The Summer Field

103 Youths need right pointing out fromwrong, in morals as in a sound bowling action; and they need hope. When Sir Gary Sobers visited a Nottingham secondary school in June 2011, he met several lads, and one girl, in whites at nets. The girl said she played for Nottinghamshire. I could not hear what she said when Sobers asked if she would play for England, but I made sure I heard what he told her: “Don’t ever think you can’t.” To reach adult sporting excellence, adults and children alike have had to attain ever higher standards. The old Corinthian way of having a full life outside sport, or even in other sports, will no longer do. As early as August 1934 the Olympian Guy Butler was noting in The Field the ‘strenuous training’ of Finns ‘which would kill most of us stone dead’. As Butler shrewdly added, such training was also tedious, and off-putting. Cardus, too, wrote in The Field in May 1936: ‘The modern efficiency drives up the atmosphere of sport and I can well believe that many a gifted amateur has turned from it and sought enjoyment of the summer time elsewhere.’ This might explain Cowdrey’s querying of his sons’ generation; did a teenager’s unconcern hide doubt he was equal to adult demands? That full-time, paid professionals could beat amateurs every time led to a change in the very meaning of the word ‘amateur’. Once an honoured term for someone who played for the love of it, by the 21 st century it had become a sneer at a bungler. Likewise to do a ‘professional job’ was praise for something done efficiently, though maybe without flair. * It is easy for adults, even teachers, to forget the peculiarly immature, yet strongly felt, emotions of childhood. Some, such as the urge to belong, were natural, as Douglas Jardine showed in his essay on school eleven captaincy in 1934. When the captain had to call for a catch, better he advised to say someone’s christian name or nickname, rather than surname. The more boys the captain knew by name, ‘the greater his influence on the school’s cricket’. While Jardine took the young captain’s side, urging him to resist the advice of the teacher-umpire when on the field, Jardine was not proposing reform of schools. He recommended that any member of the eleven should excuse a fag from duty at the nets, if the younger boy did a courageous piece of fielding; Jardine was not against fagging. It took a strong will for anyone, let alone a boy, to resist the either-or choice in any school as set out in a speech by Charterhouse headmaster Frank Fletcher in 1933; to excel in mental or physical culture. To be a ‘swot’ was bad; to be an athlete or philistine, good – although that might hide your stupidity. In his memoir Still Digging , the archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler with a light yet shrewd touch – that must have served him well on digs – admitted the intellectual’s ‘deep seated, barely tolerant contempt’ for pointless, overrated games. At Bradford Grammar School in the 1900s he had to play cricket once: ‘In due course I arrived on the ground with a spotless new pair of flannel bags and the sketchiest understanding of the game.’ Fielding first, he wondered what to do if the ball came his way: ‘Happily it didn’t. Then we removed ourselves to the pavilion, where we adopted one of three or four critical or slightly blasé stances which I quickly recognised and simulated as part of the ritual.’ Last to bat, he never had to face a Schooling