It's Not Cricket!
Cricket is a national obsession in Australia and England. Millions of Aussies and Poms follow the game avidly. Perhaps only in India, another acquisition of the British empire, is the average cricket fan more fanatical. In England, cricket is the sport of choice for members of the Establishment. Round-ball football is for the masses. Class has always mattered. Early matches were played on the fields of the aristocracy, and on remnant patches of the village green, until the latter were swept up by land developers.
Most players at the local level were workers and ordinary people, though local grandees usually captained and provided the kit. Once the professional game developed to attract workers from field, factory and mine, the division between amateur gentlemen and professional journeymen solidified, and was institutionalised in the biannual game held at Lords Cricket Ground between ‘the Gentlemen’ and ‘the Players’. This match was held from 1806 to 1963, with periodic exception like the two world wars. The former teams were drawn from the public (i.e. private) schools where cricket in the summer and rugby in the winter marked out the school terms, accompanied by poor food, cold dormitories and harsh punishments. Captain of the first eleven or first fifteen was the greatest height attained by many a public school boy who graduated into the governing class of nation and empire.
The stark division between amateurs and professionals at County level was strained by the tendency for the former to claim ‘expenses’ that often exceeded the modest wage of the latter. But the game’s class status was upheld with solemn dignity, not least when it came to touring national teams. The amateurs travelled first-class, the rest did not. The bastion of the cricket establishment resided (and still does) at the Lords Cricket Ground in London, home to the venerable Marylebone Cricket Club. The MCC was founded in the late eighteenth century and codified the game’s rules, severely policing their observance until the game was wrenched out of its grasp by ungrateful colonials like the Indian Cricket Board and an Australian media billionaire (not Rupert).
For most of the Twentieth century the English national team toured the cricketing world as the MCC eleven. MCC membership has always been a most cherished signifier of social status, jealously guarded by the club’s ruling committee. So zealous were successive administrations in their labours that women were not admitted to membership until 1998, long after the house of Lords had relented (though before the members of Augusta golf club gave in). Until then the only dispensation was to allow Queen Elizabeth II to enter the hallowed ‘Long Room’. Presidency of the MCC is arguably more sought after then residency in 10 Downing Street. However, standards have slipped of late. The current occupant of the former post is gay actor Stephen Fry, who relaced the clubs’ first female president. Fry’s alter ego Oscar Wilde, who hated the game, would have roared with laughter, and surely found room for a comment in ‘Earnest.’ Kim Philby, who loved the game, would not have been amused.
Cricket has often been the source of friction between Australia and the mother country, sometimes mock, sometimes real. The first ‘test’ was played between the two countries at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1877. After Australia won the match, a mock obituary appeared in a London newspaper bemoaning the death of English cricket. The bails from the match wicket were supposedly cremated and placed in a small and unprepossessing urn that was returned to be housed at Lords from which it has never been disgorged other than for temporary excursions under heavy guard. The urn became the ‘prize’ for which all future ‘ashes series’ between the two nations were fought.
In 1882 at ‘the Oval’, London’s other cricket ground, England’s grand old man of the game, Dr. W. G. Grace threw down the wicket of Australian tail-ender Sammy Jones, who had wandered out of his crease, running him out. So incensed was Australia’s ace bowler, Fred ‘the Demon’ Spofforth that he stormed into the English dressing room and engaged in some very ungentlemanly language and then proceeded to demolish England’s second innings to win the game by seven runs. (I realise this last sentence will be meaningless to non-cricket followers. But hang in, all will become clear later.)
The granddaddy of all stoushes between the two countries occurred during the depths of the Great Depression. Douglas Jardine, son of an Indian colonial administrator led a team of gentlemen and players to Australia with a new tactic designed to quell the prolific scoring of the game’s greatest batsman, Donald Bradman, cricket’s babe Ruth. The instruction was simple. Have the bowler, all the bowlers, bowl directly at the batsman’s head to stop him scoring any runs. (Americans, think of the pitcher throwing every pitch at the batter at over 90 miles an hour, and when hit, not allowing him to walk free up to first base.) The fastest and most deadly accurate exponent of what Australians called ‘bodyline’, and Jardine insisted was ‘leg theory’, was a stocky miner from Nottinghamshire, Harold Larwood. During the third test in Adelaide in 1933, fury erupted in the crowd as Australian batsmen were repeatedly hit in the upper body and head. Australia’s captain was later heard to mutter ‘there were two teams out on the field but only one was playing cricket.’ The English team demanded an apology, outraged that their sporting honour was being besmirched. Cables travelled between Westminster and Melbourne, the then capital of the nation. The MCC threatened to cancel the tour if the colonials refused to retract their perfidious slur. Australia caved and the tour proceeded to its ill-natured end. Debate raged on. Jardine was subsequently quietly disappeared and ‘leg theory’ was banned by MCC decree. That the gentlemen had not played in the true ‘spirit of the game’ was implicitly conceded. Bradman continued to destroy English bowlers, before and after the ensuing real War.
I was reminded of all this in recent days, as media-hyped outrage and polite political interchanges between the Prime Ministers of both countries enlivened a new ashes series. At the second test at Lords of all places, the Australian wicket keeper threw down the stumps of England’s keeper-batsman (Americans, think catcher) and was greeted by a furious barrage from the partisan home crowd. To the shouts of ‘cheat’, ‘cheat’ the Australians left the field and as tradition decreed, walked through the members Long Room to their dressing room. The shouts and jostling continued, as members reinforced the ire of their social inferiors. The spectacle was faithfully captured by television cameras inside the pavilion and given special visibility by the multi-coloured ‘egg and bacon’ ties and jackets worn by some of the members. Decorum was clean bowled. Embarrassed, the MCC president issued an apology to the Australian team and promptly set about changing the rules of behaviour for members, an interesting reversal of the dynamic that followed the bodyline furore all those years ago. Several members were suspended.
The rage refused to die, avidly egged on in the media by past and present players, commentators and opportunistic politicians with an eye to future elections. Everyone had a view on what the spirit of cricket was and whether or not this event contravened it. One’s position on the matter tended to depend on which team you supported and how invested in the result of the game and series you were. The moral outrage of the English brigade was blunted by video evidence of the sinned against wicket keeper pulling off a similar stunt some time ago. The Australian contingent played a straight bat – it’s within the rules, mate. Bolstering their legalistic interpretation was an incident the day before when the rules were called upon to disallow a catch that would have dismissed an English batsman. In that case the positions of the two adverse battalions were precisely reversed: Australia looked to ‘the spirit of the game’, and England pointed to the rules, old chap. In both cases, the umpires applied the current rules without fear or favour, thereby enraging everyone.
There are many similar instances of the death of the spirit of cricket. In a previous ashes’ series, England substituted an injured player with the country’s best fielder, who promptly ran out Australia’s best batsman. Back down under in living memory, Australia beat New Zealand by rolling the ball along the pitch to deny the batsman any chance of hitting the winning run. More recently, three Australian cricketers, including the captain, were suspended from the game for being involved in a ball-tampering incident – ‘sandpaper gate’ (Americans think pine tar on the pitcher’s mitt) – very definitely against the rules of the game.
Cricket is one of the last sports in the professional era that strives to keep alive some semblance of ‘true sportsmanship’. In fact, like golf in recent months and tennis long ago, full professionalisation has obliterated the ethos that once resided in the amateur game. As a past American president once said – ‘show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser ‘– before he lost the next presidential election. Big Sport is all about winning. Why? The answer is the time tested “follow the money”. To lose a match means loss of brand, followed by the exit of sponsors who had paid to tailcoat on winning. One cricketing tradition now honoured only in the breech involved a batsman ‘walking’ – that is, giving him or herself out when the umpire mistakenly judges him or her not out. Imagine a baseball batter saying to the umpire, “no sir, that ball was a strike”. Professional cricketers like other sports people must win in order to build their market value. And yes, players are now auctioned in the shortest form of the game, T-20 cricket. The amateur creed of the modern Olympics – “for the honour of my country and the glory of sport” – sunk under the intrusion of drugs and gambling, now spilling over into other sports like cricket. There is simply too much money involved for a flower as delicate as the spirit of cricket to bloom.
Of course, there are other causes of the lamentable drop in the standards of sportsmanship and much else. The rampant rise of economic inequality, political populism and nationalistic fervour is undercutting many of the traditional norms of civility in and beyond the cricketing world. The tendency of democracies to succumb to plutocracy and autocracy is ringing out in the calls of ‘cheat’, ‘cheat’, echoing around the cricket ground. Aristotle (and Plato) would not be surprised.
Mike Berry. July 2023
PS You may have noted my gendered use of the term ‘batsman’. Yes, I am a cricket traditionalist. In my defence I also played baseball in my youth, where we were all batters. In today’s era of the professional woman’s game, we are all batters.