For those who love cricket and operate in financial markets, Andy Haldane’s “Central banks are no longer batting on a sticky wicket” (Opinion, FT Weekend, August 24) was a powerful meditation on central bankers and cricketers.
One of the reasons we no longer have many sticky wickets is that pitches today are almost always “covered”, protected when not in use against the weather. Arguably, that spoils batsmen. They get accustomed to flat, predictable “tracks” and no longer have the expertise to deal with pitches not to their liking. Sticky wickets revealed the excellent batsmen, those with the depth of technique to play in all conditions, over a long time. Could it be that central bankers have been playing on “covered wickets” too long?
We have also moved into an era of the shorter-form cricket game. In T20 cricket, where matches conclude within about four hours, conditions are predictable, arguably weighted towards batsmen. We have accordingly moved into mindsets not aligned to five-day test cricket. Have our central bankers become T20 players, forgetting that economies and inflation, like the longer-form game, are there to test?
CLR James in Beyond a Boundary compared the legendary West Indian batsman George Headley with the acknowledged all-time batting great of the game, Australian Don Bradman, and their relative performance on sticky wickets. He noted how Headley’s was superior to Bradman’s to such an extent that Neville Cardus, the famous English cricket writer, noted that Headley should have good claim to be considered, on all wickets, the finest of the interwar batsmen.
Perhaps, like assessing batsmen, central bankers need to be assessed on their ability to bat on all types of wickets and not just flat pitches!
James also wrote: “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?” Haldane’s questioning was Jamesian: “What do they know of central bankers, who only central bankers know?”
Alan Smith
London HA1, UK
