A Matter of Style

I spent a good deal of the day watching a fine game of cricket between my school's senior team and their number one rivals for the top slot in Singapore. Our opponents won but our guys put up a strong showing. In fact, at the point when I left for prayers at the nearby mosque I thought they might just snatch a victory, but by the time I got back it was all done and dusted. There's a lot of nonsense these days about winning being everything. It isn't. Giving it your best shot, doing it the right way and recognising both victory and defeat for the imposters they are: that's everything.

The best novel I know about school cricket, in fact, my all-time favourite school story (which I think I read probably twenty times around the age of eleven) is P. G. Wodehouse's Mike and Psmith (which marked Psmith's fictional debut.) Here's a paragraph describing one of the teachers attempting to bowl:

Mr Downing was a bowler with a style of his own. He took two short steps, two long steps, gave a jump, took three more short steps, and ended with a combination of step and jump, during which the ball emerged from behind his back and started on its slow career to the wicket. The whole business had some of the dignity of the old-fashioned minuet, subtly blended with the careless vigour of a cake-walk. The ball, when delivered, was billed to break from leg, but the programme was subject to alterations.

Now that's a style to which to aspire - the writing, not the bowling.