Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

99 The Shadow Of Embourgeoisement inter-wars years, football was out-distancing cricket by millions. Compared with cricket’s 1.5m or so a summer for first-class matches, the Football League’s enlarged programme of forty or so games attracted approaching 1m every Saturday, with an average gate of 20,000. It will be recalled that 2000 paid what for some was a reluctant shilling to watch the first FA Cup Final. In 1923 Wembley Stadium was opened capable of holding 127,000 – and well over 200,000 overwhelmed the venue for the first Cup Final there. This demonstrates the huge strides football had made in fifty years or so – and, incidentally, the good behaviour of the spectators on that first Wembley occasion is further testimony to Judith Flanders’ succinct phrase ‘the volatile mob had become the sedate consumer’. 3 A perplexed and astonished Irishman commented ‘not a pistol went off’ at a game played with ‘human touchlines’ preceded by a respectful rendition of the national anthem to greet George V. The newspapers and the radio alike became very wedded to the football frenzy while an easily underestimated element in the spreading of this great interest was the football pools. Beginning in 1923 when 4000 pools coupons were distributed at Old Trafford football ground, by 1939 some £800,000 a week was being invested and there were 8m punters, representing a fifth of the adult population and two-thirds of the nation’s households. Each week fifteen times as many as the huge crowds that attended the matches pored over the likely outcome of the fixtures and awaited the news of that outcome with some degree of concentration. It was a quantum leap in the penetration of the culture of the game among many who without the pools would not have known their Wolverhampton Wanderers from their West Bromwich Albions. The ambuscade of cricket by football was very serious. In a relatively brief time and in a very business-like fashion the Football League and the FA had developed a simple, lucidly intelligible game with a concise time-frame and without undue vulnerability to inclement weather that was played as an entertainment in 92 outposts and with a great base of recreational engagement. Cricket had stood still and had been overtaken with ease. Horse racing remained the other rival for public involvement but this was a sport different in kind rather than degree. Many, high and low, followed it but betting – up to £200m annually at this juncture - was always the crux. Few ‘played’ it, for obvious reasons, nor was it in any way a team game nor a school or recreational pastime. Some might have a favourite jockey or horse but it did not engender the same sort of localised loyalty that characterised the league football or the county cricket club. Of course there was room for both cricket and football; it was more that cricket, trapped in the past, somehow missed the chance to fill the space that was available for it. Cricket was no longer the ‘national game’ that once it had seemed to be. The Victorian charade, one part pleasant diversion, one part ethical exercise, had lost some of its gloss, although its leaders, against the logic of the mathematics, still claimed the high moral ground for a sport which, they asserted, was the essence of Englishry and by that token the