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Sometimes you just want to read about an incorrigible poo poo being written by someone who knows what he's doing, ya know? Love a bit of Flashman shagging his way round the Empire.Beefeater1980 posted:By tradition, it’s where the game of Rugby football was invented (Rugby is approximately American Football without forward passes or any kind of physical protection). All types of football (including American/Gridiron Football, Association Football aka Soccer and Australian Rules Football) hark back to a common ancestor that is at least medieval and seems to have been a cross between a sport and a brawl, but it is highly likely that the specific rules of American football genuinely did evolve out of a cross between soccer and Rugby. At the risk of being "well ACTUALLY" about this: the playing of football at colleges in America goes back long before the codification of Association football in 1863 or Rugby football in 1870. It's far more accurate to call it parallel development; in both countries, educational institutions (universities in America instead of public schools) adapted a popular mob football game so it could be played in a more controlled environment. Each locality did so in different ways, with some colleges developing a handling-based game and some developing a kicking-based game, in the same way as happened in Britain. The colleges then decided they wanted to play each other, just as ex-public schoolboys were doing in Britain - there, kicking games were more popular, but the people who liked handling games cared enough about handling games to keep them alive and separate as Association football quickly moved to remove almost all handling. In America handling games quickly became dominant, which did then take a little Rugby influence via playing against Canadian colleges (particularly McGill), and kicking codes were abandoned very quickly; the resulting handling code evolved very quickly and almost entirely on its own terms, and by the turn of the 20th century it was recognisably American football. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Jul 21, 2019 |
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Jul 21, 2019 20:18
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Beefeater1980 posted:Iqbal (the tough, competent Rissaldar whom he had been travelling with earlier) A Quick Note on Indian Ranks, in case it should become relevant later: Indian soldiers in British service, often collectively known as "sepoys" after the lowest rank, have their own names for ranks which map directly onto the British structure. Sepoy: Private Naik: Corporal Havildar: Sergeant As in the British army, there are then various senior sergeants cutting about the place, cultivating their facial hair and doing a lot of shouting. The cavalry has its own names, again through British influence: Sowar: Trooper Lance-Daffadar: [RANT ABOUT IDIOTIC SNOBBISH BRITISH CAVALRY NCO TITLES EXCISED] Equivalent to Naik Daffadar: [SIMILAR RANT EQUALLY EXCISED] Equivalent to Havildar The Indian army also had odd things called Viceroy's Commissioned Officers, who in matters of politeness were treated almost as officers, and in matters of soldiering were rather more like a British sergeant-major, in that they were people of long service and high intelligence who were nevertheless outranked by the most junior of idiot second lieutenants (such as Flashman). The purpose of the VCO was to have someone with a brain in his head who could speak both English and his men's language; and so represent his men to the white officer, and give the men orders on behalf of the officer. (IIRC it did not become mandatory for officers on Imperial service to make any attempt to learn a useful language until the 1930s.) Both infantry and cavalry have Jemadars; the infantry has Subedars, and Subedars-Major; the cavalry has Rissaldars instead, because [FURTHER EXCISION DEEMED NECESSARY]. A sensible young officer in India would take frequent advice from his rissaldar and listen to much of what he was told. Let's see what Flashy does, shall we?
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Aug 12, 2019 00:12
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I do enjoy Flashman's little gazpacho soup moment here a great deal; it shows how Fraser's research and insight didn't just extend to historical events.quote:and even as I thought; oh, sweet Jesus, this is death, I had one fleeting memory of being trampled in the scrimmage in the School-house match. This is an only very slightly indirect reference back to the first time Flashman appears in Tom Brown's Schooldays. It's also a fantastic piece of writing from a book that blows hot and cold, so I'm going to indulge myself and post a wall of text. Our hero Brown finds himself, on his first afternoon at Rugby School, playing in the critically important School-house football match, in which the sixty boys who board in the School-house (including Brown, Flashman, and the captain Brooke and his younger brother) take on the 120 boys of the rest of the school. quote:But now look! there is a slight move forward of the School-house wings, a shout of “Are you ready?” and loud affirmative reply. Old Brooke takes half a dozen quick steps, and away goes the ball spinning towards the School goal, seventy yards before it touches ground, and at no point above twelve or fifteen feet high, a model kick-off; and the School-house cheer and rush on. The ball is returned, and they meet it and drive it back amongst the masses of the School already in motion. Then the two sides close, and you can see nothing for minutes but a swaying crowd of boys, at one point violently agitated. That is where the ball is, and there are the keen players to be met, and the glory and the hard knocks to be got. You hear the dull thud, thud of the ball, and the shouts of “Off your side,” “Down with him,” “Put him over,” “Bravo.” This is what we call “a scrummage,” gentlemen, and the first scrummage in a School-house match was no joke in the consulship of Plancus. Rugby football at this point is nothing like the organised sport that would begin to emerge a generation later in the 1870s; you kick the ball downfield very hard and then have a gigantic mass pushing match around it, kicking as hard as possible at anything within reach until the ball squirts loose again, someone picks it up and kicks it downfield again, another mob forms around it, and so on. When Scud East introduces the game, he points out "Why, there's been two collar-bones broken this half, and a dozen fellows lamed. And last year a fellow had his leg broken." quote:The ball has just fallen again where the two sides are thickest, and they close rapidly around it in a scrummage. It must be driven through now by force or skill, till it flies out on one side or the other. Look how differently the boys face it! Here come two of the bulldogs, bursting through the outsiders; in they go, straight to the heart of the scrummage, bent on driving that ball out on the opposite side. That is what they mean to do. My sons, my sons! you are too hot; you have gone past the ball, and must struggle now right through the scrummage, and get round and back again to your own side, before you can be of any further use. Here comes young Brooke; he goes in as straight as you, but keeps his head, and backs and bends, holding himself still behind the ball, and driving it furiously when he gets the chance. Take a leaf out of his book, you young chargers. Yes yes, very heroic and manly, but where does Flashman fit into the picture? quote:Here comes Speedicut, and Flashman the School-house bully, with shouts and great action. Won't you two come up to young Brooke, after locking-up, by the School-house fire, with “Old fellow, wasn't that just a splendid scrummage by the three trees?” But he knows you, and so do we. You don't really want to drive that ball through that scrummage, chancing all hurt for the glory of the School-house, but to make us think that's what you want—a vastly different thing; and fellows of your kidney will never go through more than the skirts of a scrummage, where it's all push and no kicking. We respect boys who keep out of it, and don't sham going in; but you—we had rather not say what we think of you. "With shouts and great action" is such a perfectly-chosen phrase. I love it to bits and use it whenever possible. Words cannot do justice to how perfectly it describes the kind of behaviour that Speedicut and Flashman are displaying. It's so great I love it even though trying to visualise that kind of behaviour in any way immediately sets my teeth on edge. So, er, the point being that, based on this one paragraph from Tom Brown, it makes such complete and total total sense for Flashman to have had a critically formative experience, trampled after falling in the midst of a scrummage in the most important football match of the year (I like to think it was in his first match when he was at his youngest). Whether by uncharacteristic courage or uncharacteristic bad luck at a critical moment, he ended up right in the heart of the action just once, discovered exactly where courage gets you, and swore an immediate and lifelong vow of cowardice. Chapeau.
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Aug 22, 2019 22:43
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Selachian posted:(Yes, “d - - - - d.” The cussing in this book is censored out; Fraser, in his foreword, suggests that Elspeth's sister Grizel might have bowdlerized the manuscript while she had access to it. Why she would censor the cursewords but leave in the details of Flashy's sexual escapades is a mystery.) This more than anything else is why I stopped reading the series eventually; this and "I've been in some dashed nasty scrapes before, but none quite as bad as...". For some reason they just irritated me beyond the point of reason.
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Jun 6, 2020 16:21
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Selachian posted:Raglan was talking about neck-stocks, if I remember rightly, and how they should fasten well up under the chin. The stock is an extremely uncomfortable stiff leather collar worn by ordinary soliders which forces the chin up, beloved of any idiot who thinks that "appearances" and "military effectiveness" are identical concepts. Anyone who's watched Sharpe has probably seen the title character ripping them off people's necks at least once.
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Jul 18, 2020 11:14
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quote:“Well, here we are, the French and ourselves, at war with Russia, in order to protect Turkey. Ve-ry good. What shall we do, then? Better attack Russia, eh? H’m, yes. (Pause). Big place, ain’t it?” This would be an example of Flashy (or Fraser, or both) allowing truth to take a back seat to cynicism and a few good gags, in the finest tradition of satire. Dig deep enough into the underlying geopolitics behind military disasters and there's very often something very explicable which could have seemed to a reasonable person like a good idea at the time. So it is here. Just about Russia's single greatest foreign policy objective since it became organised enough to have foreign policy objectives has been access to the Mediterranean via the Black Sea. This is why the Russian Empire annexed the old Crimean Khanate in 1783 and founded Sevastopol in the first place, and it's why Putin spent a lot of time and hard effort angling to get back in there before the re-annexation in 2014. This is also the root cause for why the Russian Empire would want to pick a fight with the Ottoman Empire. Access to the Med (and the rest of the world) from the Black Sea is via the Bosphorus (and then the Dardanelles, further south), so whoever's in charge of the region can close the straits and annoy a lot of people whenever they feel like it. This has been a strategically important location with major wars being fought for control over the region since at least the 5th century BC. The Russian Empire isn't going to give up the dream of seizing the straits for themselves until it falls over and dies for good in the Bolshevik Revolution. If the Tsars or the Kerensky government had only managed to hold on for another 12 months, they had an army in Turkey which looked set fair to march right on in before they were ordered to halt for political reasons. And this in turn is why the British and French empires are taking any notice. They get involved in the general service of keeping the Russians away from Constantinople; this prospect threatens the nascent French colonial interests in north Africa and the Middle East, and threatenes unfettered British access to the in-the-serious-planning-stages Suez Canal. Having got drawn in, attacking Sevastopol is a great way to poke the Russians in the eye and encourage them to stop loving around with British and French interests. That doesn't change just because they made a hideous bollocks of the execution, or because this particular war's trigger causes would definitely be seeded very highly at the World Championships for Silly Reasons to Start A War. The war will eventually end in an overwhelming Russian defeat, and one of the key terms of the Treaty of Paris is that, while they can have Sevastopol back, they're not allowed to keep a fleet in the Black Sea. (The Russians then renounce this at the first opportunity, but that's another story.) If Flashy wanted a more accurate metaphor, it would be far more like an enemy of England coming after Gibraltar.
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Jul 20, 2020 03:23
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quote:"just as if he were riding down Rotten Row," Rotten Row is a sandy bridleway in Hyde Park, much favoured by the upper classes of the day for demonstratively poncing around on horses.
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Jul 22, 2020 11:40
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More specifically, it allowed executions to be postponed until after the mother gave birth; the judge was still required to sentence her to death and hope that the sometimes-capricious system for granting pardons or commuting sentences under the Royal Prerogative functioned appropriately. It wasn't until 1931 that the law was changed so that expectant mothers were sentenced to life imprisonment.
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Jul 24, 2020 12:11
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Viola the Mad posted:How much of this bullshit was still applicable come World War I? I know that in popular memory every single general can be represented by General Melchet, but for the life of me I can't recall the actual competency of the staff. I did all my reading/listening on that war years ago, and most of what stuck was the stomach-churning descriptions of trench warfare and Dan Carlin reading wrenching letters from the front. The Cardwell reforms had put an end to people buying themselves commands; it became a lot harder (though not impossible) for silly asses to rise through the ranks by force of inertia and the Peter principle. 1). There were a few Melchetts knocking about, the likes of Hunter-Weston and Stopford and Hamilton and Townshend. They generally served outwith the Western Front and the people who put them in their commands generally had some reservations about them, but in the face of the Empire getting balls deep into the literal first-ever world war, they needed warm bodies to fill the positions and had to make do with who was available; the system of the time wouldn't have countenanced "just pension them off and take a chance on twenty untested field officers to suddenly get promoted to general rank". 2). Most of them were well-meaning and had some understanding after the battles of 1914 that this was a different kind of war and things needed to be done differently, but lacked the mental flexibility (or the moral courage) to fully appreciate just how different. Their greatest flaw was not that they were military idiots, but that they weren't military geniuses; and the whole point about geniuses is they're exceptional and don't come along very often. People shouldn't be condemned for being average people in a situation that's beyond them. Most of the best-known hate figures like Haig actually belong in this category; it's not his fault he happened to be on a very short list of people with the qualifications to be commander-in-chief on the Western Front in 1916, and although he got there slower than a military genius might have done, he did get there in the end. It is impossible to fully reckon with this sort of thing without coming to terms that the Battle of the Somme was planned chiefly by Sir Douglas Haig and executed chiefly by Sir Henry Rawlinson as his principal army commander; and then the Battle of Albert in 1918, the first in the series of overwhelming victories that would eventually end the war almost by accident, was planned chiefly by Sir Douglas Haig and executed chiefly by Sir Henry Rawlinson, having finally learned the appropriate lessons from a lot of painful nearly-but-not-quite tactical-victories-but-strategic-defeats. 3). There were a few exceptional men knocking around; the only one who gets near the category of "military genius" is Ferdinand Foch, whose writings in the decade before the war were responsible for birthing the French cult of the offensive and the shrapnel-repelling properties of elan and red trousers; and yet almost immediately after the first battles of 1914 he was going "poo poo, I was completely wrong, this is going to need a complete revolution before we can get anywhere"; many of the innovations that led to victory can be traced back to something Foch started experimenting with or provided patronage to while he was an unfashionable army or army group commander. Below his level there are quite a few men who are not particularly well-known (with the exception of when people are trying to exaggerate the credentials of people like Monash and Currie to make nationalistic points) and in a war with a better general (ahaha) level of generalship would be unremarkably competent, but of course we know what is said about the status of the one-eyed man on holiday. 4). The feats of supply performed by all sides were in a different universe compared to the supply efforts of 70 years before; the things Wully Robertson did as Quartermaster-General of the BEF were so stupendous that they managed to get a man who'd joined the army as a private soldier appointed as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, which would have been kind of like allowing the heir to the throne to marry a fishwife. (He is still, and probably always will be, the only man to rise from private to Field Marshal). Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 12:13 on Aug 1, 2020 |
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Aug 1, 2020 12:08
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Viola the Mad posted:Thanks for the write-ups about WWI, folks, I really appreciate it. I'll probably toddle around back to the subject eventually in one of my history book binges, and it'll be good to have a bit more of a grounding when I dive in. A left-field WWI book recommentation for you: The Enemy at his Pleasure, by S. Ansky. One of the many epic and compelling war stories that isn't given nearly as much attention as it deserves by the Anglosphere because just about nobody involved spoke English or produced records in English for the convenience of Anglophone historians.
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Aug 3, 2020 01:09
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Ansky wrote in Yiddish; the introduction translates his original title as "The Destruction of Galicia". The translation's title is from a translation of Anna Akhmatova's "July 1914":quote:Beware of terrible times...the earth
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Aug 3, 2020 13:11
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Arbite posted:Also I'm having trouble pinning down how much five sovereigns would be worth in 1856, nominally five pounds so £542 in todays money, but the coins were made of gold, and even a £542 bottle of perfume isn't going to wow royalty. Let's try thinking of it like this. It's hard to figure out what the median wage might have been in 1856. However, a police constable of the time would have been paid very roughly 20 shillings per week, or £52 per year. (Today, a constable's starting wage outside London is very close to the median wage.) Five sovereigns would have been about 10% of that annual wage. 10% of PC Smith's starting wage in 2021 is roughly £2,500. That tracks quite closely to some of the items on this Town and Country Magazine list of the world's most expensive perfumes. I think most of us would agree that anyone who can drop £2,500 buying perfume has *got* to be utterly loaded.
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Apr 17, 2021 17:56
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The return of Scud East is as good a time as any to flag up another direct callback to Tom Brown's Schooldays:quote:They were the rummest lot, though; when they'd tired of devising means of execution they got into a great argument about whether hacking and carrying should be allowed in football, and as I was an old Rugby boy my support was naturally enlisted by the hackers — it must have been the strangest sight, when I come to think of it, me in my garb of hairy Pathan with poshteen and puggaree, maintaining that if you did away with scrimmaging you'd be ruining the manliest game there was (not that I'd go near a scrimmage if you paid me) In that book we find the following, in the description of the Rugby football match that Tom Brown takes part in on practically his first afternoon as a School-house boy: quote:Here comes Speedicut, and Flashman the School-house bully, with shouts and great action. Won't you two come up to young Brooke, after locking-up, by the School-house fire, with “Old fellow, wasn't that just a splendid scrummage by the three trees?” But he knows you, and so do we. You don't really want to drive that ball through that scrummage, chancing all hurt for the glory of the School-house, but to make us think that's what you want—a vastly different thing; and fellows of your kidney will never go through more than the skirts of a scrummage, where it's all push and no kicking. We respect boys who keep out of it, and don't sham going in; but you—we had rather not say what we think of you. I once again observe how perfect a phrase "with shouts and great action" is. It's almost impossible to describe with mere words how perfectly it describes the kind of cowardly, two-faced, self-serving, and despicable behaviour that Flashman embodies. Incidentally, on a minor point of pedantry: at this time, 1857, "scrimmage" and "scrummage" are just about synonyms for the same rough-and-ready concept, although "scrimmage" will soon become the preferred spelling in North America. As their handling-based football begins to evolve in the next 20 years, it will soon become a very different means of putting a loose or dead ball back into play from the Rugby scrummage. In a strictly British context, we are six years away from the first attempt to create a universal code of rules, by the Football Association in 1863. Their members will mostly come down on the side of disallowing handling and catching of the ball in general play and favouring a kicking-based game. Along with that they will disallow hacking, or the practice of legitimately kicking an opponent in the shins to get him to give up possession of the ball, from their rules This will cause the Blackheath Football Club and several others to break away from the Football Association and pursue their own handling-based games, accompanied by the legendary quotation "...if you do away with (hacking), you will do away with all the courage and pluck of the game, and I will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week's practice" from a Blackheath representative. Blackheath will eventually become a founder member of the Rugby Football Union in 1871, at which time they will vote to disallow hacking. It will take until 1927, and a great many weeks' practice, for a lot of Frenchmen to beat England. Flashman's opinion on all this is not recorded.
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May 18, 2021 23:25
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Thomas Kavanagh actually existed and did indeed get a Victoria Cross for his actions; his character is known to have been suitably questionable that Flashy can easily be inserted into his story. Civilians may be awarded the VC as long as they are under military command at the time; he is one of only five men to have done so, and all but one got it during the Indian Mutiny. Two of them, Ross Mangles and William Fraser McDonnell (no, really) won it a few months before Kavanagh. Like Kavanagh they were part of the Bengal Civil Service; Mangles carried a wounded white soldier several miles on his back to a boat with 33 other men on board, that Mangles and McDonnell then piloted under heavy fire across the river to safety. Another, George Bell Chicken, was a sailor who volunteered to assist the Indian Naval Brigade, and somehow ended up attached to an Indian cavalry detachment. In a staggering act of defiance against the power of nominative determinism, Chicken single-handedly charged a group of 20 mutineers and killed five before being surrounded, pulled off his horse, and then rescued by (presumably) a pair of very long-suffering daffadars. The last, the Rev James Adams, was an army chaplain during the second Anglo-Afghan War. He had three separate acts of bravery which were originally mentioned in dispatches in 1879, and he then got the VC in 1881 after a specific clarification that he counted as being under military command. He was the first padre to get a VC, and also the last civilian. Soon after, the Army began commissioning its padres as officers.
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May 31, 2021 17:47
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Phenotype posted:Cricket must be the most impenetrable and arbitrary game in the world, that could only have been dreamt up by rich people with far too much time on their hands. You say this, but one of the earliest historical records of proto-cricket is from 1611, when two ordinary blokes from a village were prosecuted for playing cricket on Sunday instead of going to church. Another is a Puritan minister in 1629, bitching about the great unwashed of Maidstone playing at cricket, stoolball, and morris dancing (well, he was one-third correct, at least). To anyone who is trying to understand the Empire and the mindset of the people of all classes who administered it, I would recommend Derek Birley's excellent A Social History of English Cricket. It's a rollicking story of rank hypocrisy, massive gambling at every turn, and inventing spurious traditions for the sole purpose of complaining that nobody follows them any more.
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Jul 8, 2021 00:24
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Arbite posted:Also, out of my depth and will need some help explaining all of the Cricket that goes down, so if anyone wants to give the aspects that arise an overly detailed explanation with many visual aids and historical references, that'd be great. *marks out long run* quote:So they're talking about amending the leg-before-wicket rule again. I don't know why they bother, for they'll never get it right until they go back to the old law which said that if you put your leg in front of the ball a-purpose to stop it hitting the stumps, you were out, and damned good riddance to you. This is simple enough. In cricket, the basic action is for a bowler to bowl the ball at three short sticks (using one of many different actions depending on the time period, but crucially without bending his arm) while the batsman/batter attempts to defend them (with the rise of women's cricket, the gender-neutral term is rapidly catching on). For anyone familiar with baseball; imagine if the strike zone was marked with a physical object, and the batter doesn't have to run after a hit if they don't want to. Since the object of the game is for the batter to hit the ball with their bat, it soon became clear that using one's legs to defend the wicket is unfair; and so the leg-before-wicket (LBW) law was introduced to stop them doing this. quote:It all comes of these pads that batters wear nowadays. When I was playing cricket we had nothing to guard our precious shins except our trousers Modern cricket began to emerge at the turn of the 17th century, and by Flashman's time it's already been played for 120 years in a form that would be more or less recognisable to a fan of the modern game. Big external leg pads of the type used by batters today did indeed emerge some time after Flashman's best years; but as Flashy admits a little later, it was common to stuff any available soft material down one's trousers before going out to bat. quote:Alfie Mynn, that great muffin Grace, that fat black nawab and the pup Fry We'll see Mynn soon, a pace bowler as feared in his day as any who came after him. Dr W.G. Grace is one of the few cricketers on the level of Bradman whose fame endures beyond cricket, a massive comic-book figure with a hefty frame and massive beard, primarily known for his batting but a useful bowler as well, playing in 44 straight first-class seasons, and his absolutely shameless ability to make vast sums of money for playing cricket while also claiming to be an amateur. He was born in 1848 and is clearly of the next generation to Flashman. Most cricket fans who hear "Nawab" will think of one of the 8th and 9th Nawabs of Pataudi, both of whom captained India; the 8th Nawab also played for England before the Indian national team was fully established. However, since the 8th Nawab was not born until 1910, Flashy probably means Ranjitsinhji, Jam Sahib of Nawanagar. He came to study at Cambridge in 1888 and would eventually become as influential a batter as Grace had been in his day. His influence is such that the Indian domestic first-class trophy is named for him. C.B. Fry is the kind of hearty man who Flashman's existence parodies; he played cricket and football for England, appeared in an FA Cup final at football, equalled the long-jumping world record, and may or may not have been offered the literal throne of Albania after the end of the First World War while working at the League of Nations. He was a contemporary and great friend of Ranjitsinhji. quote:From this you may gather that I was a bowler myself, not a batter A classically-picked cricket eleven consists of five specialist batters, five specialist bowlers, and a specialist wicket-keeper (the equivalent of the baseball catcher). Most players specialise in either batting or bowling; players good enough to perform at a high level as both are known as all-rounders; they're extremely rare and usually become superstars (like Ian Botham or Andrew Flintoff) when they do emerge. Other than wicket-keepers, and unlike baseball, it is almost unknown for a player to be known and picked primarily for their fielding; even the greatest fielder must first be able to contribute with either bat or ball in hand. As a specialist bowler, there is nothing unusual in Flashman's dislike for batting except against weak bowlers. As a bully who likes to be seen as intimidating, it's also unsurprising that he worked to become a fast bowler. Unlike in baseball, in certain situations, bowling fast and aiming to hit the batter on the upper body is a legitimate tactic, and would surely have appealed to Flashy's personality; it's the ideal role for him. The list of great intimidatory fast bowlers like Malcolm Marshall or Glenn McGrath is far too long for this thread. quote:It may strike you that old Flashy's approach to our great summer game wasn't quite that of your school-storybook hero, apple-cheeked and manly, playing up unselfishly for the honour of the side and love of his gallant captain, revelling in the jolly rivalry of bat and ball while his carefree laughter rings across the green sward. No, not exactly; personal glory and cheap wickets however you could get 'em, and damnn the honour of the side, that was my style, with a few quid picked up in side-bets, and plenty of skirt-chasing afterwards among the sporting ladies who used to ogle us big hairy fielders over their parasols at Canterbury Week. Flashy is accurately describing how cricket was seen in popular culture in his day. It has long been a popular pastime to clatter boringly on about the noble cricketing traditions of sportsmanship and fair play and good behaviour (and how these standards have declined from how it was when the speaker was a lad); but it is far less well known than it should be that these traditions were invented out of whole cloth once the Victorian moralists really got rolling in about the 1860s, seemingly so they could hypocritically moan about how nobody was following them. (Again, if anyone wants to know more about this, Derek Birley's your man.) Cricket is therefore the ideal sport for him; he seems very incongruous as a cricketer if you're used to the modern discourse around the game, but the really interesting thing is that actually in his prime, most of his cheating, gambling ways would have been completely unremarkable. quote:our recent disastrous showing against the Australians There are plenty to choose from near the end of his life, and this would depend on exactly when he was writing; although the three most likely candidates all took place in Australia. Still, his not knowing a drat thing about what happened other than what he read in the newspapers would almost certainly not affect the strength of his opinions one bit. quote:I rubbed along at it only by limping up late to the scrimmages yelping: "Play up, you fellows, do! Oh, confound this game leg of mine!" and by developing a knack of missing my charges against bigger men by a fraction of an inch, plunging on the turf just too late with heroic gasps and roarings. Here comes Speedicut; and Flashman the School-house bully, with shouts and great action... quote:I suppose, if Fuller Pilch had got his bat down just a split second sooner... Pilch was widely acclaimed the greatest batter in cricket's history until W.G. Grace surpassed him a generation later. He was the leading batter of Flashman's time and it's unsurprising that we'll be seeing him later. quote:It was in the 'thirties, you see, that round-arm bowling came into its own, and fellows like Mynn got their hands up shoulder-high. Cricket was originally played with the ball bowled underarm; at first it was rolled along the ground, and then as standards of batting improved and evolved, it was bounced to make it harder to hit. In the modern game bowlers aim to bounce the ball once and once only, and the major feature of cricket bowling is exploiting how the ball reacts after it hits the ground. Roundarm bowling, as Flashy says, allows the bowler to generate more pace than bowling underarm due to simple biomechanics. The bowler was permitted to raise his hand no higher than the shoulder until 1864, when full overarm bowling was allowed and (aside from oddities like Malinga), roundarm styles almost immediately disappeared forever. quote:He shook his fat head solemnly. "I'm thinking of reading philosophy at Oxford this term, you know. However, I mustn't prose." Before we close, this seems to be a wonderfully arch little reference to Tom Brown at Oxford, the difficult second album to Tom Brown's Schooldays. quote:while piety and sobriety may ensure you eternal life, they ain't enough to beat the MCC The Marylebone Cricket Club was founded in 1787 as an offshoot from other leading cricket clubs of the day, and almost immediately was well-regarded enough to become custodian of the Laws of the Game, and the club maintained significant control over the administration of international cricket until 1989. They were one of England's leading first-class clubs until about the 1870s, when county cricket began to become the predominant form of first-class play. quote:Lord's - I'd never played there, but what cricketer who ever breathed wouldn't jump at the chance? You may think it small enough beer compared with the games I'd been playing lately, but I'll confess it made my heart leap. In 1815, the MCC established the current Lord's Cricket Ground (named for Thomas Lord, MCC player and original landowner), still the most famous ground in the world. It remains a place so wonderful and mythical to cricket lovers that it's completely reasonable to think that even the determinedly cynical Flashman can't resist its allure. It's Lord's, for gently caress's sake.
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Jul 12, 2021 01:56
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Cricket annotations:quote:cover point took on a meaning that you won't find in "Wisden", I know John Wisden would have just been coming of age at this time. Three years later he makes his first-class debut for Sussex; in 1864, just after his retirement from playing, he published the first edition of his annual Cricketers' Almanack. This quickly became the last word in cricket statistics, and is now a byword for respectability, comprehensiveness (modern editions run to over 1,500 pages), and subject matter expertise. Like baseball, cricket is a haven for the statto, and Wisden is their bible. Rare old editions can change hands for thousands of pounds. Meanwhile, "cover point" is one of many cricket fielding positions with defeatingly silly names. quote:old John Gully, the retired pug We've seen him before in Royal Flash; in his prime he would have been very much the Chris Eubank or Tyson Fury of his day, and when that book was made into a film he was played, most appropriately, by Henry Cooper. quote:the crowds ten-deep at the nets Cricket nets are a simple practice structure found the world over. It allows bowlers and batters to practice without needing fielders, or having to constantly be gathering the balls up. quote:to see Pilch at batting practice, or Felix, agile as his animal namesake, bowling those slow lobs that seemed to hang forever in the air. "Felix" was the pseudonym of Nicholas Wanostrocht; he was Head Master of a school which he'd inherited from his father at age 19, and it is usually said that he adopted the pseudonym to avoid looking frivolous to his school's parents. His book Felix on the Bat is one of the first cricketing instruction manuals. quote:the egregious Brown was decidedly cool, and so was Brooke, who'd been head of the school in my time and was the apple of Arnold's eye Brooke is the School-house's cricket and football captain in Tom Brown's Schooldays, who right from the off is depicted as seeing through Flashman's bluster: quote:Here comes Speedicut, and Flashman the School-house bully, with shouts and great action. Won't you two come up to young Brooke, after locking-up, by the School-house fire, with “Old fellow, wasn't that just a splendid scrummage by the three trees?” But he knows you, and so do we. quote:Gentlemen of Rugby vs the cracks of Kent Rules set down by the MCC soon after their foundation strictly governed the division between "gentleman" amateurs, who were only allowed to claim incidental expenses for playing (and so had to have enough social status to support themselves when not cricketing), and "player" professionals, who were paid wages for playing (and so demonstrating they were lower-class enough to have to earn money themselves). In most teams, gentlemen and players turned out together; as the Victorians took hold, greater segregation off the field came along, to the point where many important grounds had separate entrances and changing rooms for gentlemen and players, paralleling Army regulations which demanded strict social separation between officers and men. The rules on amateurism were always honoured rather more in the breach than the observance, so long as they were only broken discreetly, and it would still be treated as a scandal if a gentleman were exposed as earning money from his play. Mynn himself played as an amateur and more than once ran into problems with his expenses. This match would now be considered first-class by most major statisticians. Kent elevens have been considered among the strongest for just about the entire history of organised cricket; there were no organised competitions to judge them by, but at this time you wouldn't have found much argument against Kent being the leading side in the country, and they were definitely capable of beating All-England sides. For them to play the Gentlemen of Rugby would be not unlike a major college football team whose early schedule includes an FCS opponent; there's a very good reason why the odds are so heavy and nobody's interested. quote:Flashy waxing nostalgic over cricket The reverent, sincere tone here is just about indistinguishable to the sort of thing you'd find in the school stories like Teddy Lester, Captain of Cricket, which followed in the footsteps of Tom Brown's Schooldays. Absent the reference right at the end to him having a shag in the fields, the rest of it would not be even slightly out of place in any mainstream sepia-toned anthology of cricket writing. Read it alongside something like "The Flower Show Match" from Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, and see how the mood compares. quote:I see myself, an awkward overgrown boy, fielding anxiously at mid-on. And there’s Ned Noakes, the whiskered and one-eyed wicketkeeper, alert and active, though he’s forty-five if he’s a day. With his one eye (and a glass one) he sees more than most of us do, and his enthusiasm for the game is apparent in every attitude. Alongside of him lounges big Will Picksett, a taciturn good-natured young yokel; though over-deliberate in his movements, Will is a tower of strength in the team, and he sweeps half-volleys to the boundary with his enormous brown arms as though he were scything a hayfield. Of course, this being Flashman, it's probably going to end differently. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Jul 16, 2021 |
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Jul 15, 2021 15:24
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Cricket annotations:quote:Felix, crouching facing me, barely ten feet away, edged just a little closer, his eyes fixed on my feet Felix is fielding in a position which is called "silly point". I promise I am not making this up. "Point" is a particular area on the field, and it's "silly" because he's extremely close to the bat, putting himself in personal danger by being there. If the batter hits the ball directly at him he'll do well to avoid not getting injured by the hard cricket ball with its raised seam. It's even sillier for Felix to be there to Mynn's bowling, because Mynn bowls fast, and the field would likely have been set further back from the bat for him. The catches that silly point usually takes all look like this, they come from looping mis-hits that only go to silly point from slow bowling. Usually if it looks like a ball is going to be hit hard anywhere near a fielder in a close-catching position, they will just try to get out of the way, they're not there to stop hard hits. For Felix to take a reaction catch at silly point from Mynn's bowling is practically superhuman, and I read this as Flashy exaggerating for the sake of a good dit, having had about 70 years to tell and re-tell it. If he were telling it in 1845, he'd probably have Felix fielding at point, a sensible 30-yard distance away from the bat, and over the years the field's got closer and closer. quote:We closed our hand at 91 This is the fundamental difference between cricket and baseball. Baseball is the pitcher's game; you expect to see the batter get out, and it's unusual to see the batting side score a run. Cricket is the batter's game; you expect to see the batter score runs, and it's unusual to see the fielding side get somebody out. At the time, 91 runs would have been a low but respectable score by amateurs playing the best side in England; albeit that Kent should be able to knock them off at a canter, as they do. quote:Flashman bowls Felix out Flashman's first scalp comes from one part skill and one part luck. He first primes Felix with bouncers, fast balls aimed at his body. Felix has enough skill to hit Flashy's bowling for runs rather than be intimidated by it; but it still means that Felix is preparing himself to deal with balls that come to him at hip level or higher. Flashman then manages to get the ball to bounce in just the right place (as it eventually will on a pitch from 1842); Felix sees where it's bouncing and expects it to come in at hip height again, and then is unable to adjust when it comes through as a shooter at ankle height. No Youtube, nobody puts shooters on there because you can't intentionally bowl one. quote:Golden duck for Pilch Pilch will have been watching all this, but first ball, he's unable to handle it when the ball bounces in a similar place to the last two, but comes through just a little higher than he's expecting. The ball goes straight back at Flashman, and Pilch is caught and bowled. Caught and bowled from a fast bowler is one of the more ridiculous and impressive feats a human body can pull off. The bowler runs in as fast as possible, goes through the unnatural bowling motion, and then takes several steps of follow-through to use up the momentum. In an instant, they must recognise that the ball is coming back at them, stop, and completely change their body position. Fraser has Flashy view this wicket as more luck than the first one, but assuming that Flashman's narrative can be relied on here, I'd say that the first wicket was more luck, and this one was more skill in being able to put the ball roughly where he was aiming, and then react and take the catch. quote:A shocker for Mynn Hopefully it's clear that what Flashy has done here is played the umpire (of whom more in a moment); he's bowled purely to hit Mynn, so he can then appeal to the umpire to give Mynn out LBW, regardless of where the ball was actually going. In cricket, a batter cannot be given out unless the fielding side first appeals, which is what all the shouting's about. In theory they are asking the umpire "How's that?"; in practice they are shouting any three or four syllables that roughly fit the pattern. The leg-before-wicket law is the most controversial in cricket because it requires the umpire to make a very difficult split-second judgement decision about where the ball would have gone if it had not hit the batter. The most important technological innovation in the history of cricket is Hawk-Eye (as demonstrated by Stephen Fry), a computer system to track and predict the path of the ball after it hits something, which is now used to assist umpires in international matches and which has unquestionably made umpires more accurate and the game better. quote:Three balls, three batters out For a bowler to take three wickets in successive balls is cricket's hat-trick, and it's also the supreme cricketing achievement, the equivalent of a pitcher's perfect game. The Oxford English Dictionary's lexicographers are confident that they can trace the term "hat-trick" to an 1858 match where a bowler took three wickets, the spectators had a whip-round for him, and then actually bought him a new hat with the proceeds. To anyone with a passing interest in etymology, this sounds like it should be complete bollocks bearing all the hallmarks of a too-good-to-be-true folk story, but I'll take the OED's word for it. quote:old Aislabie's a Rugby man, and it was out of pride in the old school that he arranged this fixture; honest as God, to be sure, but like all enthusiasts he'll see what he wants to see, won't he? Aislabie is a minor supporting character in Tom Brown's Schooldays; he appears in the final chapter as captain of the MCC side which comes to Rugby to play the whole school's eleven (Brown, of course, is captain of Rugby). Even then he's "old Mr Aislabie", so it makes sense that by now he's given up playing and taken up umpiring. He's not originally said to be an old Rugbeian, but it would explain how the original match came about, and it would explain why he would be willing to complete Flashman's redemption from being expelled as a drunkard to getting a hat-trick against three of England's leading batsmen. It also brings up a wonderfully-drawn irony; near the end of that original match (Flashman long since having been expelled in disgrace), Brown and Arthur have a rather vomitously lawful good conversation with an unnamed schoolmaster: quote:“Come, none of your irony, Brown,” answers the master. “I'm beginning to understand the game scientifically. What a noble game it is, too!” The match then ends in an extremely close defeat for Rugby, but one which the boys take as good as a win against the MCC, and it's sporting congratulations all round, moral victories, and lashings of ginger beer. Here, the Gentlemen of Rugby are well beaten, but there is still a large amount of glory in defeat to be had. All of which goes directly to Flashman, and his self-interest, and his unsportsmanlike appealing for things that he knows full well are not out, and drinking beer between innings. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Jul 16, 2021 |
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Jul 16, 2021 22:37
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Just one cricket annotation, for the doddering Duke:quote:the one I bowled out Beauclerk with This would be the Rev Lord Frederick de Vere Beauclerk, one of the more colourful characters of pre-Victorian cricket (and that's really saying something), and certainly a man who you'd never shut up about if you'd ever bowled him out. Even by the standards of the time he was a dedicated gambler and devoted gamesman who probably could have taught Flashman a thing or two about the dark arts. Were he a hundred years younger and from Australia, he'd probably be a national icon. In the grand tradition of younger sons of the nobility, he went into the Church and proceeded to have as little to do with religion as possible, lest it get in the way of his cricket. He played first-class cricket for some 35 years, much of it for the MCC, was genuinely an excellent all-rounder and tactician, and had a significant impact on the early laws of the game, often using this and spurious/hypocritical accusations of match-fixing to settle scores. It is said that right up to his death in 1850 he was regularly seen at Lord's, and so perhaps he was there on the boundary nodding in appreciation at Flashman's appeal for LBW.
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Jul 19, 2021 21:38
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Fraser drops contemporary allusions like they're going out of fashion to establish the Don's bona fides.Arbite posted:he was some kind of nabob, with connections in Leadenhall Street His connections in Leadenhall Street can be taken either as referring to the heart of the financial centre in the Square Mile generally; or more specifically as a reference to East India House, headquarters of John Company. By this point they've occupied the building for nearly 200 years. It was demolished shortly after the fall of the Company, and the Lloyds Building stands there now, one of the most iconic buildings in modern architecture. quote:he was friendly with Haddington and Stanley at one end of the scale The 9th Earl of Haddington (a Tory) has just been made First Lord of the Admiralty after declining Governor-General of India; "Stanley" could be one of a few individuals but is most likely Edward John Stanley (a Whig), most recently Paymaster-General, and who in the fullness of time will succeed to the family barony, and be President of the Board of Trade and Paymaster-General, and father ten legitimate children. quote:and with such rascals as Deaf Jim Burke and Brougham at t’other Deaf Jim Burke is a 32-year-old champion boxer whose life and career are heading rapidly downhill; in three years he will die in poverty. "Brougham" is unclear, but may be a queeny cheap shot at the recently-ennobled Lord Brougham, who while serving as Lord Chancellor was one of the chief architects of the Great Reform Act and the Slavery Abolition Act a year later, which would not have endeared him to Flashy one bit. He commissioned the original example of the horse-drawn carriage that was of such use to Sherlock Holmes, and his long association with Cannes helped establish it as a popular resort for Europe's well-heeled. quote:One night he would be dining with Aberdeen, and the next at Rosherville Gardens or the Cider Cellars "Aberdeen", the fourth Earl, whose diplomacy was critical to the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon. He's currently the Foreign Secretary and in 1842 oversaw the signing of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty between the USA and Canada, and the ending of the First Opium War, with the establishment of the Chinese treaty ports and perpetual (cough) British sovereignty over Hong Kong. Rosherville Gardens is a recently opened pleasure garden in Gravesend, well outside London, and one of the first modern tourist traps. It's easy to think that it came with the railways, but in fact it was built to be served by boat travel along the Thames; the railways will not arrive until 1886, and almost immediately kill the gardens stone dead, as they also go to the coastal towns. The gardens are currently somewhat declasse, but will achieve greater respectability with the passage of time. The Cider Cellars, meanwhile, were remembered with no little nostalgia a generation later by Gustav Dore: quote:How long ago is it since gentlemen of the highest degree went to the Cider Cellars and the Coal Hole? Speculating on the changes in London at play, within the last five-and-twenty years, in that corner of Evans's where, any night, you could at once tell by a sudden influx that the House was up; we trundle back through the seasons, to the time when the bar parlour of the Cider Cellars-a dirty, stifling underground tavern in Maiden Lane, behind the Strand-was the meeting place from Fop's Alley, after the opera. The Cave of Harmony was a cellar for shameful song-singing-where members of both Houses, the pick of the Universities, and the bucks of the Row, were content to dwell in indecencies for ever. From his London: A Pilgrimage, nothing so much as a key prosecution exhibit when modern travel writers are brought up on charges of unoriginality. quote:the latest joke about Nelson’s Column, The genesis of the column was far from smooth; the original contest to design it had to be re-run, the winning design had to be lowered to stop it falling over under its own weight, construction of the column took four years (far longer than planned) from 1840 to 1844, the organising committee then ran out of public subscription money and the Government had to rescue the project, and when bronze reliefs from Nelson's life were added to the base (starting in 1850), the final one was found to have been adulterated with iron and the manufacturers were convicted of fraud. Not entirely unlike the Millennium Dome. quote:had songs from the “Bohemian Girl” played in his drawing-room The premiere of The Bohemian Girl came in 1843 and it remained in the repertoire until the 1930s; just before it disappeared, it inspired a Laurel and Hardy movie. It was translated into French as "La bohemme", and should not be confused with Puccini's later La boheme. quote:The Mines Act and the Factories Act The Mines Act 1842 is accurately described in the text; the Don is being slightly optimistic about the passage of a Factories Bill, which did not come until 1847, and then it took two subsequent Acts to fix some serious errors of drafting. When in full effect in 1853, it did indeed establish the ten-hour working day, conclusively proved Morrison's objections to be absolute bullshit, and led to a whole series of successor Factories Acts over the next hundred years. Oh yeah, cricket. quote:I’d been having a few games for the Montpeliers at the old Beehive field The Montpelier CC was at the time one of London's leading town clubs. In the same way that MCC had earlier moved to Lord's, and eventually begat Middlesex County Cricket Club, in 1845 Montpelier moved to Kennington Common, begat Surrey CCC, and founded the Oval. They currently play at a ground officially known as Aram's, but its popular name is based on a nearby pub and so of course Flashy knows it by that name.
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Jul 23, 2021 11:02
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 EXTENSIVE CRICKET ANNOTATIONS quote:for that afternoon I bowled the best long spell of my life for Mynn’s Casuals against the All-England XI: five wickets for 12 in eleven overs If the ultimate cricketing achievement is to take a hat-trick, the basic mark of unusually good performance for a bowler is to get five of the opponent's batters out in a single innings, which is half the team. A bowler of Flashy's calibre would enjoy taking "five for" as often as possible (not every match, but depending on opposition he might expect to do it every five or ten matches) and see it as something worthy of a little modest celebration afterwards. Five for 12 means that while he was bowling, the combined score of all the batters who faced his bowling was 12 runs. Remembering that cricket is a batter's game in which it's expected to score runs and unusual to get out, then even in the 1840s when scoring was far lower than it is today, conceding only 12 runs in 11 overs and taking five wickets is a match-winning performance. To do it against All-England is apparently real proof of genuine skill and ability, far more so than his luck/skill/cheating hat-trick against Kent; but see below... (Note, by the way, that Flashy is far more concerned with his personal haul of five for than he is with who actually won the match.) An "over" is the basic unit of cricketing time, consisting of (at the time) five consecutive balls from a particular bowler. In the modern day it is six balls; originally it was four; and there was a 50-year fashion in the Southern hemisphere for eight-ball overs in the middle of the 20th century. quote:Lillywhite leg before This is almost certainly William Lillywhite, father of the cricketing dynasty that would eventually found the eponymous Lillywhites department store, a visit to which until very recently was like a visit to Eden for any child who was mad about sport. It's now an overgrown Sports Direct trading off nostalgia and clueless tourists, which is a massive shame. On the field, Lillywhite is one of the most important bowlers in cricketing history and a leading bowler of his day. His bowling formed a part of the push that led MCC to legalise roundarm bowling, and after that he was generally said to be as good with the ball as Pilch was with the bat. His first-class career lasted nearly 30 years and he played his last match aged 61, then succumbed to illness less than a year after being awarded a well-received benefit match (in which all profits are donated to a player for his retirement). At this point he's at the height of his powers despite being 50 years old; but as a specialist bowler he's not particularly good at batting. It's not nearly the same feather in Flashy's cap to get Lillywhite out as it is to get a recognised batter like Pilch, Felix, or Mynn. quote:Marsden clean bowled Most likely Thomas Marsden, one of the first great Yorkshire cricketers. He was a batting all-rounder who played for Sheffield, the leading club in the county in his lifetime. He was a major crowd attraction and noted single-wicket specialist (of which more in a moment) in his early career, until Pilch beat him twice in big money challenge matches. However, in real life his last first-class match was in 1841 and he died in February 1843, so for Flashy to get him out at this stage of his career would be kind of like knocking out Muhammad Ali in the year 2000. It's also important to note that we are still four years away from the establishment of the first permanent All-England side. At present, any team who feels like it can style themselves All-England and draw spectators as long as they have some big names; and this All-England side only needs to be All-England enough to oppose Mynn's Casuals, it's not like they're playing Kent or the MCC. It would not be out of character for Flashman to be bigging himself up for taking five wickets against old men and tail-enders who aren't expected to be any good with the bat. quote:“I don’t suppose,” he added, fingering his earring and looking impish at me, “you’d consider playing me a single-wicket match, would you?” Single-wicket is a variant of cricket designed to be played as a challenge match between two leading players (or sometimes teams of two). One player bowls at one batter for a period of time; then they swap over. Its original heyday was in the middle of the 18th century, when a well-promoted single-wicket match could draw far more spectators and gambling than a great match between full teams. It then fell out of favour for about 50 years, but made a storming comeback to its previous levels of popularity after Mynn and Felix saw the opportunity to use it to shore up their often-questionable financial positions. It's always easier to fix a contest between individuals than it is a contest between teams, and so single-wicket is where the real big money and big scandal was during its second heyday. It died out after the retirement of Mynn as county matches and regular All-England tours took its place. Despite occasional attempts, it's never returned as a spectator attraction. The rules of each single-wicket match varied wildly depending on the players and the available location. It was common to play most single-wicket matches on a recognised cricket ground, or at least somewhere with a suitable strip of grass. Unlike baseball, in regular cricket there is no concept of foul territory and a ball may be hit anywhere, including behind the batter; some single-wicket matches restricted where the batters could hit to. Usually there would be several neutral players brought in to be fielders. In single-wicket's original heyday it was common to play with a single innings each of unlimited duration, but in the 19th-century revival it became more usual for each player to have two or more innings, of a few overs each. quote:How many a side?” No fielders was uncommon but not unheard-of, and fitting for a drunken challenge arranged at short notice. "Bounds" means that there will be a boundary line, hitting the ball beyond which will award the batter runs without having to physically run up and down. We're only just beginning to enter the era of cricket's development where it's common for a match to be played on a field with formal boundary lines. For a single-wicket match with no fielders, the boundaries will be very short; as the Don says, to cut down on the bowler tiring from from chasing the ball into the field. In ordinary cricket, a "bye" is when the batter fails to hit the ball, but because of a fielding error, has the opportunity to run anyway. An "overthrow" is when a fielder attempts to throw the ball to another fielder standing near the stumps, and misses, and the ball goes back out into the field and gives the batters a chance to keep running when they would not have done without the error. The byes video also demonstrates how runs are scored in regular cricket. Two batters are on the field at the same time; the playing field has a strip of close-cut grass in the middle with two sets of stumps 22 yards apart and opposite each other. When the batters run, they are trying to make it to a marker line near the opposite set of stumps before the fielders can run them out by either throwing the ball so it hits the stumps, or so it is caught by another fielder standing near the stumps who then touches the ball against the stumps. In single-wicket, it was more usual to put only one stump opposite the batter to mark where the bowler should bowl from; and for the batter to only score a run and be safe from being run out if he were able to run both to the bowler's stump, and then back to his original position. With no fielders, the bowler will then have to chase the ball himself after a hit, and then either run it back to the batter's stumps or throw it from distance. END OF CRICKETING ANNOTATIONS quote:Course, the peelers is shockin’ lax these days—” The Metropolitan Police has only been in existence for 13 years, its jurisdiction has only four years ago been massively enlarged to more or less its current size, its founder Sir Robert Peel is at this moment Prime Minister and at the height of his career, and already people are bemoaning that the Peelers aren't good as they used to be (ironically, but still). Nothing new under the sun, is there? Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Aug 3, 2021 |
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Aug 3, 2021 14:02
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A little anticipation while we mark out our run-ups:quote:He spoke—at the top of his voice, according to a guest at the hotel—of setting a prize-fighter on to you. It seems he is the backer of...Caunt Benjamin Caunt is currently recognised as the heavyweight boxing champion of England. He stood six feet two inches and weighed 17 stone; his popular nickname "Big Ben" is sometimes said (without any actual evidence, of course) to have inspired the name of the bell (or the clock, or the clock-tower, or all three) at the Palace of Westminster. Right then. Let's get in the mood. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GdvFiE2R5I CRICKETING COMMENTARY BEGINS HERE quote:little Felix spun the bat; I called “blade”, and so it was A cricket bat is asymmetrical with a flat front, a thick edge, and a bladed back. Felix has held the bat upright resting on the ground, spun the handle between his hands and let go. This is an informal cricketing alternative to the toss of a coin, and physics says that "blade" is much more likely to come up than "flat". quote:We went out to the wicket together Cricket has a wonderfully self-confusing way of using the same term to mean several different things dependent on context, and also having many different terms to describe more or less the same thing. So it is that the "wicket" as a physical object can mean either the three stumps and two bails, or the strip of close-cut grass in the middle of the field that the stumps are driven into. The wickets are set up at each end of the wicket; that's the kind of glorious bullshit you're dealing with here. quote:Felix gave Solomon guard Solomon decides where he wants to stand to face the bowling, and then holds his bat upright with its foot on the ground and the edge facing the umpire, whose position is opposite the batter. He then asks for a stump (the typical guard is "middle stump"), and the umpire guides him with moving the bat until it is in line with middle stump. Solomon will then take a few seconds to use his shoe or the bottom of the bat to draw a small line on the ground. Then, as long as he faces each ball with his bat on the line, he will know he's standing in exactly the same place each time. quote:he took his time over it, too, patting his block-hole and feeling the pitch before him It's usually a ritualistic little moment, especially for an apparently poor batter like Solomon preparing to face Flashman. The "block-hole" is the area immediately under and around where the batter stands with his bat on the ground, and his toes next to it. If the bowler aims the ball there, it is very difficult for the batter to play an attacking shot and will only hope to block the ball and prevent himself getting out; thus, "block-hole". quote:It was spongy turf, I realised, so I wasn’t going to get much play out of it—no doubt Solomon had taken that into account, too. Most cricket bowling (with an exception, which we'll come to soon) is designed so that the ball bounces off the ground once before reaching the batter. The harder and drier the grass on the wicket (sorry) is, the faster and higher the ball will bounce, which favours a fast bowler like Flashy. A soft wicket will take a lot of the pace out of the ball as it bounces, putting Flashy at a disadvantage. It favours slower bowlers who flick their fingers or twist their wrists as they bowl to spin it, and cause it to change direction after bouncing. Flashy also shouldn't really be surprised that a temporary wicket in the grounds of a house would be soft and spongy. However, while a lot of the joy of the books is reading about his cunning and cleverness in some regards, he's also a colossally stupid oaf in other regards, so it's very believable that this hasn't occurred to him until now. quote:He wasn’t a bad batter. He blocked my next ball with his hanging guard, played the third straight back to me, and then got a great cheer when he ran two off the fourth. Remember that cricket is the batter's game. If the ball isn't going to hit Solomon's stumps, he can just raise his bat and let it fly harmlessly past. If the ball is going to hit the stumps and Solomon doesn't think he can take the risk of trying to score runs, he can just play a defensive shot and wait for the next one, he doesn't have to run if he hits the ball. quote:I gave him a slower ball, and he pulled it into the trees, so that I had to plough through the chattering mob to reach it, while he ran five This is a bit odd, as is the later reference to hitting the ball to the other side of the house. Originally Solomon appeared to be suggesting that they play on a field with boundary lines, but now they're hitting the ball up hill and down dale and the bowler's having to chase every which way and the batter's running everything, with no suggestion of boundaries. A pull shot is played cross-batted, across the batsman's body, aiming to send the ball away at a 90-degree angle to himself. Again, there is no foul territory and the batter can hit the ball anywhere. quote:Worse still, no fieldsmen meant no catches behind the stumps, which is how fast men like me get half their wickets. The flat face and thick edge of a cricket bat means that a common mistake for a batter is to attempt to hit the ball, almost miss it, and hit it only very slightly with the edge. The ball then flies behind the stumps for the wicket-keeper or slips to catch. Here are some of the more spectacular examples from the 1980s. quote:I heard him yelp, but by then I was lunging after the ball, scooping it up and throwing down the wicket, and then looking round all eager, as though to see where he was. Flashy helpfully says "throwing down the wicket" to give us an example of "wicket" to mean the stumps and bails. Now, this amusing interlude is also a trifle oddly-written for the cricket lover, since (unless it's somehow been omitted again) Fraser doesn't see fit to explicitly mention that Flashman appeals to Felix after running Solomon out. This is a problem, because (as Fraser well knows) since at least the 1740s, the umpire may not give any batter out unless a fielder appeals first, and I'm just left asking myself, why doesn't Felix just say "well, Flashman, you didn't appeal, so it can't be run out"? By the way it goes down, I guess we have to assume that Flashy appealed to Felix, even though it doesn't explicitly say so, and given that he's cheating he surely would have made a point of making a massive appeal like the one that got Mynn out LBW at the start of all this. We're also about 20 years shy of the Victorians' formal invention of the Spirit of Cricket; in the modern game it is well established that a captain can withdraw an appeal from the umpire if he believes it should not have been made, and there are recent examples of batters being injured while running and the fielding side declining to run them out when it could easily have been done. quote:He lobbed with the solemn concentration of a dowager at a coconut shy, and I gloated inwardly, watched it drop, drove with confidence—and mishit the first ball straight down his throat for the simplest of catches. Lob bowling is just about the oldest trick in the book. Its heyday was the underarm bowling era; it's now pretty much definitively dead and obsolete, but even into the 20th century there were good sides throwing the ball to an occasional lob bowler for a bit of something different. Unlike most bowlers, lob bowlers don't necessarily try to bounce the ball on the ground. Instead they try to bowl high, slow, looping deliveries, ideally aiming to land the ball directly on top of the stumps. It died out because as batters' skill increased, it became easier and easier to deal with slow lobs that didn't hit the ground, or didn't spin when they did hit the ground. quote:He was quick, and sure-footed, and his back game was excellent, but I’d noticed that he wasn’t too steady with his forward strokes, so I pitched well up to him, Effective cricket batting requires the batter to move one's feet as part of playing shots; not too early, or you'll move the wrong way, and not too late, or you'll mistime the shot. Cricket batting shots are divided into two types. If the ball is bouncing close to the batter, and low down, the batter will step forward, towards the pitch of the ball, and hit it as soon as possible after the bounce. If the ball is bouncing further away, and higher, the batter will step backwards, away from the pitch of the ball, and leave as much time to play the shot as possible. This observation displays again that while Flashman has some physical skill at the game, he has a distinct lack of cricketing intelligence when he must play honestly and can't cheat. On a spongy pitch with low bounce, there's not much point bowling short. Short bowling relies on the ball coming through with pace and high bounce to intimidate the batter and threaten his body. Flashy should have been pitching the ball well up as soon as he saw Solomon taking his guard and realised how soft the turf was. Instead he's been witlessly thumping away and letting Solomon play back-foot shots like the pull. quote:on side...his off-stump As the batter stands at the wicket, the "off side" is the side away from his legs, and the "on side" (or "leg side", because cricket never saw anything it didn't want to give at least two names to) is the other. quote:I was so nervous that I edged some of them, and would have been a goner if there’d been even an old woman fielding at slip Now the lack of fielders is working in Flashy's favour. However, what works against him is that if Solomon had edged the ball, its pace would have taken it a good distance from the stumps and Solomon could probably have got a run while Flashy chased it down. Because the ball's coming down slowly, when Flashy edges, it stops very quickly and he doesn't have time to run. quote:I got over my first shakes, tried a drive or two Ironically, our favourite cheat/cad/bounder begins to turn his fortunes around with the most conventional, respectable, orthodox shot in the game. Were this several generations later, we might say they were straight out of the MCC coaching manual, not a sentiment often applied to Flashman. To drive the ball is to hit it with a straight bat in the general direction of "back past the bowler", or through the covers on the off side. Polite applause all round. quote:when he sent me a full pitch, I let fly and hit him clean over the house I have been the wicket-keeper and had a front-row seat to watch a good quality batter effortlessly hit some very bad bowling clean over a nearby building and right out of the ground. It's rather demoralising. Especially when, as the only fielder wearing pads and gloves, you get volunteered to go and find the ball. CRICKETING COMMENTARY ENDS HERE
Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Aug 6, 2021 |
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Aug 6, 2021 19:41
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Not sure there's much to annotate there.Arbite posted:Please post the most saccharine cricket tributes you can. Oh Aggers, do stop it...
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Aug 8, 2021 22:22
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Arbite posted:Now's the day and now's the hour This is a Robert Burns quote, being the first line of the second stanza of Scots Wha Hae. It's an early example of post-Union Scottish patriotism, casting Scotland as a plucky underdog nation on the side of right and justice, with liberal reference made to the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. When originally published in 1794 it had to be done carefully to avoid being seen as dangerously seditious. quote:Now's the day, an now's the hour: It's presented as a speech that might have been made by yer actual Robert the Bruce to his men shortly before the battle, at which their army defeated Edward II of England and helped win 400 more years of independent nationhood.
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Sep 9, 2021 09:18
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Expecting an old soldier who served when he did to not wholeheartedly embrace and perpetrate the myth of Tommy Atkins single-handedly winning the war, hammering away at the mad minute, killing three enemies with every shot, with a Woodbine out of the corner of his mouth and a dixie of tea at his elbow (etc), is kind of like expecting him to believe in the Fairy Tinkerbell.
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Sep 19, 2021 16:55
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Cricket: Slight Returnquote:(This at a time when Grace was making triple centuries in England, and I not there.) Dr W.G. Grace was often reckoned the greatest cricketer of all time until Bradman came along a couple of generations later, and one of the few men whose image transcends the sport. Primarily a batter who was still useful with the ball, he was a comic-book figure come to life, with a hefty frame and massive beard. He played in 44 straight first-class seasons, and was particularly renowned for his undying commitment to bending the rules without actually cheating (one possibly-apocryphal story tells of how he reacted to being given out LBW by telling the offending umpire that the suitably large crowd had come to watch him bat, not the umpire give him out), and his thoroughly shameless ability to make vast sums of money for playing cricket while also claiming to be an amateur. Flashy would surely have been a big fan, in a jealous way. A century is when a single batter makes 100 runs in the same innings. In the modern game it's still a noteworthy achievement but top batters are expected to make them; in Grace's time they were relatively rare and cause for great celebration. Playing in an era when pitches were far worse and batting far harder, he was the first player to make a century of first-class centuries in his career (the exact figure is disputed by historians; the most common total has him 10th out of 23 to reach that mark). In August 1876 he made 344 for MCC against Kent, the first batter to score a first-class triple century, and then two weeks later he did it again with 318 not out for Gloucestershire against Yorkshire. 344 stood as the individual record until 1895, and it has only been beaten six times after that.
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Jul 13, 2022 01:26
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