The Summer Field

207 employers were supposed to repay them with jobs. As if a speech would make Cardus give up his job for a returned soldier. Talk of a ‘game’ could be sinister if the undefined rules masked a conflict between two sides, which suited the side with more power. The journalist Sir Philip Gibbs recalled that Haig praised war correspondents: ‘you have played the game like men’. Gibbs did not say what he, or Haig, meant by game; whether life itself, or warcos not rocking the boat by asking awkward questions of the generals. Men paid with their lives in what Gibbs called ‘the grisly game’. * To call something ‘not cricket’ was a neat way of avoiding anything too pointed or emotional. ‘Goodbye – good luck – keep your wicket up!’ was a farewell to Angus Rose, an officer of the Second Arygll and Southern Highlanders, as he left Singapore in 1942 before it fell to the Japanese. The language, like the act of cricket could bind, and heal. Towards the end of his alternative history The Third World War: August 1985 (1978), General Sir John Hackett had the fictional village of Branscombe in Devon play a match against ‘the Rest’, a neat and symbolic way of showing that the place came through Russian nerve-gas bombs, and the shooting of looting refugees. Is cricket special then, as some say? Is there a ‘Spirit of Cricket’ as the MCC has championed lately? The very fact that the authorities have to plead for such a spirit – former cricketers named as ‘ambassadors’, the ‘Spirit’ pasted all over a preamble to the laws – is a sign that the spirit has gone, or never was there. In December 2013, after Michael Clarke’s notorious arm-breaking threat to James Anderson, Graham Cowdrey – former Kent batsman, and a son of Colin – called it a ‘sad episode’: ‘As I sat watching with my 14-year-old son, what was I supposed to say to him? That’s life, son – it’s the way society is?’ As someone who stood by the ‘spirit of cricket’, he admitted that others in the game rejected it – he singled out the Middlesex bowler turned broadcaster Simon Hughes – and pointed to rugby union’s ‘aggressive marketing campaign’ for respect in its sport. Cowdrey and the mockers of his ‘spirit of cricket’ could agree on something: that there was what Cowdrey called a ‘moving line of acceptability’. They disagreed where to set the line, or even whether anyone in authority could set it. Or rather, the struggle was always over who had the power to set what was acceptable: players (could they do as they please, if it helped them to win and prosper in their careers?), umpires (would those in the pavilion ever back them in a straight fight – metaphorical, or literal – with players?), the officials (with their own jobs and win-bonuses to protect), broadcasters (usually they did not broadcast the pitch microphone – which begged the question, how much were they hiding?), and spectators and advertisers (if as many paid for the next Test, weren’t they accepting whatever players did?). Both sides were wrong. Why burden players of a game with a do- gooding ‘spirit’, and not expect the same of politics, or journalism? Why not a ‘spirit of accountancy’?! The disbelievers in a ‘spirit of cricket’ ignored the persistent idea that sport, like the theatre or art, was not like everyday work. People who gave cricket time, and their money, did so partly for its Into The Void