I HAVE a particular concern for threatened and endangered forms of life: humpback whale, Kerry slug, Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, Przewalski’s horse, Iowa Pleistocene snail, the draw. The week has been a good one at least for the draw.
The draw gets a bad press: it’s like kissing your sister, as the American expression has it. Nature abhors a vacuum, Americans abhor the draw. They just don’t understand. Sport is about winning and (perish the thought) losing. So why complicate things? And since we must follow America in all things, starting with the most ghastly food and drink on the planet, there is pressure on all sport to disallow the draw.
But at Old Trafford they played cricket for five days, still couldn’t find a winner and it was glorious. England drew with Australia in one of the great Test matches and the draw only adds to its beauty.
And — carrying on in the shadow of the cricket — the first weekend of Premiership action brought us Wigan not quite drawing with Chelsea. They were denied a 0-0 draw by a 93rd-minute goal, and it needed to be a goal of the season.
Naturally, all the reports celebrated not the winners, but the nearly-drawers. You could taste in every report the regret that Wigan had come so close to parity: that sister had so narrowly escaped her token cheek-peck.
At Old Trafford on Monday, when Michael Clarke was batting with Ricky Ponting, there was about half an hour when all four results were possible: a win for either side, a draw and a tie. I have never tried to explain to an American the difference between a draw and a tie — and I hope I never will.
There is nothing in sport quite like the joy of the losing draw. In some ways, it has more to savour than mere victory. When I played for mighty Tewin Irregulars, we always refused to play limited-overs cricket. In that format, the better side always won, and where’s the fun in that? We played what we, somewhat ambitiously, called “a proper game of cricket”.
We were playing against the Victoria and Albert Museum and at tea — a crucial landmark — they were 240 for four declared. Tea done, we responded and I came out to bat at 88 for eight with 20 overs to go (this being a condition of play agreed at the start). Marcus Williams (also, incidentally, of Times Sport) and I agreed that we would eradicate at least one form of dismissal by refusing all runs. We then proceeded to bat out 20 overs for no runs: match drawn.
Had we been playing limited overs, this would have been futile. But this being a proper game of cricket, the weaker side had no reason to give up. We couldn’t win, but we could stop the other buggers winning. We could stuff it up for them. And we did.
For 20 overs of bowling that has grown increasingly demonic over the years, with ten men round the bat, we did rather more than block. We defied. We defied all those who, for some unfair reason, were better cricketers than us. We didn’t let mere incompetence stand in our way. We flew the flag for mediocrity — and we triumphed.
I may add that the result was taken in reasonably good part by the opposition. Not so on another occasion when the opposition refused to speak to us afterwards, and there were two utterly unmixing groups at the bar. They sulked. They thought we should have “gone for the runs” — ie, we should have lost, as a homage to the spirit of sport. Stuff that, mate.
No. You have to earn your victory. In proper cricket, you have to take ten wickets, and if you can’t do that, you don’t win. In a Test match, that’s 20 wickets. England took 19. A winning draw and, like a verbal contract, that’s not worth the paper it’s written on.
Did Chelsea deserve to win? Did Wigan deserve to draw? Desert is one of the overriding obsessions of football. Leicester are one goal up and just about deserve it . . . Kilmarnock somehow escaped with a draw, and it was a travesty of justice . . . Spurs won 3-0 and fully deserved it after a sparkling display in which . . .
This view of sport ignores the fact that one of the greatest pleasures in life is something you don’t deserve: a day’s holiday out of respect for the late founder, change for a £20 note when you proffered a tenner (and it’s far too late to go back), winning the lottery, meeting your spouse, having children.
The losing draw represents one of those perfect unmerited gifts from fate. I have played in just such a draw at football, more than once: the ball striking post and crossbar, cleared off the line, the goalkeeper (me) miraculously in the right place so that even his blunders fall to your advantage and the crash-hot opposition forwards maddened by their failure to understand that in life, you don’t always get what you deserve.
There is real joy in taking part in a travesty of justice, at least when you are the ones doing the travestying. You lot didn’t deserve to win. I’m sorry, but last time I looked, the winner was supposed to score more goals than the opposition. Ah, but we’d have won if we hadn’t missed that penalty. True, but you failed to score and, anyway, you didn’t miss it. I saved it.
The campaign to eradicate the draw has brought us one-day cricket, a format that gives us far too many longueurs and far too many one-sided games — so much so that they are still messing about with the rules to make it reliably entertaining. And in football, the anti-draw faction has brought us the penalty shoot-out.
Penalty shoot-outs are exciting in their warped way. The only trouble is that they are usually preceded by 120 minutes of poor football. The need to find a winner has, paradoxically, led to the dominance of the draw. When both sides play for a draw, the draw is seriously dull. In tournament football, the draw is now — quite inadvertently — over- rewarded, to the point where enterprise is genuinely counterproductive. The shoot-out is the most ill-thought-out legislation in the history of sport and we are stuck with it.
It all comes from the foolish and utterly unimaginative notion that there is something bad about a draw. But there is no denying that the draw that concluded on Monday in Manchester was a thing of perfection and beauty. Australia didn’t deserve to get away with it; there is poetry in that. England deserved to win, but they failed to take the twentieth wicket. There is poetry in the unforgettable cruelty of the denouement.
This is an Ashes summer: a drama in five acts and the first three have all been wondrous. Two more still to come and if it ends two-all, that, too, will be a kind of perfection.
