Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

137 Change of Culture; Change of Cricket towards crowd-pleasing enterprise. Many sports fans boast of a joint allegiance to a cricketing county and a football team. It does make room for some reasonable comparability. Whatever the case, association football in England, aggressively commercial and resolved to maintain the ethos of being an element in the entertainment industry, has swept ahead of cricket as the national sport in both the popular and the cultural sense. First-class county cricket in particular has taken a back seat. What role did class play in what might critically be described as this undermining of English first-class cricket? 1. Midwinter the Collectivist Age op.cit. 2. T.W.Adorno & M.Harkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment (1997) p.166/7. 3. J.Harris Civil Society in British History (2004). 4. Richards op. cit. 5. Guardian 28 Oct 2016. 6. Adrian Tempany And the Sun Shines Now (2016). 7. M.Johnes & M.T.Taylor Football Ticket prices; Some Lessons from History in History and Policy Feb 2016. 8. Wisden 2016. 9. Anthony Clavane A Yorkshire Tragedy;the Rise and Fall of a Sporting Powerhouse (2016) This book examines how Yorkshire’s sporting glory, rooted in its heavy industrial culture, became irrevocably dimmed in the neo-liberal era.