Yesterday's match at Blenheim Palace, in which I took part - for the Duke's team.I shall not attempt something so presumptuous as to claim the preference of a game for the Almighty: I am sure he can choose for himself. However, as an Englishman of Jewish heritage once said:
‘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’ - Harold Pinter
Cricket is itself a byword for grace: for the supremacy of the spirit over the letter. ‘It’s not cricket’ is an accusation above all of Pharisaism, of perhaps mastering the frame of the game but not its understanding its essence. In the infamous Bodyline series of 1932-33, the Australian captain Bill Woodfull famously said to the English manager: ‘I do not want to see you, Mr Warner. There are two teams out there. One is playing cricket and the other is not.’
Cricket is a game with a doctrine of creation perhaps only rivaled by that of golf. It is a game that relates directly to the surface of the earth; it is exposed to the wind and the rain and the sun. Cricket is a game invented by shepherds: it is a pastoral game.
Cricket has a biblical relationship to time. It combines the universal truths of the sages with the dynamic progressions and epic dimensions of covenant history.
If Cricket's messiah was Don Bradman, her Abraham was the appropriately named W.
G. Grace. Well, perhaps he was more a Jacob of a figure: a wily grasper and a shamateur at that, a replacer of bails...but an impassable bearded giant at the crease.
Cricket is itself a byword for grace: for the supremacy of the spirit over the letter. ‘It’s not cricket’ is an accusation above all of Pharisaism, of perhaps mastering the frame of the game but not its understanding its essence. In the infamous Bodyline series of 1932-33, the Australian captain Bill Woodfull famously said to the English manager: ‘I do not want to see you, Mr Warner. There are two teams out there. One is playing cricket and the other is not.’
Cricket is a game with a doctrine of creation perhaps only rivaled by that of golf. It is a game that relates directly to the surface of the earth; it is exposed to the wind and the rain and the sun. Cricket is a game invented by shepherds: it is a pastoral game.
Cricket has a biblical relationship to time. It combines the universal truths of the sages with the dynamic progressions and epic dimensions of covenant history.
If Cricket's messiah was Don Bradman, her Abraham was the appropriately named W.
G. Grace. Well, perhaps he was more a Jacob of a figure: a wily grasper and a shamateur at that, a replacer of bails...but an impassable bearded giant at the crease. 
