A bowling machine, a net, a screen, and a game that has been stripped of everything except hitting
Sixes is a bar in Shepherd’s Bush where a machine bowls at you, in a net, and a screen tells you how many runs you would have scored, and there is a bar.
Four hundred and thirty-eight reviews, a 4.4, ten to thirty pounds.
It is the third venue of this type in the current survey and the pattern is now unmistakable.
The pattern, stated
Oche, on the Strand, is darts with the arithmetic taken away – and the arithmetic is the entire game, because starting at 501 and subtracting under pressure is where the fear lives.
Puttshack, at White City, is crazy golf with the scorecard taken away – and the scorecard was the game, because six people arguing about whether a man took four shots or five is what crazy golf actually is.
And Sixes is cricket with the fielding taken away. And the bowling. And the waiting. And the weather, and the other team, and the six hours.
What is left is a man hitting a ball, repeatedly, with a machine feeding him, and a screen telling him he is doing well.
What has been removed
Cricket is, structurally, a game about waiting. That is not a criticism; it is the design. Eleven men stand in a field for a very long time, most of them with nothing to do, and the tension accumulates precisely because nothing is happening.
The batsman’s ordeal is not the hitting. It is that he gets one mistake. Ever. One error and he walks off and sits down and it is over, possibly for the day, possibly for the season.
Sixes has abolished this completely. You get out, and the machine bowls again. There is no consequence. There is no walk back to the pavilion.
The Prat’s sport desk regards this as the removal of the only part of cricket that meant anything, and notes – as it noted at Oche and at Puttshack – that four hundred people appear to be having an excellent time and that we should probably shut up.
In defence of the whole genre
We have made this argument twice already and it holds a third time.
The British pub has never expected you to just stand there. Darts, dominoes, shove ha’penny, cribbage, skittles, the quiz. It has always handed you something to do with your hands so that the conversation could happen sideways, which is the only way this country can have one.
Competitive socialising is not a new invention. It is the oldest thing in the building. The only genuinely new element is that somebody has worked out how to charge sixty pounds an hour for the dartboard.
Verdict
Excellent for eight people who would otherwise be looking at their phones. Pointless for two.
Go, hit the ball, and enjoy a version of cricket in which nothing is at stake and nobody has to stand in a field in the rain.
The machine does not sledge
Which is, in fairness, an improvement, and we should say so.
Cricket has a long and rather ugly tradition of verbal abuse from close range, conducted while the batsman is trying to concentrate on an object arriving at ninety miles an hour, and dignified with the name of gamesmanship.
The bowling machine says nothing. It has no opinion about your technique, your parentage, or your county. It simply delivers the ball, over and over, at whatever pace you asked for.
It is, on reflection, the most sporting participant in the entire history of the sport.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Transcribed meetings somewhere. Trauma evident. Appreciated.