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Roger Morgan-Grenville

When a Trojan horse backfires

‘We are what we repeatedly do,’ said Aristotle to no one in particular. ‘Excellence is not an act, but a habit’.

Aristotle may have been unfamiliar with the finer points of 20/20 cricket, but I like to think that the bearded philosopher would have felt a sharp pang of excellence recognition if he had cared to drop in to Petworth Park CC last night, maybe after a long day shopping for antiques in the town. Unique events unfolded there.

By way of background, 33 years and 393 games have passed since we formed the White Hunter Cricket Club one muggy July afternoon in the shadows of Winchester Cathedral. In that time, 350 people have played for us, helping us to win 138 of those matches, lose 196, draw or tie all of the rest bar one, where someone died and we really hadn’t the appetite to see it through. For the last 18 of those years, and probably around 200 games, we have employed the services of one particular player whose contributions, whilst immeasurable on the social side of things, are distinctly measurable on the cricketing side. We call him the Human Sieve, and, to put it gently, he has redefined incompetence. His batting average is in the low 1s, he has no bowling average having never taken the wicket that would first validate it, and he has dropped countless catches. In those 200 or so games, he has reached double figures just the once, an occasion whose anniversary is still marked by celebratory candles of gratitude being lit in local churches. Being a lovely bloke, his place in the team is assured until such time he decides to move his excellence elsewhere.

He had already started the 2019 season in a rich vein of form, with scores of 2, 0*, 0, 0 and 1, all compiled with the aid of two trademark shots that he has made all his own, the airy waft and the nauseous heave, both employed randomly and having little or no causal relationship with the ball bowled. Each passing year, his feet are yet more stationary, more Ozimandias-like, on the grateful turf. Out in the field, he has been refreshingly creative, inventing a score of new ways in which to usher the ball past his body, or between his legs, and off on its uninterrupted and cheerful way to the boundary.

But tonight, we gave him to the opposition, and everything changed.

Since it was a beautiful evening, and since we had thirteen players and Petworth only eleven, we agreed to play twelve a side. We gift-wrapped the Sieve, of course, and packaged him up as a middle order power house, a sort of Virat Kohli with Dorset overtones. And it had taken about four days to pluck up the courage to hand him that particular silver bullet, for he is nothing if not loyal to the club, nothing if not proud.

‘Bat him at five,’ we suggested. ‘He will read the game for you and instinctively know whether to be Boycott or Buttler.’

And bat him at five they did, at the end of a mini-collapse. All we needed to do, we chuckled, was give him countless deliveries a foot outside the off stump, and he would be nought not out ten overs later. Things didn’t quite work out that way.

His first ball was exactly as planned from our point of view, but when it got to his end, instead of the waft or heave, he deftly late cut it towards deep backward point, with the exquisite timing of a Steven Smith.

‘One run,’ he called with quiet authority, and trotted through. Quizzical glances were shared.

His second ball, a vicious delivery rising up to his chest, was sumptuously pulled behind square for four, a shot that incidentally propelled him to his highest score for four years. ‘Sumptuous’ is an adjective that is rarely, if ever, deployed when the Sieve is about; ‘awkward’, ‘ungainly’ and ‘inept’ are his more usual currency. I suspect that he lies in bed of a winter’s evening dreaming of being sumptuous.

‘No need to run,’ he called. ‘It’ll go’. He lived in a world where nothing had ever ‘gone’ before. Normally, even when he managed to hit things, they didn’t get off the square. The only ‘going’ he ever did was back to the pavilion.

We all started to look at each other, with the air of remote island tribesmen hearing gunfire for the first time.

He swished and missed a couple, but then did one of those violent Jason Roy tennis racquet smacks to long off for two, before carving the following one way above the wicket keepers head for four. Eleven not out, and the man was pushing his career high of fourteen. Twelve, with a quiet on drive which he skilfully took the weight off, running a cheeky single to the fielder’s weaker hand. Twelve became fourteen with a carved two to wide third man, and then he blocked out a few straight balls from our best bowler.

Too much is written about brilliance these days, in sport as in every other walk of life, and not enough about appallingness. It is given to vanishingly few of us to be brilliant at anything, and yet the back pages of each newspaper are full to the gunwales of its cocky, unwholesome presence. Incompetence, on the other hand, which is a virtue shared by far more of us, is routinely overlooked, like a disapproving aunt who sits festering in the corner, having overstayed her welcome at the Christmas break. Fine shots are two a penny in international cricket, but the cultivated smears, wallops and tickles that the Sieve was serving up were, in our view, a rare thing of beauty. Tickets to watch it would have changed hands at a high old price.

And after each shot, the two batsmen would meet in the middle, punch gloves, and talk about the kind of things people only get round to during long innings. He was in unknown territory. Hitherto, to the Sieve, midwicket conferences were things that other people did.

When his excellent partner was retired on fifty, he became the senior player, walking half way back to the boundary and briefing the incoming bat as to the state of the pitch, and the ability of the bowler.

‘Look for sharp singles,’ we heard him say. ‘I’ll deal with the big stuff.’ To our certain knowledge, he had never once before been in a position to greet an incoming batsman. He was simply never in for long enough, as the first wicket that fell when he was out there was always his own. Something far bigger than a simple cricket match was going on; something of excellence was emerging from the chrysalis of ineptitude.

Fourteen became eighteen with a brutal lofted cut to the fence, from a fast and rising ball. Jonny Bairstow couldn’t have executed it better. Not only was it one of the shots of the evening, but it brought him to a personal career high. Granted, he got out soon afterwards, caught at mid-off from a traditionally mistimed pull, but by then the damage was done. Since the last wicket had fallen, sixty uncomplicated runs had been added, and, from the boundary’s edge we could hear the Sieve modestly batting away the honeyed compliments that were flowing his way.

‘Too kind!’ he said. ‘I really should have stayed to see the innings through.’ This was cheek of a weapons grade scale, but we loved him all the more for it.

As things turned out, he had not quite finished with us.

Suddenly, when we batted, he was everywhere. Where we would have expected to see balls passing between his legs, they were instead scooped up and hurled flat into the keeper. Where he would have waited for the ball to come to him, he was running it at it, the better to effect a problem for the batsmen. Where the normal noise one heard after a bit of Sieve fielding (‘oops, sorry, bowler’), we started hearing ‘Nice work, Richard’. It was kind of inevitable that, when I myself was batting and was late onto an off-cutter, top-edging it into the safe and arid wastes of no-mans’ land, that the darting figure who ran all the way from cover to backward point and safely pouched the chance would have been the Sieve. The transformation was complete. If they’d chucked him the ball, he probably would have taken a five-fer.

‘You know what?’ the skipper said to me as we shook hands to the backdrop of the Wealden sunset. ‘We thought you’d give us a no-hoper. Most people do. That was very sporting of you. Very’

And out there on the edge of the ground, the Sieve was quietly making the third of a dozen phone calls to his extended family. Success, after all, is public property.

From now on, the Sieve plays for us, and us alone. The alternative is too painful.

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