Societies across the world mark the transition into manhood in a range of ways – and the world of the village cricketer is no different. For the emerging village player there is a point when you move from being one of the youngsters and start to be recognised as a person and player in your own right. It’s that time when you get your nickname.
It’s an exciting time – but one where a young player needs to proceed with caution. Your nickname will say with you until they lower you into the ground or scatter your ashes at long-off. It will be shouted at you across the outfield and will spread like a virus beyond cricket to work and college, girlfriends and siblings.
Nicknames say a lot about you, more about your friends and a lot about Cricket. Farmyard and Crofter are firmly of the view that there is a strong relationship between the quality of your team’s nicknames and on-field performance. When Super Cat led out The Master Blaster and Whispering Death you just knew what you were getting.
More on this below as we explain England’s capitulation down under.
It’s a thinking man and woman’s game with scope for creativity – so if the best you can come up with for a mate is Smithy, then perhaps you are not the man to work out how your left arm wrist spinner should be using the breeze. When you hear a skipper shout ‘get loose Dave/Simon/Imran’ to his bowler you should be sniffing blood. If the call is ‘get loose Bullet/Simple/Immers then you know these guys hunt in a pack.
To some extent the first rule of nicknames is the team that’s cruel together stays together.
But how do we get them in the first place? For many it marks the transition to manhood. The young ‘uns who break into senior cricket are typically referred to by the first names for a year or so. Anything too cruel or crude needs to be explained to dad (usually not an issue) or mum (potentially more challenging) so for a while first names prevail…and then out of the blue something sticks, sometimes obvious and sometimes so warped and tangential to any sane person’s thinking that virtually all of your future introductions are spent explain while you are called Dingo or Slasher or Cupcake.
There are 3 species of Nicknames.
The first are based on what you are already called and are subdivided into to two sub species:
Obvious: add a Y or IE (as in Trotty) or shorten (as in Carbs or Bres)
Associative: where a name is used in conjunction with a another word – The late Graham Dilley was known as Picca, and very few Rodneys get to play without being called Plonker every week.
The other two species are ‘Appearance’ (which could be physical or clothing related) – such as Beaky; and ‘Event’ when you are named after something stupid you have done (brain yourself on the low beam in the home dressing room, come round and you are forever ‘Hard Hat’).
For a young player making his way on the team they play every week knowing that their name – the transition to manhood could happen. They need to think about the story of Tang. A young man keeping wicket with orange pants putting in an appearance every time his gets set to take the ball. Long leg predictably shouts ‘We have got an Orang-utan keeping wicket’.
Actually that would be unpredictable – the actual version is cruder and he says ‘Orange -u-tang’. Of course long leg really should have said we had a baboon keeping wicket – but two overs later our young keeper is forever ‘Tang’. You can run through the eternal looped conversation yourself now ‘Why do they call you Tang?’
‘It’s to do with some pants’.
It so often is.
So what is a young man to do? At a club where there already quite a few animals so to speak, eating your tea with two hands would almost certainly mean you’ll be ‘Squirrel’ and the guy with the big nose crawling around looking for his contact lens will become ‘The Anteater’.
You could, off course, try to set the agenda. If your surname can take it, add a Y or IE and slowly start to use it. Answer your phone with a casual ‘its Jonesy’. You can even try to grab yourself a name like tiger – wear a few stripes, go for black and orange – but get it wrong and remember – it’s a life sentence. For every ‘Tiger’ there is a ‘Deckchair’.
Maybe it’s best to take what the cricket gods have for you, whatever it is, it means you have arrived.
…and now back to the international game. England’s ‘bowl dry, percentage cricket’ is reflected in the names they use for each other – Cookie, Swanny, Broady, Bres, Carbs. The coach Andy Flower is called Andy Flower – while the Aussies have replaced Micky Arthur (known as Micky Arthur) with Boof. It explains a lot and it’s no wonder that England might look to Ashley Giles – and man with two nicknames in the Hall of Fame: Wheelie Bin and King of Spain.
[footnote: Orang-utans are classified in the genus Pongo]
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