It was beauty that brought me back to cricket. After 12 years away from the game, burned out from obsessively watching and playing the sport Id loved from the age of 11 to 22, I signed up for an indoor league in Tokyo. It had been so long since Id played that I wondered if I still knew how to hold a bat, let alone score runs. Running in to bowl, worried that Id not get to the crease, and whether it was even worth getting to the crease, I was just a few steps from an epiphany - that it would be the aesthetic of the game that still held joy for my 34-year-old body.There was nothing beautiful about the venue, an indoor-tennis school in Chiba, a radioactive town downwind of the fractured Fukushima nuclear reactor. Twenty-two yards away, the opening bat for the Japan womens team took guard. Balanced, poised. Then I bowled, my first ball in competitive cricket in over a decade. The average, and perhaps even ugly, delivery was met with an exquisite cover drive into the netting. In that instance of timing and technical perfection, a culmination of dedication, ability and talent, was a moment of cricketing beauty.Id fallen back in love with the game.Philosophers have long debated the nature of beauty, and when Aristotle was asked why people desired physical beauty, he answered, No one that is not blind could ask that question. Theres no doubt about the existence of beauty, yet to call something beautiful is, of course, a subjective judgement. The argument is that a universal beauty isnt possible, as true beauty only exists in the eye of the beholder.However, Id nominate the white-tipped cone of Japans Mount Fuji as an object of near universal acclaim. The snow-capped volcano set before the backdrop of a clear blue sky is a near-mystic totem, at least for one nation. And perhaps its fitting that Japan - a culture where its not simply what is achieved but how something is done that is celebrated, from the delicate art of flower-arranging to the stick-fighting sport of kendo - should be the locale where I rediscovered cricket and its glorious aesthetic.Sport, and especially cricket, Id argue, is beautiful when grace overcomes the brute, where the execution of power via technique and cunning, or the exertion of force with efficiency and style, is a success. Its a flawed beauty to look great and lose. Pretty players are dropped if they dont score runs or take wickets. Ultimately the numbers in the book, and not the crowds artistic appreciation, decide the victor.Despite the cold, hard digits of our sport, cricket and beauty have a long and intertwined history, from the early paintings of the game in the 1700s, to the cigarette-card poses of cricketing stars beginning at the end of the 1900s, and now the modern-day digital photograph. But consider, especially, how those coiffured cigarette-card men are static. These figures represent the period we call the Golden Age, when gents with waxed moustaches and flamboyant caps took to the manicured gardens of country houses and the ball was stroked rather than struck. Yet we dont know if that same handsome figure, beautiful before the camera lens or the artists brush, was actually awkward or ugly when swinging a bat.In the amateur game, where the social player has no previous intel on the opposition, we attempt to gauge the ability of the incoming batsman from the moment he steps out of the pavilion. We inspect his kit, whether he wears gleaming whites or ancient buckled pads, even though both can be red herrings for talent. Closer to the wicket we inspect his gait, and try to suss athleticism and prowess by how he takes his guard. Until a cricketer faces a ball or sends down a delivery, he cant be beautiful. He might have the looks of a male model and the body of a Leonardo sculpture, but he cant be a beautiful player until he has performed. Ive watched many a muscle-bound Adonis in resplendent whites walk to the crease and flex their biceps, survey the field with Pacific-blue eyes while the sunlight glints off their golden hair, before the aesthetic is undone by that first ball and our cricketing god is just a mortal hacking with a club.Our biffers contrasting team-mate is the middle-aged bloke with grass-stained whites and a taped-up bat. Perhaps he wobbles around the waistline as he shambles to the wicket because he loves a good cricket tea. Maybe the zip is broken on his trousers, and his cap is sweat-stained. This vision is transformed when the bowler releases the ball, and our ordinary citizen morphs into a work of art as he late cuts, with a deft flick of his wrists, a missile from his off bail down to the third-man boundary. We dont even notice his yellowing pads when he glances the next delivery off his shins down to fine leg.It is technique, the mastery of movement, combining fine motor skills with explosive power, that is the foundation of beauty in cricket. And yes, again, I must accept subjectivity if I talk of beauty. One mans Gower is another mans Gavaskar. But I also want to highlight my use of the word foundation, as excellence in technique is simply not enough. Was Bradman beautiful at the crease? Or was his rotary method too modern for what was considered style in his era? Geoffrey Boycott was a batsman who sought excellence through attention to detail, yet few would call him graceful.If the beauty we seek is excellence, then any correct player would be a joy to behold. And to a point, this holds true because technique has evolved to be efficient - if a shot didnt work, it would die out of the game. Ultimately when excellence seems to be effortless, and that on-drive is leant on rather than drilled, we admire the artisan rather than the athlete.Consider that any well-coached junior cricketer could model an immaculate cover drive, that high elbow pointing where our young dreamer envisions the ball racing. But the in-game execution of a perfect cover drive is rare, certainly in the amateur sphere. The modelled stroke in the nets must also work in the middle. A robotic motion is less likely to have the effective timing, and therefore the true elan, of a flourishing blade that strikes the ball at the optimum point. And when a batter does connect with such a cover drive, its a moment appreciated with that involuntary utterance of Shot from the fielding team. That applause by friend and foe, perhaps even the bowler - okay, probably not Jimmy Anderson - is a rarefied event in competitive sport. Few other contests bring the opposition to coo in delight at the grace of their opponent. This cricket art, whether it be Shane Warnes Ball of the Century to Mike Gatting, or a picture-perfect cover drive from Rahul Dravid, rather than gladiatorial combat, has superseded the battle as spectacle.It is this grace under duress that creates beauty. This is why Michael Holding was majestic (possibly the most beautiful athlete to grace a cricket field, as described by Mike Selvey in the Guardian) and Shaun Tait wild. Both bowled at a lethal pace, delivering a ball as fast as possible at the extremes of dynamic athleticism, but only one seemed to do it without effort.Writing about sporting beauty for the Guardian, Daniel Harris observes that Holding exuded a harmonic, symphonic quality that compares to other aesthetic sporting greats, Stefan Edberg, Ernie Els, Roy Jones Jr and David Rudisha. Harris argues that the beauty of these athletes comes from a particular human being doing what he is meant to do, to his maximum capacity, and that the allure of a runner such as Rudisha, and perhaps a bowler such as Holding, is to watch a moving, numinous thing. A man in absolute mastery of himself and his self.Alas, comparing bowlers and their actions to Holdings seems unfair. Bowling is an act of nature. Yes, we can tweak our run-up and the angle of our leading arm and our grip and adjust our foot position at the point of delivery, but the raw motion of how we bowl a cricket ball is something we are born with.So let us go back to that perfect cover drive, where every constituent part is the total act of beauty. The details are not the details, stated celebrated American designer, Charles Eames. They are the design. He may have been talking about furniture, but we can apply the same maxim to cricket. If one part of the cover drive fails, the head position falls, or the bottom hand forces the shot, the choreography is awry. The batsman may close the face and drag the ball through mid-on, or lift the cherry over the outfield, or even thick-edge it square to the boundary, and still be effective. But to be beautiful there are rules of technique that have formed to dictate what is grace and what is slogging.And even if this technical perfection is achieved, the sports fans, the self-appointed aesthetic judges, must then grade the difficulty of the action to the game situation. A rank half-volley, floated down by a struggling bowler, is expected to be driven to the boundary. A Mitchell Johnson rocket, minutely veering off line and length, is not. Dr Emily Ryall, a senior lecturer in the Philosophy of Sport, notes the correlation between what is generally considered skilful and what is thought beautiful. The empirical evidence for this is the criteria for scoring in gymnastic sports - the greater the level of difficulty in the performance, the greater the number of points available. While cricket is what the late sports philosopher David Best would define as a purposive sport, a sport with objective measures for winning, feats of cricketing beauty are still remembered as much as any outcome.Poise and prowess, along with hours and hours of practice, and that vital gift for timing, the talent to locate the best point in space for bat to strike ball, are what elevates the ordinary to the prodigy and makes the cricketer beautiful - the sublime machine, as the writer Anthony McGowan titled his work on conceptions of masculine beauty.Batsmen at a social level may not be Dravid or Gower, yet many have one shot that complies with these foundations of beauty. The same player who cant connect with a half-volley can actually parry a sumptuous square cut.Even in the ad hoc games of cricket Ive conjured up in car parks, back gardens, on decks of cruise ships, and surprisingly, an East London squat, beauty can be created. Ever since playing the Test Match board game on my kitchen table and those tennis-ball epics in student dorms, Ive shouted the phrase, Test Match Out. This excited reaction is saved for when a moment of proper cricket has been reproduced in the most unlikely surrounds. In the trashed living room of a derelict house I once lived in in Stratford, we taped a set of stumps to the back wall and positioned two armchairs at mid-on and mid-off, and a beanbag at short leg. Underarm legspin, delivered with both hands squashing the ball at the moment of delivery so it would rip at right angles after pitching on the carpet, was the spearhead of any attack. If that ball, played with a textbook forward defensive, touched the edge, or ricocheted bat-pad into the beanbags (brilliant) hands, our imagination ignited to a sunlit Lords and a cry of Test Match Out would celebrate the dismissal. Even in that broken house on the edge of a council estate, there could be a glimpse of true cricket choreography that never needed debating or explaining - we just knew when a wicket or a shot was worthy of glee. The cricketers inbuilt affinity for beauty is no better demonstrated than in our ardour for a brand new cleft of willow. I often walk around my house simply holding my bat, a Custom Cricket Company blade, admiring the grain and the craftsmanship, the aroma of linseed oil. Most players have a faithful love affair with a fine bat, but I suppose not all of them look on it as an object of beauty. At least not the bowlers, or the true social cricketer who digs around the club kit and hacks away with any old branch. Perhaps to admire beauty in cricket, if it is indeed style with textbook substance, the true critic must be educated in the ways of cricket. Although I did once take a bat into a class of Italian university students I was lecturing, and despite none of them knowing anything about this 2lb 7oz length of wood, apart from that it was wielded in a kind of baseball-hockey sport, they did understand it was an object to be revered. That an artisan had worked it into a shape of sublime efficiency to strike a ball. Its beautiful, the students agreed, awkwardly swinging and demonstrating how difficult it truly is to use a bat beautifully.I guess we are back to that Charles Eames quote, about the detail actually being the design. Cricket is a complex game developed over centuries, over millennia, if we include the humans who have evolved to play it, and then the materials, the ground, ball, clothes, bat, and the technique we have honed for its defining aesthetic - like fashion, what is beautiful now may be outmoded in the future, when altered forms of the game demand (the next) shift in cricket style.Since I was a boy in the back garden with my father, when my dad lobbed down tennis balls and corrected my grip, Ive observed, and I hope (to the observers, at least) been part of cricket acts of beauty. I can still see a languid Gower flicking a six off his legs into the clock tower at Grace Road, and how Jonathan Agnew yorked Chris Broad with a dreamy slower ball. And although I now bowl spin, I spent 30 years trying to swing the ball away from a right-handed batsman, and forever have in my archives a late boomerang that had Mark Ramprakash, that most graceful of players, snicking to first slip - and it doesnt even matter that it was grassed, because every point up to that drop, a sunny day on a beautiful ground, bowling against a player who had already leaned effortlessly into a couple of drives, was (to me, anyway) a classical scene.I still play cricket, with diminishing returns it seems, each season. I play on with the wish to be part of one more grand act of beauty. And if its the details that make the game beautiful, then here they are: Id be batting on a rural ground with a view of trees and sky, a green and gold landscape of English summer rolling away beyond the boundary rope. There would be sunshine gleaming off the pavilion roof, a little wooden score box clunking through the numbers, and the crimson beam of a brand new Dukes pitching on a true hard track with an emerald green tinge. A light breeze, so the leaves in the tops of the trees feather and shush as the delivery swings from the bowlers hand, a bowler with a smooth run-up and glide into the crease, the liquid grace of a Hadlee or a Holding, before I pick the flight and step forward, my bat, my cleft of willow that grew by a river in the rain and the sun and the changing seasons, carved by an artisan who too has played and loved and felt the beauty of the game, striking the ball with musical percussion. And with the same effortless straight drive that Sachin Tendulkar perfected, the ball races away and the fielders are compelled to praise - not the batsman, merely the conduit of the aesthetic, but cricket itself. 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"I was fortunate to play many years at this level with a great organization and unbelievable teammates," said Hejduk in a statement. NEW YORK -- Steven Matz was sailing along with a no-hitter intact, his pitch count climbing in 96-degree heat. But as the buzz began to build at Citi Field, Terry Collins stomach was churning in the dugout.Smack in the middle of a 5-1 victory over San Diego on Sunday, the New York Mets manager couldnt help but recall that tension-filled night four years ago when he let Johan Santana -- making his 11th start since shoulder surgery -- throw a career-high 134 pitches to finish the only no-hitter in franchise history.Santana, of course, got injured later that season and hasnt made it back to the majors.I looked up there and I saw 65 or 70 and I said, `(Oh, no). Here we go again, Collins said.Concerned this time about leaving his prized rookie in too long, Collins was given something of a reprieve when Alexei Ramirez slapped an opposite-field single just inside first base with one out in the eighth inning.The ball appeared to skip right over the bag, and first base umpire Carlos Torres quickly signaled fair.Guess it was a coin flip, New York second baseman Neil Walker said. He absolutely had no-hit stuff today. You could tell that early in the game. ... Hell have another shot at it.Collins immediately went to the mound and Matz was pulled after 105 pitches. He walked off the field to a big ovation from the crowd of 26,612.It was the longest no-hit bid by a Mets pitcher since Santanas gem against St. Louis on June 1, 2012.It really wasnt on my mind. The only thing on my mind was getting outs, Matz said.Walker and Wilmer Flores homered for the defending NL champions (59-58). Struggling to stay close in the wild-card race, they took two of three in the series to win consecutive games for the first time since July 6-7 against Miami and Washington.Facing the Padres for the first time, Matz (9-8) earned just his second victory in nine decisions over his past 14 starts.The 25-year-old lefty, a hometown favorite who grew up about 50 miles from Citi Field, struck out eight and walked two. Mixing his 94-95 mph fastball with a sharp curve, he fanned All-Star slugger Wil Myers all three times.In his previous outing, Matz threw a career-high 120 pitches during a no-decision last Tuesday against Arizona.Had he got through the eighth inning, I was going to let him start the ninth -- depending on what the eighth inning looked like, Collins said. I wasnt going to visit the Johan Santana scenario again, I can telll you that.ddddddddddddFlores and Walker connected for solo shots off lefty Clayton Richard (0-2) as San Diego began its shift to a six-man rotation during a stretch of 16 games between off days.Richard allowed two runs over five innings in his first major league start since Aug. 2 last year for the Chicago Cubs.I couldnt ask for anything more, Padres manager Andy Green said. He was outstanding.The Mets added three insurance runs in the eighth, when Jose Reyes scored on a wild pitch and rookie T.J. Rivera -- another New York product playing for his hometown team -- hit a two-run double for his first career RBI.That felt really good, Rivera said. Pretty cool, man.Addison Reed and Gabriel Ynoa finished the four-hitter. Ynoa yielded Yangervis Solartes run-scoring single in the ninth.UNDER THE SUNMatz is 7-2 with a 1.46 ERA in 10 career starts during the day.ON THE LEFTA switch-hitter, Walker has connected for seven of his 21 home runs off left-handers this year. Coming into the season, he had six career homers off lefties. ... Flores is hitting .354 against southpaws, including 18 for 40 (.450) with eight homers and 16 RBI since July 1.TRAINERS ROOMPadres: CF Jon Jay (broken right forearm) is scheduled to have another CT scan Monday in California and the team hopes he will be cleared to begin swinging a bat.Mets: OF Curtis Granderson was rested. ... Collins said he thinks RHP Zack Wheeler is scheduled to see noted orthopedist Dr. James Andrews on Monday. Wheeler has been slow to recover from Tommy John surgery in March 2015. He began a rehab assignment with Class A St. Lucie this month but complained of elbow discomfort after throwing 17 pitches in one inning during a rain-shortened start.UP NEXTPadres: RHP Luis Perdomo (5-6, 6.80 ERA) starts Monday night at Tampa Bay as San Diego begins the final leg of its nine-game road trip. LHP Drew Smyly (4-11, 5.04) goes for the Rays.Mets: In the opener of a 10-game road trip, 43-year-old Bartolo Colon (10-6, 3.35 ERA) gets the ball Monday night at Arizona as New York looks to avenge a three-game sweep by the last-place Diamondbacks at Citi Field last week. Arizona is the only major league team Colon has never beaten, though he permitted just one run over seven innings and struck out eight last Wednesday vs. the Diamondbacks. 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