September 20, The Cricket Paper
The demise of the Black Knight is one of the most quotable scenes from one of the most quotable movies in history – Monty Python and The Holy Grail.
Accompanied by a valet clip-clopping coconuts to mimic horse hooves, King Arthur (Graham Chapman) ‘rides’ into a forest and meets a brooding Black Knight, who refuses to let him pass. In the ensuing fight, Arthur quickly chops off his opponent’s right arm and then his left before claiming victory. “Tis but a flesh wound”, exclaims the latter as he gamely battles on. The bemused King then unceremoniously swipes off both his legs and rides away leaving the unrepentant Black Knight, played by John Cleese, shouting: “Come back here and take what is coming to you. I’ll bite your legs off!”
This week, the actor’s angry words had a similarly hollow and slightly desperate ring to them, only this time he was not playing for laughs. Cleese is a life-long Somerset fan who sat alongside his friend Jeffrey Archer throughout the County Championship decider against Essex at Taunton last year.
John Cleese with the Somerset CCC squad
The same two teams will play out a similar all-or-nothing finale next week. OK, it is in the Bob Willis Trophy at the end of a shortened season but it will still crown the red-ball champions of England, a title Somerset have never won. So, when it emerged that batsman Tom Banton would miss the final to join up with the Kolkata Knight Riders in the IPL, the comedian was not amused.
“I've always loved Somerset County Cricket Club for their team spirit, their decency and their loyalty,” Cleese tweeted. “So I am appalled that Tom Banton cannot find the time to play for his county in the most important match in their history. Shame on you, Tom.”
In fact, Banton’s red-ball form has been eminently droppable and the 2020 Bob Willis Trophy will not equate to a full County Championship title win. Therefore Cleese’s elevation of the game and Banton’s importance within it is open to question.
The real issue is the diminishing importance of long-form cricket. County fans have been used to losing players to the IPL at the start of a season, but seeing them swan off at the business end is a new kind of insult. It nearly happened last year. Ravi Bopara and Roelof van der Merwe were set to miss the Taunton game for the inaugural Euro T20 Slam only for the event to be cancelled after running into financial difficulties.
As I argued just last week, the Bob Willis Trophy has been a success, with the introduction of a televised showpiece finale among its most welcome innovations. Sky showed all four days of the deciding games in the 2016 and 2019 Championships. Now the whole season was set to engineer last-day drama.
However, Cricinfo has suggested that building work at Lord’s and, yes, their IPL schedule were problems Sky could not, or would not, overcome this year. Fortunately for red-ball fans, live streaming video has been the biggest success story of 2020 so most of us will settle for that.
More importantly, the BBC have flatly denied rumours that their online cricket coverage, both live text and commentaries, were set to be cutback next season. This would have been the biggest blow of all. In the past few decades, a community of unheralded BBC commentators have kept alive the County Championship like an underground movement. This year, live streaming has helped domestic red-ball cricket re-emerge blinking into a new, digital light.
So forget Banton, those of us who love long-form cricket plough our own furrow and nurture those who really care. Unless we do that, we’ll be left like the Black Knight, mortally-wounded and screaming about what might have been as our vanquishers race off into the distance.
* Read The Grumbler column The Cricket Paper, every Sunday during the season
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