The Summer Field

203 Austin recalled: ‘You treated the members as gods and the Middlesex players almost as gods as they were the people you looked up to; they were friendly, too.’ As Sutton’s and Austin’s stories suggest, whatever your rank in the game, you accepted it, and in return those of higher rank were good-natured. Men of high rank were bad-natured when questioned too piercingly, or at all, as towards the end of Michael Vaughan’s time as England captain in 2008. He rounded once on the BBC broadcaster Jonathan Agnew, in effect asking how Agnew dared to query him, having hardly played Test cricket. Agnew could have joked back that while Vaughan had more Test wickets than Agnew (six to four) Agnew had the slightly better average (93.25 to 93.5). Vaughan later offered the excuse that he had felt under pressure, and in a typical case of the small world of English cricket the two broadcast alongside each other on BBC radio’s Test Match Special . Vaughan’s attitude was telling; as in ancient Greece, only gods could judge gods. Applied to modern professionals – such as doctors and policemen – you wonder what they have to do wrong to be punished. Similarly, swearing and threats on the sports field that might have you thrown out of your workplace are ignored; or even praised, as a sign that the offender is trying hard. Inhisbook TheRiseof Professional Society: Englandsince1880 ,HaroldPerkin barely touched on sport, yet cricket fits his argument that professionals became powerful in the 20 th century compared with aristocrats, capitalists and workers, the Marxist classes of the 19 th century. The game controlled its own labour market and could pick youths according to intangible promise while excluding unqualified coaches (despite Vaughan’s view, it didn’t matter how many Tests you won, or how good a coach you were; if you didn’t pass an exam to have a piece of paper saying you were qualified to coach, you couldn’t have a paid coaching job). Mark Turner, and all the others putting in hours in the gym, were building what Perkin called ‘human capital’; professionals were condescending towards everyone else; and were competing with other professions for society’s eye and wallet. The young dream of becoming sportsmen; fathers have the same dream, so that they can live through their sons and - speaking half in jest - say that they can live off the earnings in old age. What Perkin called ‘the professional ideal’ – that our culture sees the professions such as sport as good – has triumphed. Not that the pro’ player feels triumphant. He is still someone’s employee. No matter how well paid, or privileged, he or someone in his team may be tempted into taking a bribe; because fraud plays on the greedy and naive. In his 1964 book Tackle Cricket This Way , Colin Cowdrey could write, ‘No one drops a catch on purpose’; after the trial of Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Aamer in London in 2011, we knew better; players could bowl no balls on purpose, or bat unnaturally slowly, in the pay of gamblers or whoever ran gambling markets. In that 1964 book, Cowdrey made a rare – and revolutionary – economic point. It is a pity that in the professional game that we know today the employees are not the shareholders. There is a tendency for the To The Present and Beyond