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Todd Snider: what if cricket was his canvas?Todd Snider: what if cricket was his canvas? Steven Siewert / © Getty ImagesA challenge could perhaps be set, even with official sponsorship, for new calypsos commemorating the most counterintuitive, i.e. least sprightly and insouciant, subjects: who would not be curious to hear a calypso struggling to celebrate Bill Lawry, Chris Tavaré , Geoff Boycott or someone equally well known for dourly accumulating cobwebs as well as runs? Such a contest need not be confined to Caribbean artists: Paul Kelly, borrowing the tune from Lord Kitchener's "London is the Place For Me" released the calypso "Shane Warne" in 2007.Which prompts - via the recollection of Eddie Perfect's Shane Warne: The Musical - the theory that the reason that cricket languishes insufficiently honoured in song is the possibility that the game is better suited to longer forms of musical celebration: even a T20 match goes on longer than Tales From Topographic Oceans. There has, however, been precious little exploration on this front, either. There is the rarely produced and little-recalled Lloyd-Webber/Rice musical Cricket: commissioned by Prince Edward as a 60th birthday gift for his mother, it depicts a love triangle amid the milieu of a fictional cricket club, and therefore struggles to qualify on the grounds that cricket is the metaphor, rather than the subject. The same might be said of the songs from Lagaan or other cricket-related Bollywood films: that while they do recognise, astutely, that cricket is to a large extent about other things, they are not, in and of themselves, primarily about cricket. The failure of our opera librettists to get to work on the 2005 Ashes is an atrocious dereliction.While more songs about cricket and cricketers would be a self-evident good, there is also a genuine urgency to this crisis. If actual songwriters and singers do not step up, there is a very real risk that cricketers themselves may attempt to fill the void. Have another listen to Brett Lee's "You're the One For Me" - a duet with the blameless Asha Bhosle, who keeps up her end with the watchful foreboding of someone batting with Inzamam-ul-Haq - and ask yourself if this sounds like the kind of world in which you want your children to live.
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If you're looking to pay tribute to a cricketer, you could do worse than put Mighty Sparrow in chargeIf you're looking to pay tribute to a cricketer, you could do worse than put Mighty Sparrow in charge © Getty ImagesMcGain took no wickets, his two visits to the crease yielded a duck and 2, and he never played another Test. One can readily imagine such a woeful yarn adapted by Shel Silverstein or Tom T Hall, and sung by Johnny Cash or Roger Miller. Not them personally, obviously, as only Hall still walks among us, but their heirs, perhaps Todd Snider, who has written at least one song about baseball - "America's Favourite Pastime", recalling the remarkable day in 1970 when the Pittsburgh Pirates' Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter while addled by LSD.It is surely past time, for example, that David Boon's famous 52-can Sydney-London flight of 1989 attracted the attention of a similarly inclined Australian chronicler: perhaps if TISM were ever to reform, this could provide the basis for an expansion of their cricket-related repertoire beyond "The Parable Of Glenn McGrath's Haircut" and the anti-vuvuzela triptych "Fielding At Long-On". TISM's approximate British equivalent, Half Man Half Biscuit, did contribute "F**kin' 'Ell It's Fred Titmus" to the pantheon - though this was, properly speaking, more a reflection on the disorienting effect of encountering celebrity in real life than an appreciation of the titular offspinner.There is a partial case to be made for the calypso singers of the Caribbean, who have produced some sterling homages to individual cricketers - Mighty Sparrow's "Sir Garfield Sobers", King Short Shirt's "Vivian Richards", among others (one should also acknowledge I-Roy's dense, hypnotic dancehall "Tribute to Michael Holding", which has something of the effect of being remorselessly battered by hundred-mile-an-hour bouncers). Again, however, plentiful wells of inspiration remain untapped - the more so when one considers the commendable generosity with which West Indian calypso singers have ennobled foreign players (see Lord Relator's "Gavaskar", Lord Kitchener's "Alec Bedser Calypso").
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