Comment on coetzee's observations about cricket in his essay "playground"
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Answer:
He describes an imaginary cricket game the lead character plays, with a beach bat and tennis ball. The boy aims to keep the ball in the air for as long as possible, and each time it falls, he records it as a wicket. He prefers this to "proper cricket," which results in too many missed shots, too many lost balls and too much time spent fielding.
One of the central themes of the book is the attachment of the protagonist to his mother - which does not extend to his father. While he tries to teach his mother to bowl and wants to include her in the activity, he eventually deems it "too shameful" for a mother to be playing cricket with her son. Meanwhile his father's position in the town's 2nd XI is a source of embarrassment because it is a team "no one bothers to watch".
When he plays his first schools match, he goes out to bat thinking cricket the most real thing he has ever experienced. When the family moves to the big city - Cape Town - his passion for cricket remains, but so does his fear of facing fast bowlers. "Afraid of being struck, afraid of the pain", he prefers to engage in another fantasy game on the stoep (verandah) by himself.
It would have been easy then, perhaps, to imagine that Coetzee did not actually play the game seriously and just idolised it from afar. But he did play. Unlike Samuel Beckett, who played two first-class matches for the University of Dublin and has a profile page on this website, Coetzee did not play cricket in any official form, but only at club level - a fact that was revealed by Archie Henderson, sports editor of one of South Africa's two major newspaper groups, Times Media, who once bowled to Coetzee at the University of Cape Town's ground.