Comedian and lifelong cricket-lover Mark Steel talks to Felix White about cricketing life lessons and how the game got him expelled.
Felix White is a regular columnist in Wisden Cricket Monthly magazine
Mark Steel is late. Another UK tour just completed, he’s been held up travelling from the last date in Brighton back to the gravity of his native South East London. It’s a timely conclusion for him, the solitary slog of the stand-up circuit, however popular and bespoke his are, making its mark as usual. When he turns up, rubbing his hands together at being back in Crystal Palace, he ushers me down the stairs of a ‘lovely little Lebanese place’, ordering us fresh mint teas and hummus. Before we can talk the beautiful game, there are post-tour demons to exorcise.
“It’s miserable usually [after the shows]. If you’re lucky the tech staff go, ‘See ya mate’. Then it’s empty and you’re the last person leaving the car park.” Not unnaturally for a cricket lover, he finds a quick healthy metaphor from the game to deal with the challenging dream-becomes-routine law in his chosen profession. “We’d imagine a professional cricketer is going, ‘Wow, I’ve hit a four’, but they’re thinking, ‘I’m meant to hit a four’. They probably get a pleasure out of it the same way you do when you’ve done a brilliant gig. But it’s more relief. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Then within 10 minutes you’ve got a new place where you’ve got to do it all over again. At the risk of sounding like an utterly pompous arse, not at the risk of, at the certainty of sounding like an utterly pompous arse, it is literally the same as being an astronaut.”
That summer of triumph came near-on 40 years after his first Ashes experience, equally as gargantuan in its impression. England, having lost the first Test in 1968, had been on the receiving end of bad rain to scupper two certain victories and landed at the last needing to win.
Dominant again, they had set Australia an amount they couldn’t realistically chase and had all day to bowl them out. “It pissed down and looked like it would be abandoned again for a draw. I was seven and I remember being furious about the injustice of this. The whole crowd got on the pitch to mop it up, buckets, god knows what. It was so English.” All hands on deck owing, the umpires decided there could be an hour and a quarter of play that England had to bowl Australia out in. Derek Underwood, famous for taking wickets on uncovered pitches that were drying, was the man set the task. “He’d bowl fast, 55-60, it would turn and fizz and everything.” A very young Mark Steel was glued to the TV set. He remembers: “There was this amazing field of all 11 players round the bat. One by one all these Australians were getting out lbw, caught at short leg, all that.” Underwood got the last wicket with about a ball to spare. It was “Absolute joy.” He took 7 -50.
I’ve been so locked into all Mark’s stories, beginning to picture the Norwood Exiles as a wonky left-field modern version of Dad’s Army, absorbing perfect observations of perfect cricketers and noting all the ways that cricket can temporarily temper fractious parent/child reltionships, that I haven’t checked my phone. We’ve been talking for two hours. I’m very late for Tailenders (the BBC podcast with Jimmy Anderson and Greg James). Mid-last anecdote, knowing how late I am, I identify the story too good to stop him, so hear it through to its last valuable cricketing life-lesson.
“I played in the comics XI that Arthur Smith organised. One of the blokes took his son down, he took five wickets. This kid was as ecstatic as anyone has ever been, so over-enjoyed. The next week. Boof. Boof. Gets taken off. Three overs for 40. The kid is devastated. We’re getting changed at the end, the lad’s dad is laughing and joking as he always was. We were worried and asking ‘is he alright?’. He said ‘yeah, he’s great. He’s learnt a very important lesson in life. One day you’re a king, the next day you’re a c***’. I thought, ‘what a brilliant bit of parenting’. I hope he’s still playing.”
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