The Summer Field

208 own sake but partly because they could invest it with meaning that the everyday money-economy denied. The case of David Warner punching Joe Root in 2013 showed that cricket, like any profession, can apply different standards to society. Men throw punches in and outside such bars in every English town every weekend, and nothing comes of it. Warner’s employers banned him; though they made sure that Warner could play in the Tests. You had to wonder how badly a player had to hurt another to suffer real punishment – a disfigured face? A broken bone that stopped the victim playing? Murder? Sadly Warner, a pioneer in his way, pushed the line of acceptability that June night in Birmingham. Others will push it further. * Cricketers and society have always pushed each other, over what is acceptable. Metaphors of war have cropped up often. In January 1933 the last surviving Australian of the 1878 tour to England, T.W.Garrett, said that there was no bodyline in his day: ‘We regarded cricket as a game, not as a battle.’ Before and during the two Ashes series of 2013-14, English players disagreed. ‘For five or six weeks, it’s war,’ Stuart Broad said in July 2013. After Clarke’s arm-breaking threat and the loss in Adelaide in November 2013, Alastair Cook said: ‘On the pitch it’s pretty much a war, isn’t it?’ This spoke of more aggression on the field, and a lack of perspective among professionals. Earlier generations, who had lived through real wars, would not have confused sport with war – and insulted British and Australian soldiers who were fighting a war, in Afghanistan. While professional cricketers generally had a poor record – with exceptions – of serving in the real wars of the 19 th to 21 st centuries, those who did serve understood there was no comparison. George Geary, for example, spoke ‘of himself as a very lucky man to be playing cricket at all’, Reynard wrote in the Leicester Sports Mercury in July 1924: ‘A mechanic in the Royal Air Force, he was almost knocked out for all time by a premature starting of a propeller.’ Geary liked what he did – ‘cricket is the greatest game on earth in his estimation’ – but did not pretend it was more than it was. ‘Yes, it is still a civilised game,’ John Foster, the captain of Shropshire, told Shropshire Magazine in April 1990, ‘and a game where you can make great friendships whether you play for a village, a minor county or a national side.’ What sort of game? ‘Cricket has always been a peaceful game with the emphasis on skills,’ Colin Cowdrey wrote in Country Life in May 1979. Players did not only pit the motor actions of their arms and legs, aided by bat and ball, against each other; ‘It is in addition the struggle of wills’, wrote Wheatley and Parry in their 1948 book Cricket … Do it this way . Not only what you did had to be acceptable, but how you did it, as player or spectators. Henry Vane-Tempest (1854-1905), son of a lord and regular watcher of the Eton-Harrow match at Lord’s, comes across in his diary as more interested in who he lunched with than anything on the field. Do historians of cricket or anything give enough weight to indifference to cricket? And what do we make of Vane-Tempest younger brother, Herbert (1858-1920), in court in July 1880 after Lord’s ejected him and other toffs. Marylebone magistrates heard that the men shouted and used their umbrellas, ‘very disorderly’. Police tried to disperse them but Into The Void