Cricket matches and the memory – are you really sure what you saw? | Gary Naylor
A day's play can't be summed up in a moment, and the statistics can never do justice to the drama you (think you) witnessed
Two of the twentieth century's greatest writers of short fiction were fascinated by memory, returning to it over and over again. In Funes The Memorious, Jorge Luis Borges writes of a boy who remembers every detail of his every perception, his mind locked on to an endlessly replaying reel of memory, the past overlaying the present. Philip K Dick, in We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, invites us to consider how the perception of the past can control our futures: how memory can serve multiple masters given the technology. (Working in non-fiction, Oliver Sacks has written about how strangely memory works in his patients' brains and in his own).
My memory was very good indeed as a youngster, though I lost the happy ability to remember, almost effortlessly, long lists of French and German vocabulary when I introduced my neurons to alcohol. That memory, like so much else, is now fading in middle age, becoming limited to a means of recalling what I've read, but an otherwise unreliable, even capricious, tool for much else.
Which brings me to cricket. How is cricket remembered? There are the facts of course: highest scores; batting averages; even players' initials (APE, IVA and DPMD are just three of literally hundreds that just float around in my head, as biddable as the date of my birthday). There are the moments too: Steve Harmison 2006-7; Michael Slater 1994-5; "Jones … Bowden … Kasprowicz the man to go." But, though cricket has a rich treasury of facts and an inexhaustibly youtubeable archive of moments, such are mere amuse-bouches compared to the feast that is a full day's play, a five-day Test or, best of all, a five-Test series. How do we remember the narrative arcs of such swirling whirlpools of opportunities taken and eschewed?
This question arose at Words and Wickets, a splendid day at Wormsley that combined cricket and literature into a potent draft. A panel discussing their favourite cricket books, noted, with a degree of puzzlement, that fiction was largely absent, despite the game's tradition of provoking wonderful prose. I wondered too – before an answer suggested itself.
My memories of cricket (for example when I wrote of this famous day at Old Trafford in 1981) are unreliable, capturing and rejecting detail almost at random. I'm as likely to recall the hardness of the benches on which we sat or the cry of the newspaper vendor with his bag of Manchester Evening News's as I am to conjure the memory of Botham's blind sixes. Even as strong an impression as that made by my first experience of a live first class match (this one from 1975) was corrupted by the passage of time, only to be rectified by the unarguable flat data of the web. The match in my mind (with first day centuries for Barry Richards and Gordon Greenidge and a second day riposte in kind by Clive Lloyd) will never be the match on the screen – nor, perhaps, should it be.
And maybe that is why cricket's fiction is all too often a damp squib, an ersatz simulacrum of the real thing. Our memories of cricket, unlike other sports (though, as usual, I'll make an exception for cycling's Grands Tours) are themselves fictions. We cannot capture the sweep of the narrative in mere facts, isolated incidents or (worst of all) talking points – we are obliged to construct our own fictions to place cricket in our memories. And invented fictions can never compete with the fictions we have made from real matches past.
Perhaps cricket needs its Nabokov. It needs a writer of his skills to demand, "Speak, Memory" and then to share the answers with us. Cricket's greatest fiction may be no more than its most accurate recounting of its past.
• This is an article from our Guardian Sport Network
• This article first appeared on The 99.4 Cricket Blog
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