There will be a next match, and lots of them

Seventh of May.  Third chapter of the week.  Assuming that I do complete the chapter and post it this evening, that's my April total equalled in a week.  So what's happening?  I suppose the big news is that there are signs of a resumption of racing, although I think we would be getting ahead of ourselves were we to start to show signs of demob-happiness.  One gets confused, but I think that Friday 15th, a week tomorrow, has been whispered as a potential date for kick-off, but I feel that that's unlikely to happen then.  I think that plans will be drawn up on Monday after our leader has addressed the nation on Sunday, so we'd be cutting it a bit fine if we think that we can be racing four days later.  Whenever it is, though, I still think we'll fare better than Ireland, for whom 29th June seems to be looking a likely date.

The key thing to remember, as I see it anyway, is that the resumption of racing is merely Stage One, and Stage One is not the most pertinent one from the point of view of the participants (even if, for off-course viewers and punters, it will be a giant leap forward).  Stage Two will be more relevant, ie the time when there's enough racing and the backlog of would-be runners has started sufficiently to ease for there to be a realistic chance of your being able to find a suitable race for your horse and getting a run in it.  I think that the gap between Stage One and Stage Two will be at least a month.  And I don't think that you'll be doing yourself or your horses too many favours by getting them ready to run too many weeks ahead of their being able to do so.  (Stage Three, of course, is arguably at least as important: the stage when their owners can go to the races to watch them.  God knows when that will be). 

I hope that the above does not come across as too negative.  It's not meant to be.  It's just meant to be an attempt at a realistic assessment of the lie of the land.  And one has got to try to be realistic if one is going to try to plan a realistic strategy for the year ahead, and beyond.  Overall, I'm certainly not negative.  I may have lost a bit of the lunatic optimism which for no obvious reason gripped me at the start of the year, but I certainly haven't lost all of it.  It's VE Day tomorrow which is a good time to remember that WWII was a lot, lot worse than this and lasted a lot longer (nearly six years, bearing in mind that VJ Day is not until August - and the difficult period overall lasted a lot longer than that, if one considers that rationing lasted until, I think, 1954) but 'normality' (whatever that is) still returned eventually.

No, I feel a bit of the optimism felt by the old boy ("one of the game's ripest preserves") with whom Neville Cardus chatted at Lord's on the day of the last match of the summer in 1939.  (We are here delving into The Great Romantic again).  He viewed the future with an optimism which should inspire us all (notwithstanding that he readily admitted that, in all likelihood, he had just watched his last game of cricket at the sacred ground.  "I won't be here to see the next match that takes place at Lord's, but Lord's will be here and there will be a next match, and lots of them."  Lovely, isn't it?  There's a spirit in those words which we should all channel.

As we shall be channeling our inner wartime spirit tomorrow, I'll just quote a wonderful passage from the same chapter of the book, again from the tail-end of the summer of 1939.  "One of the more poignant accounts of the last days of cricket, before the Second World War rearranged the fixture list, belongs to J. M. Kilburn of the Yorkshire Post.  Poignant because he captures so well the fear amidst the confusion, doing so almost obliquely, and also because of Hedley Verity, that gentlest of souls, who would die of the wounds he received during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943.

"'The final matches of the 1939 season were the acme of unreality,' wrote Kilburn, accompanying Yorkshire to Hove.  On the third and final morning, Verity took seven wickets for nine runs to skittle Sussex for 33, crowning a seventh County Championship title in nine years.

"Kilburn wrote about the newspapers, every column full of the war.  About the fact telephones and telegraphs were 'so heavily engaged' that cricket scores couldn't be filed.  About the cancellation of trains, forcing Yorkshire to hire a bus.  About the long, silent and moody ride northwards from the south coast, the wheels jolting on bumpy roads.  About blackouts along the way, the towns vanishing under a gown of darkness.  And about Yorkshire's arrival home.  'Finally came journey's end in City Square, Leeds,' said Kilburn, 'and then departed their several ways one of the finest county teams in all the history of cricket.  It never assembled again.'"

Two thoughts from that to take with us into VE Day tomorrow.  The first actually has nothing to do with VE Day whatsoever: oh, to be able to write like Duncan Hamilton!  The second is that we cannot be anything but optimistic.  If cricket / racing / the country / the world can bounce back from the thousands of dark days which followed the events described in that passage, it / they / we can bounce back from anything.  And we shall.  And so shall our friends across the water too.  Having expected to be up and running before GB, they'll have found the eventual release of disappointing news hard to swallow, but the world will keep rolling round and these problems will soon be a distant memory, whenever we end up resuming.