Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

109 The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching about its emergence as a single recognisable nationwide game, cricket certainly had the edge on the football codes. A combine of the missionary work of the Exhibition elevens, dating from the founding of the All-England XI during 1846, and a cricketing diaspora mainly based on the public schools and their alumni ensured that an acknowledged formula for cricket was accepted throughout the United Kingdom by the last third of the 19 th century. It was, as Tom Brown reminds, by the 1840s, that the reformed public schools, with the Eton versus Harrow fixture as a model and MCC, under the benign guidance of Benjamin Aislabie, were consolidating their position as the promoters of cricket. Former pupils as varsity cricketers and in Old Boys teams, as soldiers, as teachers, as clergymen and as colonial officers ferried the game far and wide. The Victorian thirst for association was in part assuaged by the formation of hundreds of cricket clubs in even the remotest and tiniest of settlements. If there were a standard distribution based on the known numbers in a few areas, there could have been 15,000 cricket clubs by the last decades of the century. Although many began as internal ‘sides’ outfits, the appetite for competition, nurtured by improvements in transport, soon had them all arranging regular fixture lists. A particular Victorian contribution to this welter of cricket was country house cricket; there were possibly a thousand venues for these colourful cricketing weeks all over the nation, offering just one of several staging posts to the famous amateur travelling elevens, such as I Zingari. By comparison, association football, which had an equally chequered pattern of formats, was longer in finding some kind of common identity. It was 1863 when the year-old embryonic Football Association issued what were called the ‘Rules of the London Football Association’, although they were actually based on the Cambridge University code, first outlined in 1848. That did not mean everyone rushed to obey these laws. Be it a state forbidding murder or the abolition of the slave trade, let alone the rules of