Nothing does irony quite like Test cricket. Say what you like about the world’s most desiccated, Miss Havisham-ish team sport, out there trailing around the post-colonial world still dressed in its yellowing wedding dress. It’s definitely got a sense of humour.
On day one of the fifth England-India Test this was expressed in cosmic terms, and a single bold and improbable dramatic arc. Talk about groundsmen a lot. Tell groundsmen they’re nothing. One thing is for sure. You’re going to find yourself spending quite a lot of time watching groundsmen.
Or in this case watching the personage we must now refer to as controversial groundsman Lee Fortis, celebrity Oval pitch curator Lee Fortis, an otherwise peripheral figure with a name that sounds like an Anglo-Saxon burial site in Norfolk, but who was promoted in the buildup to this Test into an instrument of the sporting-political power struggle.
And so it came to pass in the first two sessions at the Oval, as India and England traipsed on and off between the showers, and Fortis loomed, somehow inevitably, centre stage. Here is Lee Fortis striding about his domain in classic shorts and boots combos, like a proud, captive bear. Here is Lee Fortis tugging at a tarpaulin.
Here is Lee Fortis all alone in his lime green field as the drizzle fell and the walkways around the ground took on the feel of a slowly sinking ship peopled only by pint-sozzled mariners in chino shorts, and watched from behind the plateglass by his chief adversary, India’s head coach, Gautam Gambhir. In a Test series shot through with politics, rumblings and noises off, they’ve finally dragged in the bloke with the rake. Welcome to the Fortis-verse.
It is the most unlikely turn of events. Fortis is familiar figure around here, a huge ambling man with the classic groundsman’s shape, as though he’s been hinged together out of sacks of cement and packed into a pair of shorts. Who thinks of the groundsman? What are they? They sit on mowers. They walk with sawdust buckets. They follow the seasons, disturbed only by their personal kryptonite, people walking near a rope, signal for instant and uncontainable explosions of boggle-eyed fury.
And yet, look a little closer, squint at the magic eye picture, and something else has begun to emerge here, the groundsman as instrument of power and conspiracy. By 2pm on Thursday afternoon, 48 hours on from that unnecessary spat with Gambhir, Fortis had been memed and replicated and spun out across the global hive mind.
Oval curator breaks silence. Fortis v Gambhir: the full story. Who is Lee Fortis and what does he mean? There are Fortis YouTube clips (jerky spat footage; weird ad hoc media huddle) that have been viewed two million times. Lee Fortis stuns fans with body transformation. This simple Lee Fortis trick will change your life for ever. Seventeen times Lee Fortis broke the internet (No 12 will shock you!)
More fuel was added overnight as R Ashwin labelled Fortis a habitual offender. Really? It’s not the first time he’s yelled at people to get off his square? You shock me. Meanwhile, the groundsman community has sprung to his defence, a Facebook page speaking for this maligned minority demanding respect, understanding, a safe space for its members. What next? A Fortis spin-off vehicle. The Fortis origins story. A Fortis male grooming range. Jake Paul calls out Lee Fortis in sensational Vegas standoff.
Or perhaps it won’t come to that. Because this is at the same time absolutely nothing, chaff, gossip, and also a grim little episode that reflects poorly on Gambhir in particular; and perhaps also on the general power dynamics of elite cricket in its current form.
The initial incident was a standard stramash over practising too close, or so Fortis said, to the square. Gambhir’s response was furious. Any situation where you end up wagging a finger and shouting, “You’re nothing, you’re just a groundsman, nothing beyond that,” is one that has lost any sense of scale.
Later Fortis was swarmed by Indian journalists and gave the greatest no comment interview of all time, unveiling a technique that should be urgently coached to all celebrities and politicians, which basically involves just saying “I’m not ... You’re not ... I’m not really,” to every question.
It is a fairly simple divvying up at this point. Gambhir was always in the wrong here. First because all groundsmen are grumpy. They have to venerate, love and fetishise this patch of green. They have the artist’s temperament. They feel the hand of history. They basically just want you to stay off their square and stop playing cricket.
But mainly Gambhir was wrong because of the ugliness of his choice of words, and the sense of punching down. England got to show their boorishness in Manchester. This was India’s turn. India’s coach is a born-to-rule type, high caste Hindu, private schoolboy, son of a wealthy industrialist, BJP politician, a Jay Shah man, a Modi guy. It sits a little uncomfortably to hear anyone with such privilege dismissing a bloke with a bucket as “nothing”, unqualified to make demands of his betters.
In this context Gambhir v Fortis speaks, if you choose to see it, to the way India wields its commercial and political power in this sport; to the sense that here is an overlord nation that can basically do what it wants, that is in effect untouchable. This is the most unfavourable version of events. More prosaically Gambhir does just love a fight, is essentially a grudge in a cap, outspoken and commendably feisty.
In a happier turn there was at least a kind of rapprochement at the start of play between Fortis and India’s players, a little wary banter and some smiles. After which, once the showers had cleared, it was a case of the groundsman’s revenge, as Gambhir got to watch India’s batters sparring and hopping and nicking as the ball leapt and jagged about on Fortis’ chosen strip.
England’s pace attack had looked rusty at the start, both Jamie Overton and Josh Tongue perhaps paying tribute the 2.5m distance rule by almost missing the cut part of the pitch. But they chipped away and found movement. Shubman Gill had batted with sculpted elegance, all perfect arms, shoulders, lines, balletic in the way he shifts his weight, then ran himself out trying to take a single to Gus Atkinson’s right hand in his follow through.
With India on 204 for six at the end of play the series already felt a little safer. Hopefully the age of Lee is also done. Andy Warhol would later revise his most famous line to the more depressingly accurate “in 15 minutes everyone will be famous”. Fortis had his day in the gloom. With any luck hands will now be shaken, an unpleasant tone revised, and the whole thing can be safely packed away in the shed behind the pigeon nets.
