The Summer Field

200 earning money from your profession – whether politics, law, opera-singing or sport – you need to pay for your education, whether at university or conservatoire, and even beyond, whether you work for a pittance as an intern for a member of parliament or on trial in a second eleven, perhaps several. You are more likely to succeed if you can keep in the game, so to speak, if parents pay for you; if they are professionals of some sort. * Simply because the game needs ground, and kit, it has always taken some money to play. In April 1920, the York solicitor Benjamin Dodsworth wrote to Claude Thompson about the Yorkshire Gentlemen’s club; the firm selling them nets had raised the price by 20 per cent. ‘Cricket balls have also gone up, to £9 16 shillings per dozen [a month’s wage for a labourer] and I am told they will be 18 shillings and sixpence in a month’s time. I fear cricket will become impossible for all except the new rich.’ As nets and balls did not grow on trees, businesses could reasonably ask for the going rate for their products and services that made the game possible. The game always had – always needed – an amateur strand; a voluntary streak; whether owners of stately homes letting clubs play on their land, or fathers coaching and umpiring their sons’ teams. Again, as in a marriage or friendship, it was a question of give and take; each side gained without the need for money to change hands. As the game, like the country, became more commercial – economically, by businesses seeking to make money in more ways, and culturally, by mocking the impulse to be an amateur and do things for anything except money – the parts of the game nearest the pro’ elite and the money became disconnected from the rest. In the game, as in society generally, the city and the countryside, like London and the regions, have always felt apart. In the Grimsby Evening Telegraph in April 1978 the new secretary of Lincolnshire county club, Geoff Plaskitt, said: ‘Without looking for a reason, it is a fact that many clubs and weekend players throughout the county have regarded Lincs CC as being aloof and remote from their own interests in the game.’ He argued it was in everyone’s interest in the county that the county club prospered, to run coaching and colts’ teams. The professional players – and the umpires, coaches, and broadcasters who are so often former players – do not help, because they think they know what is best, and (as in other professions) are so seldom contradicted, simply because they seldom meet anyone unlike themselves; they live in a ‘bubble’, of hotels, airports, and venues, and private cars and buses to take them from one to the other. For an outsider, even to meet a player comes at a price, whether sitting at his table at a dinner, or listening to his speech afterwards. One of cricket’s myths has been that its players are special and respected; unlike political institutions or businesses, the game’s premises have been spared (or ought to be spared) terrorism and war. This assumes that terrorists – if they agree with such a name – think the same way as cricket’s authorities. They did not, for example, in Chittagong in 1934 when (as the Duchess of Atholl put it in the House of Commons) ‘Hindu terrorists’ threw bombs at Englishmen and fired revolvers at a cricket match. Jardine To The Present and Beyond