game which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of eternity.”
  • Rev. John Mitford. 1770: “Troy has fallen and Thebes is a ruin. The pride of Athens is decayed, and Rome is crumbling to the dust. The philosophy of Bacon is wearing out, and the Victories of Marborough have been overshadowed by great laurels. All is vanity, but cricket; all is sinking in oblivion but you. Greatest of all elevens, fare ye well!”
  • Bradford FC 2000/2001: “We’re shit and we know we are…”:
  • Anon: “Yorkshire born and Yorkshire bred. Strong int arm and thick int head.”
  • Charlie Parker: “Only two problems with our team. Brewers’ droop and financial cramp. Apart from that we ain’t bloody good enough.” , Gloucestershire and England slow bowler (quoted by David Foot in Cricket’s Unholy Trinity, 1985)
  • George Bernard Shaw 1856 – 1950: Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
  • Patrick Leigh Fermor 1915-: Looking backward we could almost see, suspended with the most delicate equipoise above the flat little island, the ghostly shapes of those twin orbs of the Empire, the cricket ball and the blackball.
  • William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: “Cricket is organised loafing”
  • Robin Williams: “Cricket is baseball on Valium”
  • Kathy Lette: “Basically it’s just a whole bunch of blokes standing around scratching themselves”
  • Arthur Marshall: “If there is cricket in heaven, let us also pray that there will be rain”
  • Keith Miller: The flamboyant allrounder, when captaining the NSW side, would set his field by simply by saying, “OK fellas, scatter”.
  • (About Rudyard Kipling): He waved the flag during the Boer War, though he also denounced the national weakness that military failure had seemingly exposed in his poem “The Islanders,” which included the scandalous lines about “the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals,” implying that the cult of sport had helped soften and not harden the national spirit. It is amusing to learn how much resentment this caused: the headmaster of one public school angrily said that most of his old boys fighting in South Africa had previously played on the rugby team.
  • Anon: FOOTBALL offers the world clichés; RUGBY produces facial deformity; HOCKEY provides an acceptable outlet for psychotic violence; CRICKET alone breeds myths.
  • Grantland Rice 1880 – 1954: For when the One Great Scorer comes To write against your name, He marks – not that you won or lost – But how you played the game.
  • Merv Hughes’ fifth form geography report: “When Merv leaves school, he is going to have to be very good at football and cricket.”
  • Harold Pinter: “I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth – certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either”
  • Jim Jarmusch: Cricket makes no sense to me. I find it beautiful to watch and I like that they break for tea. That is very cool, but I don’t understand. My friends from The Clash tried to explain it years and years ago, but I didn’t understand what they were talking about.
  • G H Hardy: Cricket is the only game where you are playing against eleven on the other side and ten on your own.
  • Kevin Pietersen: “It’s a catch-21 situation.”
  • Gravestone in England : “As in life so in death lies a bat of renown, Slain by a lorry (three ton);  His innings is over, his bat is laid down; To the end a poor judge of a run.”
  • Brian Johnston: “Welcome to Worcester where we have just seen Barry Richards hit one of Basil D’Oliveira’s balls clean out of the ground.”
  • The Sponsor: Digicel’s chairman commenting on the West Indies extracurricular activities as they toured Australia: “If they had scored as many runs as they had women’s phone numbers during the tour, West Indies would have won the series comfortably.”
  • At Lord’s, by Francis Thompson (first stanza): For the field is full of shades as I near/ the shadowy coast,/And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling
    of a ghost,/And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host/As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,/To and fro: O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!
  • Gideon Haigh – on sledging : “The fault is not in our superstars but in ourselves, in that we have colluded in turning a game with perhaps more scope for individual expression than any other into another means of instilling mass conformity.” From Inside Out, a cricket book.
  • Brian Clough: A conversation turned to music, and to one singer in particular. “Frank Sinatra!” Clough said. “He met me.”
  • Henry Drummond 1851-1897: Life is simply a cricket match, with temptation as the bowler. Frm: BAXTER’S SECOND INNINGS : SPECIALLY REPORTED FOR THE SCHOOL ELEVEN: Hodder & Stoughton, 1892. A popular schoolboy cricketing allegory which remained in print for many years
  • John Arlott: he cricket commentator John Arlott once said of the New Zealand bowler, Bob Cunis: “Funny Name. Neither one thing nor the other.”
  • Neville Cardus: Colour and energy begin to leave the game, even as colour and energy begin to leave the summer itself. Cricketers grow weary; ambition wanes as the sun wanes. The season goes to its end with a modest and lovely fall. It does not finish rhetorically, as football does, vaunting a cup-tie before a million eyes. One after another the cricketers say goodbye in the darkening evenings of late summer; they fold their tents and depart, and nobody sees them. The noisy crowds have left the game for the new darling with the big ball. Down at Blenheim (it may chance to be) the season comes to an end on a quiet day, on which the crack of the bat sends out a sweet melancholy. As the cricketer leaves the field, not to set foot on the again on the game’s carpet for months and months to come, he has his moments of private sentiment. He glances back to take a last look at the field as the hours decrease and autumn grows in everything. He is glad that cricket belongs to the summer, comes in with the spring, and gets ready to go when the trees are brown.
  • Lindsey Fairhurst:  There’s a time and reason / for a summer season / for cricket, don’t you know? /It would be awfully hard / to find the ball / when it’s landed / in a field of snow.