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

152 restricted by new-style regulations. It must also be admitted that, over the last year or two, a reported 64,000 have given up playing the game. It has to be accepted that traditional cricket has sunk from its recognisable peak as a sport with a very special appeal and a very special reputation. It is one of a bunch of professional games, sharing the dubious kudos as well as the petty blemishes of the rest of them. It is unlikely that a latter-day Thomas Hughes or Talbot Baines Reed would choose cricket as the art-form that prefigured the way the good life should be led, nor would a present-day Henry Newbolt be able, conscientiously, to use today’s cricket as the basis for an heroic parable, imperial or otherwise. Those of us brought up to play the game, keep a straight bat and laugh in the face of vile adversity should be ashamed to despair. While it is true that what some now rather tentatively refer to as ‘the longer form of cricket’ is out of kilter with the fundamentals of current society, the position is not static. Society itself changes. Britain has undergone a couple of such basic switches in social make-up over the last two centuries. After about 1840 there was an abrupt shift from the brutish, volatile previous period to a more stable, composed if humdrum era before, from the 1960s, there was a distinct move to a more individualist, high voltage, competitive epoch. Each had, according to taste, strengths and weaknesses. Cricket, as a more meditative, complicated game, garnished with many cultural attributes, fitted admirably into that middle phase, alongside the kind of literary addiction discussed in these pages. The hope is that, even if at a low key, genuine cricket may survive long enough to re-establish itself when society changes in character, as it surely will, to a community more accommodating and supportive of this great and humane pastime. The virtuous and stoic Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote that ‘what is not good for the hive is not good for the bee’. If cricket be the bee, then some of us feel strongly that what we feel has gone wrong with the hive of society The Runs Don’t Count