The Summer Field

199 can.’ This rather took talent for granted, and might have been the sort of thing you were supposed to say to an audience mainly of boys (from the nearby private Repton School). In fairness, we have no reason to doubt Mark Turner was sincere. As with gym-work, he and other 21 st century sportsmen trusted that by applying themselves, they would get the chance their work merited; they would then succeed or fail on merit and have the career they deserved. Who were these young men getting chances as a pro’? As early as 1949 in a little book Cricket Dialogue , C.H.Taylor and D.H.Macindoe saw three chances for a boy to progress in the game: at a public school; if the father was keen on cricket (such as Denis Compton); or if he grew up near a ground (as Patsy Hendren did). In other words, if you went to a state school, you would not make it, unless some adult helped - a keen teacher, or a patron, as the Langridge brothers of Newick in Sussex had in the village landowner Thomas Baden-Powell in the 1920s. In cricket, as in England generally, a reformed and more equal, even socialistic, society looked like prevailing after the social gains of the two world wars and thanks to trade unionism. The Essex handbook of 1980 noted that David Acfield was the only one of the 1979 championship- winning side ‘who came by the public school-university route’. That time, however, in cricket as in society, proved a high water mark. It was not only cricket’s fault. After Len Hutton saw Bradman make 309 in a day at Leeds in 1930, he went home to Pudsey and played with a few friends, ‘long into the dusk’. Whether because of parents’ fears or a reality of speeding cars and dangerous gangs, lads can no longer safely play in the street or on the recreation ground – and not at all, if the rec’ is under bricks. Cricket, like most sports, and most pastimes – gyms, cycling, music, art – can be simple and cheap, yet some adults in the name of selling kit (and the coaching to use that kit) make everything complicated and costly for the common boy or girl. Cricket is becoming as elitist as opera, partly because the professional standard has risen. Just as a doctor or dentist needs years of study, to 21 and beyond, before he is allowed to work on a hospital patient or a mouth, so cricketers need years of training – in the physical and mental sides of the game’s skills, besides gym work on their bodies. They can do all that at schools; when Gary Sobers visited a Nottinghamshire school in 2011, he officially opened a gym room filled with expensive-looking gym equipment. He was there to drum up interest in the schools’ tournament in his name in Barbados – of use to the island for tourism, because what is more natural for parents than to take a holiday to watch their son?! Gym rooms, nets, trips to the Caribbean – all cost money; and fee-paying school parents can best afford them. Sport is one way private schools compete. An electronic scoreboard beside the pavilion facing a well-kept field (mowed at 7am) may impress a parent- customer as much as exam pass rates and Oxbridge entries. Going to Oxford or Cambridge (as David Acfield did) no longer means as much as it did in English cricket; other universities, such as Durham (where Will Jefferson and Luke Sutton, to name two, went) count. Until you start To The Present and Beyond