Gideon Haigh, top cricket writer and occasional contributor to normblog, has a piece in the Australian about cricket's relationship with food. It's a tasty dish. Here are just a few excerpts from it:
It wasn't so much what Sir Donald Bradman ate as how he ate that forcibly impressed his contemporary Jack Fingleton: 'He was a study when not out during lunch of a big innings. He had, in Sydney, the inevitable light batting lunch in the dressing-room of rice custard, stewed fruit and milk. Each slow mouthful was an essay in method, in digestion, in cold planning and contemplation of the feast soon to follow in the middle.'
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One of my favourite cricket photographs features England's master batsman Len Hutton arriving in Fremantle in September 1946 for the first postwar Ashes tour: usually the dourest of Yorkshireman, he is gazing as covetously at a banana as Shane Warne might (once) have eyed a blonde, having encountered nothing so exotic for years in ration-stricken Britain. Hutton might even have developed a bit of a thing about the fruit. A famous story concerns the young Colin Cowdrey playing some speculative strokes just before lunch during a Test in Adelaide, and receiving a cryptic message from Hutton in the dressing room in the form of a banana. 'The captain saw those shots you played, and thought that you must be hungry,' explained the twelfth man.
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Shane Warne returned from his first season of club cricket in England having gained so much weight that his father picking him at the airport did not recognize him. I played for a club in England that only ever bowled on winning the toss, on grounds that nobody after tea was physically capable of rolling their arms over.
There's more on cricketers and their relationship with food in this earlier post by Bob Borsley.
