Let Us Now Praise Frank Keating

A new cricket season is upon us and something to take our minds off this election caper. Happily this also means it’s time for another lovely piece from Frank Keating, still the doyen of British sportswriters. This time he’s strolling down Shaftesbury Avenue, compiling an XI of playwrights who have played and loved the noblest game. It is everything you would imagine and hope it to be. Beckett* and Pinter and Stoppard feature prominently of course; so too Simon Gray.

There’s this too, from Peter Gibbs, once of Derbyshire and subsequently of the stage:

In that long ago piece Gibbs had been, in real life, even more metaphysical than Stoppard in explaining how a single stroke had determined his retirement from county cricket.

“I’d hit my twelfth century in Derbyshire’s match at Edgbaston when, of a sudden, sublime revelation took over. I hit Lance Gibbs off the back foot through midwicket, an old-fashioned attacking shot, one of the most difficult imaginable, and I played it to absolute perfection, consummate, transcendental, flawless.