Website Of The Week: www.snipurl.com/96spt

Matthew Fearon
Sunday 28 December 2008 20:00 EST
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Samuel Beckett is the only Nobel winner to appear in Wisden but Harold Pinter – dismissed for 78 on Christmas Eve – is surely the only Nobel winner with a cricket webpage. Pinter's rhythmic pauses. Reflected the game's cadences. Like cricket. His silences. As consequential as action.

A visit to this site is a worthy homage to the Gaieties Cricket Club's opening bat and unearths his obituary of Somerset's Arthur Wellard. Wellard was the first cricketer to hit five sixes in an over (pre-Sobers) and Pinter's pen carves out the gruff delivery of the village blacksmith's anarchic anecdotes.

If you don't share Pinter's belief that cricket is "certainly greater than sex", this site contains his little-circulated "American Football"; a protest poem rejected by many publications, including this one. It may contain a posthumous 2009 Ashes message: "We blew their balls into shards of dust,/Into shards of fucking dust."

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