On November 24, 2013 at the Woolloongabba Cricket Ground in Brisbane (colloquially called ‘the Gabba’), in the final overs of the first Ashes Test of the series, Australian captain Michael Clarke walked up, from his spot at second slip, to England number-eleven bat, Jimmy Anderson, and told him in no uncertain terms to face-up and ‘get ready for a broken fuck’n arm.’
Australian fast-bowler Mitchell Johnson had spent the previous four days of the match catapulting short-pitched deliveries at speeds of over 140 kmph at the English. Although broken limbs don’t often happen in cricket, if anyone was going to receive a broken arm that afternoon it was most probably going to be the technically unsound Anderson at the hands of the venomous, and very accurate, Johnson. Anderson, a fast bowler himself, is a prolific ‘sledger’ and at the turn of the previous over had been engaged in what one can only assume was a less than gentlemanly conversation with Australian bat-pad, George Bailey. They were ‘exchanging pleasantries,’ as the saying goes. Clarke’s advice was perhaps an indication of his dis pleasure at having an impending Australian victory delayed by so pugnacious a character as Jimmy.
The great Australian sporting media, however, called Clarke’s sledge a return to the idiosyncratic ‘Australian Ugliness’ that, apparently, is the secret ingredient of winning Australian sporting teams. Indeed, for the Guardian ’s Russell Jackson, the pronunciation is ‘fucken’ and not ‘fucking’: ‘For all the calculation and assuredness of Clarke’s media performances,’ Jackson writes, ‘there’s no hiding that broad Strine [as in ‘oz-stray-yun’, or ‘stray’n’, or ‘stroine ’ ], especially not in the heat of an Ashes Test where its blunt cadence draws a symbolic battle line of its own.’ i After seven years of humiliation at the hands of the English side, the Aussies had finally found their trophy-winning mojo.
Clarke’s enlivened Australian slang does many things. It demonstrates tactics of verbal intimidation; it feeds a stereotype of graceless Australian leaders and it exacerbates the disparity between sport and high-culture. As well as these things, Clarke’s phrase can help demonstrate the lines of continuity between cricket language, especially Australian cricket language, and the semiotics of avant-garde art. For example, Marcel Duchamp’s 1915 ‘ready-made,’ In Advance of the Broken Arm (Fig. 1), invokes in its title the same concern as Clarke’s sledge: the recipient best be wary of an ‘accident’ that would cause both pain and the incapacitation of one of his or her most useful instruments, the arms.
Fig 1. (ii)
Like Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), In Advance of the Broken Arm is a simple, seemingly unartistic object: an American snow-shovel. The object is only imbued with art-status through its placement and framing in both material and conceptual terms. As André Breton defines it, a ready-made is ‘a manufactured object promoted to the dignity of art object solely by virtue of the artist’s choice.’ iii But it’s also made art through its language, relying on reception, judgment and theory to complete its objectification. This is always only a provisional completion as the language constituting and surrounding Duchamp’s art continues to swirl-on.
In both cases, it is the language of Clarke and Duchamp that enters and constitutes the rules of the game. While cricket umpires will intervene if they think a physical clash is about to occur, they will rarely intercede in a verbal stoush. The media might trot-out cricket’s over-governing imperative to play within ‘the Spirit of the Game’ in order to question dramatic on-field altercations, but this spirit
– so pronounced in cricket – includes sledging. iv A team whose members offer mates lively support and opponents witty banter is said to be ‘showing spirit.’ In a physical game with physical stipulations that determine where on the field its players can go and how many runs are scored, it’s remarkable that bodies only clash in language.
This mimics a Duchampian contradiction, in which the ready-made cleaves conceptual art from any reliance on the physically see-able object. “Visuality is no longer a question,” Duchamp says, “the Readymade is no longer visible … It is completely grey matter.” v Physical contact in cricket and the material object in Duchamp’s matrix are phantasms. They don’t happen and nothing rides on them. But they haunt. ‘One simply notes that it is a bottlerack,’ Duchamp continues, referencing his Bottle Rack (1914), ‘or that it was a bottlerack and has changed direction.’ In this context Duchamp’s association of the prediction constituting the shovel’s title with the physical shovel itself becomes non-sensical, just as Michael Clarke’s warning that Jimmy Anderson is about to receive a broken arm becomes non-sensical. There are no arm-breaking instruments and there is no arm-breaking event.
This relationship between the object and speech is a poetic one to say the least. It’s an enigmatic and ineluctable encounter between the physical and the linguistic, the real and the imaginary. It’s indeterminate, moving, non-linear. In this way, poetics describes art and cricket. We know that poetry can also be art. But can it also be cricket, or can cricket be poetry? The vast tracts of words about cricket laid-down by journalists, diarists, novelists and poets suggests that it can. For its constant invocation as allegory for life and language and its staging of the intractable flirtation between contact and embodiment, cricket must be poetry.
Of course, cricket poets only rarely aspire to such metaphysical understanding. Most cricket poems are extensions of the game, inscriptions of what C.L.R James calls ‘the English public-school code,’ the code of ‘Britain and her colonies and the colonial peoples.’ vi They advertise cricket, mythologise it and let its practitioners reminisce about it. If I may let a personal anecdote slip-in momentarily: I will always remember off-by-heart the lyrics of one of my (ultra-traditional, private) high school’s songs:
There were heroes on the field,
Who the willow well could wield
Men who made their name as demons with the ball.
But our sun has never set,
We’ll have heroes with us yet,
Who we hope will do the greatest deeds of all.
The tune is very catchy too. There is no mere similitude between cricket and the school here. The heroes of the field are exemplars of the school’s values: they are winners, leaders, dominators, interrogators, stylists, greats. They are extensions. These heroes are the instruments of an (elitist) ideology and these lyrics ensure that that link is established and maintained. When boys leave the school having become ‘heroes on the field’ they are expected to come into contact with the exterior world and ‘do’ great ‘deeds’ upon it.
This kind of missionary contact is a thoroughly colonial phenomenon and one thickly woven into Ashes (that is, England vs. Australia) cricketing folklore. Upon the Australian team beating England for the first time at London’s The Oval in 1882, the local Sporting Times published a mock obituary announcing the death and subsequent cremation of English cricket. In advance of the English team’s reply tour of Australia in 1882-3, and several times throughout, English captain the Honourable Ivo Bligh vowed to return ‘those ashes.’ Upon stopping at Melbourne, it is told, a group of Melbourne ladies presented Bligh with a tiny, pre-fabricated earthenware urn (most likely to have been a perfume container) filled with the ashes of a bail (fig. 2).
Fig.2
This physical icon of the late English cricket was to be valiantly carried ‘home’ upon a redemptive English series victory (a feat which they achieved). Plastered across the front of this urn – which has been copiously replicated since, serving as a memento for Ashes-winning sides – is the fourth verse of a longer poem that was published in Melbourne Punch on 1 February 1883. It goes, to the tune of ‘Who’s at the Window’:
When Ivo goes back with the urn, the urn;
Studds, Steel, Read and Tylecote return, return;
The welkin will ring loud,
The great crowd will feel proud,
Seeing Barlow and Bates with the urn, the urn;
And the rest coming home with the urn.
This and the song’s five other verses are thoroughly patriotic and anti-Australian in support of the no doubt once rousing central sentiment,
Oh, great Mother England, hurrah, hurrah!
Our famous Old England, hurrah, hurrah!
It pokes fun at Australia’s economic mismanagement (‘the four-million loan didn’t float – bad lot!’) and although acknowledging the previously winning ways of the Australian captain, Billy Murdoch, impels the antipodeans to ‘give way, give way’ to the ‘brave’ Ivo Bligh, who has ‘Come here to try / To claim the blue ribbon anew’.
Again, a metaphoric instrumentalism emerges. Bligh’s ‘comrades’ come ‘with willow and leather to help,’ demonstrating what Kwame Dawes calls in his introduction to Roger Bonair-Agard’s collection of cricket poetry, Gully (2010), cricket’s ‘absolute reverence’ for its implements. vii And they come crusading to smash, break or catch-out an opposition empire that stands in the way of cricket’s author. The English aim to glaze-over the Australian victory and ‘return’; ‘the urn’ maintains, in its poetic rhetoric, an unbroken line from ‘home’ to colony to home.
Postcolonial cricket poetry is very different. It uses various, often subtle, tactics to break this line. In direct comparison to the linear deployment of cricket’s metaphorics, Brisbane poet Liam Ferney’s ‘Farewell Dick Whittington,’ from his 2013 collection, Boom , displays cricketing images and figures in simile mode. Ferney places his own departure from the scene of what is in one sense the river-sectioned metropolis, London, against Pakistani cult-cricketer Inzamam Ul-Haq’s departure from Test cricket (‘Inzy and I take our bows: different stages, same week’):
His: the Oliver Hardy Bradman in another
downtrodden trundle, three shy of Miandad’s mark.
Never a man for the accountants, that funereal trudge
into cricket’s periphery and Wisden’s yellow pages,
one final glance, a wise seal accustomed to his pups’ slaughter.
Mine: a bested Jesuit, flummoxed
By the conundrums of the current as it crowds at the pylons.
St. Paul’s dome, astride the town like some Hollywood producer
In town to sweep Ann Darrow off her feet,
But majesty aside, it just reminds me of the credits
at five to six on the end of The Goodies. viii
The simile is safe and looks like it doesn’t threaten empire – there’s no contact and there’re no broken lines. There is only one ontology alongside another ontology, each carrying mutual resemblance. However, these ontologies overlay each other. For example, youtube ‘inzamam ul-haq run-outs’ and then read Ferney’s self-analysis and tell me Inzy’s inathleticism, or indeed his banishment to the ‘periphery’ of cricket’s almanac, doesn’t cast an atmospheric pall over Ferney’s self-satire. Inzy’s ‘funereal trudge’ back to the pavillion after being run-out – again – is aligned with Ferney’s identity as ‘a bested Jesuit, flummoxed.’ Both anti-heroes seem defeated by the ever-progressing elements time, the ‘ferryman’s’ river and the memorial credits of The Goodies. They are forced to ‘go back to whence [they] came, / forever players in the pageant of returning.’ Both were picked-up and carried by colonial currents (cricket and the Thames) then dumped when they started to notice ‘conundrums’ or fall ‘shy of [the] mark.’
Does empire win here? Or, does Ferney’s chronicle of these dubious cricket heroes suggest that cricket produces agents with the capacity to both be successful and subvert its aims?
Other postcolonial cricket poetry breaks ontology harder than a leggie on day five at Chennai. Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘Rites’ takes-on cricket as an aleatory colonial symbol and is worth quoting at length. Near the poem’s end a tussle between an MCC team – including off-spinner Jim Laker – and Barbados at Kensington Oval reaches its climax:
Boy, dis is cricket
Then Laker come down wid he third
one. He wrap up de ball in de palmo’ he han’ like a package
AN’ MAKE CLYDE WALCOTT LOOK FOOLISH.
Mister man, could’a hearall de flies that was buzzin’ out there
round da bread carts; could’a hear
if de empire fart.An’ then blue murder start:
‘Kill one o’dem, Clyde’, some wise-
wun was shoutin’, ‘knock he skull off;doan let them tangle you up in no leg trap;
use de feet dat God give you!’
Ev’ry blabber mout’ talkin’,ev’ry man jack givin’ advice;
but we so frighten now at what happenin’ there
we could piss we pants if we doan have a care.‘ Swing de bat, man ’, one feller was shoutin’;
an’ Clyde swing de bat but de bat miss
de ball an’ de ball hit de padan’ he pad went biff
like you beatin’ bed
an’ de empire han’ stick
in de air
like Francis who dead
an’ de boss o’ we batsmen out.The crowd so surprise you int hearin’ a shout.
Ev’ry mout’ loss.
But I say it once an’ I say it agen:when things goin’ good, you cahn touch
we; but leh murder start
an’ old man, you cahn fine a man to hole up de side… ix
The West Indian side is being beaten in this passage of play, a loss expressed in the poem in a number of ways: the disbelief with which ‘CLYDE WALCOTT’ (of all people!) being made to ‘LOOK FOOLISH’ is capitalised; the crowd’s silence, sapping the event of its energy; the crowd’s cacophonous friendly-fire – ‘ swing de bat, man ’ – as over-compensation, followed by its heave back to silence again on Walcott’s dismissal. This last desertion – ‘Ev’ry mout’ loss’ – marks the capitulation triggered by ‘murder,’ that deterritorialising West Indian catch-all for the conditions of mayhem, angst, violence, bloodshed, disempowerment, etc. etc.
But more significantly, Brathwaite short-circuits the link between empire and its instruments. Even in loss, the West Indian cricket voice denies the English one any volume. Narrative focus is diverted from the play to the stands. Even if the West Indians are ‘murder[ing]’ each other, Brathwaite lets them feel both how cricket affects their bodies and how they can affect cricket. Their own experience – which is not the experience of cricket, but one in contact with cricket – is rendered in the vernacular. Despite falling victim to Laker’s insidious package – bound up, of course, ‘in de palm / o’ his han’ – the event remains a West Indian one.
And then there is the magnificent half-malapropism, half-‘nation language’ phonetic replacement of umpire with ‘empire’: without the locals going mad in the stands you ‘could’a hear / if de empire fart’. The game’s authority figure, the umpire, is not simply imbued with the power of empire (which would enforce the link between the rules of cricket and the code of empire). Rather, the umpire’s flatulence in this profound moment of silence between sustained subjection and murder exposes the vulnerability of empire. It shows the empire without limbs. The locals are not being made to feel like the arm of empire and nor are they yet self-destructing. In the moment of calm between these two extremes the cruel, authoritarian arse-end of empire is unveiled.
In contrast to Brathwaite who breaks cricket’s language and exposes empire, Melbourne poet Nick Whittock, in his collection of cricket poems, Covers (2004), turns cricket language inside out. x He, like Ferney, has a cricketing anti-hero, former number-six West Australian Test bat, Damien Martyn (‘Marto’). But unlike Ferney’s exiled ‘Inzy,’ ‘Marto’ remains nominally centred and is emptied of significance. He is not an agent of empire, nor an iconoclast. As Whittock explains in an interview with Sam Kidman, Marto is a formal chameleon without ideological allegiances,
…he barely plays the game […] he is the quietest, most absent cricketer, and he posits this absence so forcefully. He hardly needs to hit the ball to send it to the boundary. And when he does hit it he is never Marto but always takes on the aspect and qualities of another player. xi
This enigmatic Marto-figure is exemplified in Whittock’s poem entitled, fittingly, not with words but with a small, faded picture of a fielder lying on the ground. In it, Marto is not even required to partake in the physical requirements of the game:
at mid-on marto is
dreaming of a marig
old grown from seed
the catch comes and
goes unnoticed he is
a marigold man on his
chest cricket flowers
orange soon or on
ce approaches ever
idea with trepidation
now the chance
has slipped through
his coloured fingers
and language
Here, Whittock shows that cricket could be something entirely different to what empire says it is, and that a figure within cricket, Marto, can get outside of it to make the change. It could be an organic form flowering from the chest of Marto the Pure, who does not embody traditional, colonial cricketing ideology. In the poem, Marto should use his hands to catch the ball, but he doesn’t. The ball ‘comes and / goes unnoticed.’ With this, the opportunity to become an empirical ‘company man’ ‘slip[s]’ through Marto’s fingers. His limbs and his language help constitute a detached, monadic, organic form which is not, indeed cannot, be instrumentalised. Marto can appear or disappear, engage or not, at will.
To take us through to stumps let’s squeeze an over in from the off-spinner. That is, to round-out the argument that postcolonial cricket subject-poets (Clarke, Ferney, Brathwaite, Whittock, Marto and – hell, why not – Duchamp) break – in one way or another – the arms of empire, we’ll turn to Whittock’s ‘doosra locomotion,’ a poem based on Sri-Lankan off-spinner, Muttiah Muralidaran, his unusual bowling action and the delivery which that action lets him bowl, the ‘doosra.’ Some background: when he bowls, Murali’ looks like he throws (which is illegal). He has been cited for throwing before and has had copious scientific tests to see whether he actually bowls or ‘chucks.’ He’s been officially cleared on the grounds that his arm never actually straightens. The ‘doosra,’ or ‘the other one,’ is a delivery bowled by off-spinners which instead of turning towards a right-hand batsman’s legside, turns to the off-side. The doosra is almost impossible to bowl without a bent arm like Murali’s.
In ‘doosra locomotion’ the arms of empire – cricket arms – are ‘folded’ in order to bowl the doosra but also folded by the doosra:
the bending arm
folding cricket
the bending arm
folding cricket
2 deliveries ago
you had my hands’
playing down a line
that couldn’t physically exist
Out of nowhere, the imperceptible doosra has stumped the hands of empire – the batsman’s. Where did that delivery come from?! It came from Murali’s ‘broken’ arm. What did it do? It broke the batsman’s arms, his form, got him playing down a line that doesn’t exist. And ‘there is no legislation that can stop it’:
my doosra
it is the negation of the ball
declared a no-ball
doosra is the negation of me
my doosra
it is already the negation of all batsmen
& all administration
with every delivery i am possessed
with fear that it will be my last
my heart fills with terror until
you can see it bulging in my eyes
like a white old egg about to birth
In 2014, as Murali’s career draws to a close, it is clear this ‘terror’ has had no fatal fulfilment. He holds the record for the most number of Test wickets ever taken. He’s taken even more than Shane Warne who once also broke the hands of empire with More importantly, Murali has emancipated the doosra. It’s no longer black-marked as a ‘negation.’ This, of course, does not diminish the doosra’s transgressive capabilities. While the softly-spoken Sri-Lankan’s demeanor is far less bullish than Clarke’s, his eyes, ‘bulging’ as he winds-up to send one down with his own bent arm, suggest he might just occasionally be thinking something along the lines of ‘get ready for a broken fuck’n arm.’
Simon Eales is a post-graduate student of literature at The University of Melbourne. His current work is on satire in Australian poetry. He is also an off-spinner with the Ashburton Willows Cricket Club.
Correction: The original version of this article referred to Liam Ferney as a Melbourne poet; he is actually based in Brisbane.
i Russell Jackson. ‘‘Get ready for a broken fucken arm’: how Michael Clarke got ruthless’. http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/nov/25/michael-clarke-captaincy-sledging-james-anderson.
ii Marcel Duchamp. In Advance of the Broken Arm . August 1964 (fourth version, after lost original of November 1915). Wood and galvanised-iron snow shovel, 52” (132 cm) high. Gift of The Jerry and Emily Spiegel Family Foundation. Image courtesy of www.moma.org/site.
iii Andre Breton. Manifestoes of Surrealism . University of Michigan Press. 1969. p.277.
iv The ‘Preamble to the Laws of Cricket’ begins: “Cricket is a game that owes much of its unique appeal to the fact that it should be played not only within its Laws but also within the Spirit of the Game. Any action which is seen to abuse this spirit causes injury to the game itself.” http://www.lords.org/mcc/laws-of-cricket/preamble-to-the-laws/.
v Marcel Duchamp. ‘ Marcel Duchamp Talking about Readymades. Interview by Phillipe Collin, Galerie Givaudan, Paris, 21 June 1967.’ Charles Penwarden, trans. Marcel Duchamp . Museum Jean Tinguely Basel, ed. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers. 2002.
vi C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary . London: Stanley Paul & Co. 1963.
vii Roger Bonair-Agard, Gully . New York: Cypher Books. 2010. p.xi.
viii Liam Ferney. Boom . Wollongong: Grand Parade Poets. 2013.
ix Kamau Brathwaite. The Arrivants: a new world trilogy . London: OUP. 1973.
x Nick Whittock. Covers . COD. 2004.
xi Cordite Poetry Review, 5 March, 2003. Accessed at http://cordite.org.au/interviews/nick-whittock/.