Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

121 a weakness. Curiously enough, it could be argued that of all the British inputs into the erection of their imperial edifice, cricket is by far the most enduring. Almost all former dependencies, whilst abandoning much of the other colonial baggage, still enjoy cricket. Such is its strength; the weakness is that no one else does, at least to top-ranking standards. The Englishry, the religiosity and the sense of colonial mission that was incorporated into cricket’s diaspora made it, geopolitically speaking, very lop-sided. Where football, perhaps aided by its later development and conveyed beyond these shores by commercial, engineering and allied agencies, became a global sport, cricket, part of the message carried by the administrator, the teacher, the cleric and the soldier, limited itself to the Empire. British football gained immensely not just from its global dominance but more directly from its European connections at club as well as national level. Arsenal versus Bayern Munich has never been emulated by Middlesex versus Bavaria. This arose in main part from that upper middle class mind- set, bought into by a willing working class, that cricket was peculiarly English, not even British. At the 1926 Imperial Cricket Conference Lord Harris, the autocratic friend of the professional cricketer, endorsed the edict that a Test match was a fixture ‘between sides duly selected by recognised governing bodies representing countries within the Empire.’ It was not until 1965, during the phase of the subsidiary changes to cricket in England and elsewhere, that it became, to soothe the ruffled feathers of previously colonised races, the International Cricket Conference. By that time FIFA, established in 1904, had over a hundred members. It now has over 200. During the late medieval and early modern period when ‘play’ was uncoordinated and highly localised in Western Europe, it is evident that among the countless species of diversions many which might have gravitated into cricket were enjoyed. 2 There is really no reason why cricket could not have been promoted on the continent in the same way that other British-sourced sporting formats, such as rugby union, tennis and hockey, were – and one writes these heretical words with the feeling of being a blasphemer, such is the intensity of the Englishness of cricket spliced into our cultural bones. A tome-like anthology could quickly be assembled of rhapsodic prose and verse lauding this xenophobic theme, some of it referenced in literary citations in earlier chapters. In 1833 John Mitford writing in The Gentleman’s Magazine opined that ‘cricket is the pride and privilege of the Englishman alone. Into his noble and favourite amusement no other people ever pretend to penetrate.’ Over a hundred years later the message was unchanged. Neville Cardus wrote in 1945 ‘none except the people of England or of English-speaking countries has excelled at cricket. Its rules and its general legal system tell of the English compromise between individual freedom and corporate responsibility...it somehow holds the mirror up to English nature.’ 3 Towards Classless Cricket?