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

148 The Runs Don’t Count was in 1965 when I found myself losing an argument with a physical education expert on the subject when we were colleagues in a teacher training college. He maintained that his subject had two purposes. One was to provide physical exercise for youngsters while at school and the other was to provide them with a wide range of opportunities to taste sports so that they might perhaps sustain a given interest in one or more in their after school-life. It was not the task of the school to breed Test cricketers any more than golf or tennis or champions of any kind. It was wholesome sport as a strictly educational measure. It was a comprehensive rather than a selective way of looking at a school’s physical education programme. Cricket had its place but merely as one of several on the carousel of games on offer. The summer sporting eggs were not to be put in the one basket of cricket. As for exercise, cricket was a waste of valuable time. At any point in a formal game, nine were doing nothing at all and another eight or nine not very much by way of physical exertion. My scrambled thoughts about cricket’s place in English culture he dismissed as capricious and cant-ridden. Cricket as the summer game of righteous consequence was no longer recognised as such and had fallen from its pedestal. While acknowledging that Victorian and early 20 th century cricket had its idiosyncrasies, with WG Grace in the vanguard in that department, it must also be accepted that cricket has been subject to the same vices as all other major professional sports, including doping, abuse, cheating, match-fixing and sundry misbehaviour. It could be 18 th century England all over again. The Muscular Christians of Victorian times would be hard put to justify today’s professional cricket as the cynosure of virtuous living. Turning to spectator cricket itself, the decline of English first-class cricket, apart from Test matches, seems irreversible. Almost three million paid to watch the County Championship matches of 1947 and two million attended those games in 1950. The annual figure had skidded down to 500,000 by the early 1960s. The authorities began their