The Nominative Determinism XI

Compiling fantasy teams is a popular exercise among all sports fans, but cricket is possibly unique in the esoteric nature of many of the sides compiled. Creatively crafted sides were a popular subject at the New Zealand Cricket Museum when I volunteered there, with impromptu selection panels frequently forming. I fondly remember then-curator David Mealing’s Food and Beverage XI captained by CB Fry, and our attempt at putting together a Composers and Musicians XI, inspired by one of Neil Wagner’s first appearances at the Basin Reserve.

Nominative Determinism is the theory that a person’s name can influence their future profession or vocation. The theory has its’ genesis in aptronyms, cases where someone’s name is ironically well-suited to what they do, such as neuroscientist Russell Brain or author Novella Carpenter. Unsurprisingly, many of the most notable aptronyms are borne by sportspeople, such as world’s fastest man Usain Bolt, former tennis number one Margaret Court, and my personal favourite, Western Sydney Wanderers striker Gol Gol Mebrahtu. Nominative Determinism tells us that these people were in a sense destined, or at the very least subconsciously guided, to become these things because of their names.

The Nominative Determinism XI is made up of players whose names not only relate to cricket, but where possible also to their role as a player. So, while Glenn Turner is easily the most successful of the two or three dozen Turners to play First Class cricket, he only took five wickets in his career and misses out. Unfortunately, due to my inability to speak Sinhalese, Hindi, Jamaican Patois, or really anything except English, the side is rather…white. So if you know of any cricketing aptronyms in other languages, or even in English, let me know.

The Nominative Determinism XI to play CB Fry’s Food and Beverage XI:

Peter Bowler

The man facing the first ball is the only Bowler to ever play First-Class cricket. England-born Bowler was raised in Australia, playing for that country’s Under-19s before returning to the land of his birth. In an 18-year career in which he played for Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Somerset, and Tasmania, Bowler scored over 19,500 First-Class and 9,000 List-A runs. A rather dour but effective opening batsman, he was likely close to an England call-up in the early 90s, but an Atherton and Bowler opening pairing would probably have ended the universe. Often cited as an example of an inaptronysm, he could still bowl some handy part-time off-breaks.

Walter Driver

With the bowlers pitching the ball up you need your openers to be strong on the front foot. An average of 37 from 10 games for Victoria and Western Australia in the early post-war years is hardly a stellar record, but a few pushes down the ground will help see the shine off the ball.

Joe Burns

His name is not related to the game of cricket itself, but Burns earns his place in this side due to his having been born to play for his Big Bash League side, Brisbane Heat. Currently one of the few outstanding batsmen in Australian domestic cricket, he already has a Baggy Green and has a good chance of becoming the long-term number three for Australia. Stints with the Glamorgan Dragons, Perth Scorchers, and Wellington Firebirds also clearly await.

David Hookes (Captain)

The man for whom the shot could have been named, the South Australian battered the short boundaries at the Adelaide Oval with his hooks, pulls, and cuts for sixteen glorious seasons. Hookes was only 21 when he became only the second man ever to hit four centuries across two First Class games and made his Australia debut in the Centenary Test later that season. Despite never making the grade at international level (he scored only one century in 23 matches), he was marketed as the heart-throb of World Series Cricket and eventually plundered 12,671 First Class runs at 43.99. His 32 centuries included a 306 not out and the fastest First Class century (in terms of balls faced), a 34-ball attack upon Victoria’s very existence as a state in 1982. He also captained South Australia to the Sheffield Shield title in 1981-82, the only time New South Wales and Western Australia’s duopoly was broken that decade. Coach of Victoria when he was tragically killed, and with eight seasons of captaincy in Adelaide, Hookes will make sure the side plays aggressive, ‘Australian’ cricket.

Oliver Slipper

Slipper didn’t take a catch in his one List-A appearance for Surrey, but will be required to at least take up space in the cordon as it is an opportunity that we cannot pass up.

Jon Batty (Vice-Captain/Wicket Keeper)

A specialist wicket-keeper turned solid lower middle-order batsman, Batty was a mainstay in the successful Surrey side of the early 2000s, even captaining the side to third in the 2003 County Championship. In a career that lasted nineteen years and also saw stints with Gloucestershire and Northamptonshire, he played 494 games across all three formats. Considered unlucky not to have had a chance in the England ODI side, he offers leadership, skill with the gloves, and versatility at number six.

Heath Streak

Probably Zimbabwe’s greatest ever player, Streak could hit 145kph at his peak. After making early waves as a nineteen year old, he was consistently his country’s most important player. The only Zimbabwean to take 100 wickets in both Test and ODI cricket, let alone the more than 200 he took in both forms, he carried the bowling attack for most of his career, and the entire team after the mass exodus of the early 2000s. One of 11 players to take 200 wickets and score 2000 runs in ODIs, and with batting and bowling averages in the 20s in every form of the game, Streak was one of finest bowling all-rounders of his generation. He leads the Nominative Determinism XI bowling attack.

Ben Cutting

Ben Cutting bowls hard and hits hard. The towering right-arm quick rolls his fingers across an effective slower bouncer to go with the one that rockets towards the batsman’s head. A product of the Twenty20 age, the Queenslander has made his name playing for the Brisbane Heat and Rajasthan Royals, but his First Class averages (23.94 with the bat, 27.7 with the ball) suggest the potential to be a true all-rounder in all forms. Sure to add to his four Test and ODI caps, Cutting is this side’s third seamer and almost guarantees some runs if the batsmen fail.

Martyn Ball

You cannot play Cricket without a Ball, and Gloucestershire legend Martyn Ball not only took up the sport, but also managed to look a little like the little red thing he played it with. Belying his slightly rotund frame, Ball was a dynamic off-spinner and fine slip fielder who played a key role in his county’s domination of limited overs cricket around the turn of the century. More potent as a bowler in the shorter forms (his T20 and List-A averages 13 and 7 runs better than in the longer form), he also offers even more hard hitting down the order.

Ian Turner

A left-arm spinner (naturally), Turner had a short professional career for Hampshire, taking 54 First-Class and 16 List-A wickets. Unable to displace a young Shaun Udal, he played his last game for the county at the age of 25. However, a reasonable average of 36 and miserly economy rate of 2.74 suggest that Turner can make a contribution, especially on late-season pitches.

Arthur Fielder

Arthur certainly was a fielder, taking 119 catches for Kent and England, but it was his 1277 wickets in 287 games (average 21) that made him a stand-out in the first fourteen years of the 20^th Century. Strong, fast, and indefatigable, he swung the ball away from the right hander and possessed a lethal off-cutter. Fielder played six Tests over four years, all in Australia, taking 1 wicket in his first two, but 26 in his final four as England were heavily outplayed during the 1907-08 Ashes. Despite scoring a century against Worcestershire, he was very much a number eleven, but will be a formidable new-ball partner for Streak.

The 21st Century Game

Cricket should be the game of the 21st Century. Forget the claims that our helter-skelter lifestyles don’t allow us time to properly watch anymore, automation will put most of us out of work by 2050, let alone 2100. But while we still have jobs, we should appreciate how much cricket as a game mirrors modern work and society. For my purposes, I shall compare it to the most popular and structurally archaic sport in the world, football.

Modern football is the old 19^th and 20^th Century factory disguised as leisure. The boss strictly controls how the workers meet his plan, their places on the field notarised into fairly strict numerical structures: 4-4-2, 4-3-3, 3-2-3-1-1, et al. Players must maintain these shapes and clearly meet the instructions of their manager or face immediate removal from the factory during the course of the working day. The captain is appointed by the manager to make sure the players adhere to the plan that he has set out, to admonish them for mistakes or laziness. He may defend his players to the referee, the regulator whom is the enemy of all, but never to his manager, who looms over his workers constantly, barking instructions. The players are interchangeable parts with similar base skills, but better suited to certain positions on the factory floor, an individual’s contribution difficult to measure.

Contrast this to cricket, where the cricket captain works alongside his boss to formulate plans for the effective running of his eleven man factory, and actually has control over which plan is enacted at any one time. He is the manager of eleven independent contractors whose specialist skills and individually measured contributions allow almost exact measurement of a player’s performance, the expectation of any employer in the age of Big Data. A worker isn’t removed from the factory floor during the course of the day, he is given frequent evaluations by the upper management (the selectors) and dismissed only for consistent underperformance or behavioural issues. Consider also the relative lack of constraints on cricketers. They are given one of the largest playing fields of any sport, and the fielding team are free to use it as they see fit, with some restrictions that were introduced by the regulators (the Marylebone Commerce Commission) to combat uncompetitive behaviour. This is why Brearley and every England captain since has wanted “eleven captains” on the field. Football is a far more restrictive, communal game, not in keeping with the liberties of our modern, individualist society.

The obvious retort to the last two paragraphs is that these comparisons are as applicable to the differences between the working and middle classes, and explains the appeal of each game to their respective traditional support bases. But this is to ignore that very few jobs mirroring my conception of football exist in the Western world anymore, and those that still do are already being replaced by automation. Robot waiters of a kind already exist, Wesley. Besides, the manner in which footballers are employed, while often very lucrative, has more in common with serfdom or even slavery than cricket’s independent contractors.

One of the bedrocks of the commercial evolution of football is that player registrations are owned not by the player, but by his club. Indeed, many football clubs in Europe base their business models around bringing in young talent on the cheap and selling them on at a profit a couple of years down the line. It is speculation where the asset isn’t stocks or property, but human beings. Restraints on the footballer’s trade such as the requirement to live within ten miles of a club’s ground, the maximum wage, and restrictions on free agents have disappeared over time, but where most employees only need give notice or seek a mutual termination if they wish to leave their employer, this is a luxury reserved mostly for players at the bottom rungs of the professional game. Even if a club no longer wants a player his pool of prospective employers is limited not just to those who can afford his wages, but also the purchasing fee required by his owner. Legion are the stories of players not wanted by their owners, but not able to move into the service of another one. Like serfs tied to their lord.

Cricketers live in what has been called the ‘post-materialist’ world, where more and more of us work in the public sector or for NGOs and seek out more expensive goods in the name of fair trade or supporting local business. With the exception of the IPL, cricketers are employed by clubs and associations, the NGOs of the sporting world. Their largely annual contracts reflect the modern propensity to shift jobs or careers several times in the course of a working life and the employer’s wish to be able to move staff along easily. It is a 90-day trial world, after all. But ultimately, while much of a top European footballer’s surplus value goes to his owner when the club is sold or squandered when it goes bust, a cricketer’s surplus value goes into the running of his association and the enjoyment of amateur cricketers both young and old. They’re supporting local business.

Unfortunately, the three biggest national cricket associations behave more and more as if thy are for-profit, or at least attempting to emulate the perfectly farcical ethics of FIFA and many football associations the world over. It brings us to one aspect of late-20^th and early-21^st century employment that we should not want to infiltrate cricket. The BCCI claiming that because 70% of ICC revenue comes from India, India must be generating 70% of the game’s value is cricket’s version of CEOs earning thousands of times more than their company’s average wage. Unfortunately for the BCCI’s logic, people aren’t watching India play against itself. The Big Three takeover threatens to leave the rest of the world with stagnating or even falling real wages. The cricketing kleptocracy shrinking the middle class.

It may not require a violent overthrow of the means of production by the cricketing proletariat, but as players, fans, and consumers of the game we need to make sure that cricket continues to reflect the best of this world, not become the next FIFA or Goldman Sachs. Our game is both quaint and perfectly modern. It is, and should remain, the 21^st Century Game for us all.

I want to discuss my ideas, so please comment on my posts. Tell my why I’m right, why I’m wrong, deconstruct my assumptions, or even just say “well done.”