On Clausewitz and the Art of Cricket

Earlier this summer, at the end of a conversation on other matters, the (excellent) American blogger Kevin Drum asked for more cricket-blogging. I’m happy to oblige! He said he finds the game “endlessly fascinating” if also puzzling. “I’m pretty much agog” he wrote “at the idea that you have a sport that frequently ends in a draw even though it takes five days to play.”

This is a common observation and an aspect of cricket that mystifies many people, by no means all of them American. But of the three most common results – a win, a loss and a draw – it is not an overstatement to say that the draw is the most important. Because it is the draw, or more accurately the possibility of the draw, that gives the game its texture and much of its near-endless variety.

One could get all fancy and say that just as the episodes that constitute an individual’s life can’t satisfactorily be neatly divided into columns marked “win” and “loss”, so cricket’s nuances reflect the stuff of which life is made.