Daddy Hundreds

Wickman was watching a fantastic interview with Alastair Cook on Sky this evening - Charles Colville asking the questions - before suddenly being sent into a terrible rage by THE most irritating piece of cricket speak ever devised.

Now Wickman knows that cricket is no longer played by Gentlemen and Amateurs. He has been guilty down the years of some use of fruity urban language on the pitch, the balcony and in the bar. He realises that the correct response to a 19 wicket test match haul is no longer to hitch up your cream flannels and shake hands with your skipper. He knows that the England captain is no longer likely to have been to Eton or Harrow (although the current Test Captain did go to Radley which Wickman believes to be acceptable and the one day captain went to Bedford Modern [which sounds ghastly but dates back to the 16th century]) and probably won't have a Blue.

The fact that modern cricketers call a Bosie a Googly and that for some reason commentators now call the new ball in a Test Match the 2nd new ball when in the old days we all knew that the new ball was the one you got after 80 overs because you couldn't start a Test Match with anything other than a new ball occasionally causes Wickman to thrash around in his sleep. But he is seldom moved to abused the television.

However the "Daddy" hundred takes the biscuit, drops it on the kitchen floor in a pool of dog spittle, picks it up and eats it. Wickman was brought up on Graham Gooch. For much of Wickman's early cricketing education the moustachioed one was at one end with Boycs, Brearly, Broady or someone else at the other. He scored big runs. He smashed it. He muscled it. He had a big eff-off moustache that was the rival of any Australian soup strainer.

Goochy's had, as the modern parlance would have it, a shocker with the... Wickman can't write it again... oh... Daddy hundred. What in God's name does it mean? Why is a big hundred a Daddy? What hideousness in Essex can have caused Gooch to come up with this execrable piece of badinage and to feed it to his disciple Cook? Did Obi Wan Kenobi (say it quickly and the word wank is heard) come up with something similar? No - he talked of the force and managed to misdirect the weak minded to look for other droids. He did NOT talk of Daddy lightsabres and the like.

Wickman is lead to believe that the phrase originates from the common vernacular of saying "Who's Your Daddy?". Wickman has heard it said that this is not an enquiry to be asked of young Scrotes as one apprehends them scrumping in your orchard (obviously the correct usage would be "father" here), but is used by young men to display authority as they copulate with loose moralled young women. Although even in Essex it escapes Wickman as to why you would want to remind a young lady of her father in such delicate circumstances.

Wickman now imagines a chubby Goochie smashing Kapil Dev and the others around Lords in 1993 thinking "I really need something to say to them which will subdue them and remind them of their submissive situation" and being at a loss for words. Later, post retirement, he stumbles across the phraseology and passes it on to Cook and the other England players. Now they imagine themselves astride the Aussies, the Sri Lankans and others shouting "Who's your Daddy?" at the top of their voices, giving it the old Brokeback Mountain treatment to some poor bowler.

It's just wrong. It's even more wrong coming from the mouth of Cook, Strauss and Swann in interviews. You can tell they are trying to establish it as vernacular, as argot as part of the game. And it stinks. It stinks like fish left out in the midday sun infested with maggots. It sounds pathetic, juvenile... like a playground thing. If Sachin Tendulkar scores a double this Summer will he describe it as a "Daddyji"? Would Brian Lara ever call his 401 a Daddy score? Steve Waugh? Mark Taylor? Boony? Len Hutton? Bradman? Hayden? Anyone but a modern English cricketer?

It's an abomination. Do NOT use it.