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

110 The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching a game, it would be naïve to assume that total obedience immediately follows. In the case of football, for example, its alternative locus in Sheffield nourished a slightly different model. In any event, only eight years later in 1871 there was a breakaway group of clubs that adopted the Blackheath rules and Rugby Union, albeit initially with twenty a side, was born – only to fall foul of the professional aspect that cricket and football also had to tackle. In 1895 this schism led to the formation of professional rugby in the north of England and the establishment of the Northern Rugby League in 1901. Much of this fractious activity in the football arena post- dated the beginnings of the literaryflowering of school-based tales while the authentic schools themselves were slower to arrange inter-school games in the winter months. The earlier authors who carved the model for future writers had to take the chance that countrywide readers would necessarily comprehend football references. Tom Brown’s Schooldays is an immediate example. The cricket is intelligible enough in fairly modern terms but the ten pages of the ‘Schoolhouse’ football match is barely comprehensible, much as Thomas Hughes conveys the thrills and spills of the encounter, ‘You don’t mean to say that those fifty or sixty boys in white trousers, many of them quite small, are going to play that huge mass opposite?..You say you don’t see so much in it all; nothing but a struggling mass of boys..My dear sir, a battle would look much the same to you.’ What was to become a sustained analogy of game and battle in the first classic school story apart, one can understand why cricket was perhaps more favoured as a literary trope. Patently, the more leisured pace of cricket, the way, for example, an author might dwell ball by ball on an over or utilise the substantial stand of two batsmen as the basis for a conversation piece, gave the game a literary advantage. Its very complexity, as we have noted, leant itself to plot and character development. But these benefits of timing and fashioning would have been as nothing had it not been for the vast interest in