The Summer Field

75 as a sausage machine’, he wrote. Plaindealer went even further in June 1934 and deplored ‘the mediocrity of English cricket of today’. At least Plaindealer understood that the cricketers might be innocent victims, made stale by too much cricket, all year round if they went on MCC tours. None of this meant cricketers had become less skilful. As C.B.Fry said – one of Cardus’ golden 32, and quoted by Cardus in The Field in May 1936: There are many fine players knocking about. But there has been a change in what I call the aesthetic morality of cricket. Things are done which none of the pre-war players would have dreamed of. Men had poisoned each other with gas and machine-gunned each other; also things not dreamt of before 1914, though things C.B.Fry and Cardus had avoided. * In his weekly pieces for The Field , rather than his better-known daily journalism in the Manchester Guardian , Cardus aired the ideas that came together – after another war that he dodged, even more blatantly, in Sydney – in English Cricket . Some lines sounded peculiar, even – in May 1937 – fascistic: ‘We need an atmosphere of hero worship – the “great personality” usually emerges if the imagination looks for him. Before the The Myth of the ‘Golden Age’ A back page advert from a Christmas 1914 magazine, The Graphic, neatly updating the 1898 advertising picture ‘the Captain of the eleven’ with a (ridiculously unrealistic) Army captain leading men in battle. It shows the link between cricket and war – inevitably, the advertising copy recalled Wellington’s remark about the Battle of Waterloo and the playing fields of Eton – and how both could be used to sell Pears’ soap.