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

151 The Runs Don’t Count What Anstey’s famed contemporary WS Gilbert would have called ‘topsy-turvydom’ proved amusing. It was comedy of a fashion that the Canadian humourist of the inter-wars years Stephen Leacock described in an elegant phrase, ‘as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life’. The contrasting mentalities of boy and man in the opposite physiques proved to be very comical. But, of course, such an exchange would be unnatural. And, like the individual, society retains its coherence, its congruity, irrespective of whether it it is nice or nasty in character. For the better part of a hundred years the socio-economic structure of Britain supported a relevant super-structure of arts, pursuits, leisure activities, attitudes and mores which, in tune, sustained the structure, just as Dick Bultitude’s childlike body and mind were as one, indivisible, part and parcel, until the rubbing of the magical stone. But in the basic shift since the 1960s, in both its structural foundation and super-structural over-pinnings, formal cricket has been one of the losers, so much was it a part, along with the literature that nurtured cricket and was nurtured by it, of the older tradition. The technology and the tempo, the value-systems and the fabric, of modern life are not conducive to the cricket the Victorians created. These fundamental changes have not served well the typology of cricket enjoyed by our Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian forefathers. Or, to put it in simple terms, you cannot for long sustain a red ball game in a white ball society. So it is highly probable that the decline of cricket from its acme is associated with the decay of an apposite literary or other cultural reinforcement and that, in fact, the one causes the other to sink and, to borrow from F Anstey, vice versa. It should be emphasised that the diminution of the more old- fashioned brand of cricket is by no means total. It continues in some form, even if battered by the plethora of limited overs competitions and deprived of much of its popularity as a crowd-pulling attraction. The recreational game is in a reasonably healthy position, although it is an expensive game in which to engage and much of its format has become