Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

122 Towards Classless Cricket? Every Test-playing nation is a former colonial dependency. One intriguing consequence is that the Cricket World Cup has never been won by a country outside the old imperial boundaries – and not even by England itself, while no nation formerly part of the Empire has ever won the Football World Cup – except, just the once, England, technically a part of the United Kingdom. The International Cricket Conference has ten ‘full members’, the Test-playing nations, 28 ‘associate members’ and 51 non- voting ‘affiliated members’, with 29 of the two senior sections hailing from former British possessions. There is scarcely an area of the old British Empire that is not represented on the ICC. Even before the dissolution of the Empire the keepers of the cricketing flame had had perforce to embrace the obvious fact that members of indigenous races as well as expatriates could become talented cricketers. They had assumed that these ‘lesser breeds without the law’, as Rudyard Kipling described them, would not be able to cope with so arcane a sport as cricket. In 1900 the Athletic News claimed that West Indian ‘men of colour’ would never ‘hope to bring the same amount of intelligence to his game’ as the Englishman. But, of course, they could and did. The cultural answer was to ascribe pseudo-ethnic traits to this phenomenon such as the carefree, joyous West Indian or the magically touched subcontinental. The truth was and is that, slowly, highly talented cricketers took proper advantage of improved facilities, training and structures to reveal themselves as splendid professional – in the vocational sense – players. Ranjitsinhji was an assiduous practiser, not a wizard. Cricketing journalists in particular seemed to relish the idea that a good Indian spin bowler was wily and an English one experienced. Something of cricket’s mojo disappeared with the granting of independence to Britain’s dependencies. It was no longer the symbol of potent political authority; slowly England and MCC would lose its dominant role as the natural leader and arbiter of post-imperial cricket. Such economic and cultural buffets were hard to dodge. Top-class cricket, which had never faced up boldly to the question of whether it was part of the entertainment business or part of a kind of moral rearmament project, was in some distress. Reluctantly, the authorities considered reform. The first move and possibly the simplest from a logistical stance was to acknowledge that the amateur ethic and practice was in decay. As late as 1957/58 a sub-committee chaired by the Duke of Norfolk had asserted that the amateur factor ‘was not obsolete, was of great value to the game and should be preserved’ but it must have seemed to many a hollow cry. The truth was that the county amateur was a dying species. In the 1930s there were roughly a couple of hundred amateurs in the county championship in a normal season but by the late 1950s this figure was less than forty, with many of these playing but a few games. Nor was there any resolution of the knotty poser of purported amateurs who made a living out of cricket, employed as administrators by their county, writing and broadcasting about the game and even doing a bit of advertising.