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

93 The Flood (2) HK Rodd The Wonder Man averse to professional sport. They and their fellow-Muscular Christians felt that the payment of people to perform the sport in question in front of an often partisan crowd sullied the moral purpose of games. They were happy to write of schoolboys turning out by reason of order, convention and desire to watch their year, house or school play cricket. Indeed, some realists claim they overestimate the juvenile spectatorship portrayed in their cricket stories. Nonetheless, and for whatever combine of reasons, school cricket was much watched. It was a chance of youngsters to cheer on their own peers while at the same time demonstrating a modicum of respect for their opponents, a tradition that still lingers in some cricket circles. Major school matches were well covered by the leading newspapers and that dispensation was also sustained, if much decreased, into modern times. Cricket, too, as a spectator sport carried more kudos in that the amateur element was very strong at the senior level. Because professional county cricketers were regarded more as in service than employment (‘he’s been a good servant to his county’ is still sometimes heard), the tenuous link of master and servant on show did at least bear some semblance to a recognisable feudal contract. The milder sort of Muscular Christian might have felt county and varsity cricket, along with the Henley Regatta, the Boat Race, Rugby Union and the then pure as the driven snow Athletics, might have been just about legitimate. Compared with the horrors of professional football, boxing and Rugby League, it was not too sinful. As always, horse racing, with its aristocratic and royalist connections, was a dilemma, especially as gambling was its meat and drink. So there were ambivalences. But not for the puristic followers of Thomas Hughes and his ilk. There was another compelling reason. This was the peril of boys and young men being so tempted by spectating that they might forego by default the indispensable Christian necessity of personal physical fitness. The lure of watching Surrey batting at The Oval could risk weakening one’s own body by neglect of