Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

126 Towards Classless Cricket? maximum wage decree was overruled and in 1964 the George Eastham case against Newcastle United, also heard in the High Court, demonstrated that the Football League registration system was an unfair restraint of trade. Footballers were accorded the rights that appertained to all workers. The scene was set for the forthcoming explosion of wages and movement in the theatre of football. The difference was that the Professional Footballers Association had been chiefly instrumental in, with the occasional threat of strike action, procuring their ends, while cricketers had had to await the boldness of a maverick capitalist, the one with the most riches, to find their legal rights assured and protected. Football is simple; cricket is complex, be it as games or in structures. The Corinthian virtues of football, with ex-public schoolboy teams winning the first dozen or so FA Cups, a competition based on the Harrow Cock House trophy, were lost in the thickening mists of passing time. Professional football had soon become a straightforward business of bosses and workers, except that, compared with most enterprises, the workers eventually emerged with exceptional rewards. Cricket, with its more complicated web of relationships of paternalistic governors and usually complicit servants, sharing a belief in the sport’s special ethos, struggled to find its bearings in a world entirely dedicated to marketing and monetary yardsticks. On the model of the likes of Herbert Sutcliffe and Wally Hammond, the professional players sought to emulate the amateur gentlemen, believing this to be their chosen mode of travel. Let us observe, next, to what extent they succeeded. 1. Midwinter Collectivism op cit; the final section of this text analyses this switch to a more Individualistic epoch in considerable detail. 2. John Eddowes The Language of Cricket (1997) provides a fascinating entree to this subject. 3. Neville Cardus English Cricket (1945). 4. Sissons op. cit. especially pp 285-292 . 6. Wynne-Thomas op. cit. pp 229-236 for a most concise summation of the Packer reformation.