The social side of English cricket

As England collapsed to their worst ever start in Test cricket, the pundits pondered 'Where Did It All Go Wrong?' The words 'shame', 'dismay', 'humiliation' and, inevitably, 'beleaguered' were bandied around as they struggled to come to terms with the latest fall from Grace. If they'd read A Social History of English Cricket, which won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, they would have realised that English cricket has been going pretty wrong, pretty much consistently, for the past 500 years. That's the main part of its charm.

'English cricket was born at some time in the later Middle Ages of uncertain, though bucolic, parentage,' Birley opens a book that is both extensively researched and discriminating. He has covered all the sources and, even more impressively, displayed fine judgment as to what to play and what to leave.

He unearths many gems. 'The cradle of cricket' was not Hambledon but Islington, 'a place where stressed-out Londoners went for rest and relaxation'. Now they go to Granita, in the early 18th century they went to the Angel Inn. And Lord's, long before cricket, used to be the home of hopping contests. In Depression America, they organised dance marathons; in Restoration England, they hoped till they dropped.

During the early years, cricket was primarily played by publicans and public schoolboys - an uneasy mixture. They both encountered difficulties. 'A public house could be a dangerous place for a sporting hero... it needs a special temperament to handle the twin tasks of being a celebrity and running a public house.' The public-schoolboys - eg Butcher Cumberland 'who had been schooled at Eton, picking up a taste for animal cruelty, pugilism and gambling' - found it hard to find suitable opponents. When Shrewsbury, the school not the town, asked for a game they received the following reply: 'Harrow we know, Winchester we know, but who are ye?'

By Victorian times, the game remained split: between amateur and professional, between north and south, between morality and Grace. In 1851 Pycroft wrote, 'The game of cricket, philosophically considered, is a standing panegyric on the English character: none but an orderly and sensible people would so amuse themselves. It calls into requisition all the cardinal virtues.' In Tom Brown's Schooldays, Arthur claims cricket to be 'the birthright of British boys old and young as habeas corpus and trial by jury are to British men.' Birley is swift to debunk such nonsense: 'What on earth has cricket to do with habeas corpus and trial by jury? Is playing baseball the same as pleading the Fifth Amendment?'

Meanwhile, WG Grace was more concerned with money than morality, games manship than sportsmanship. Through careful accounting he raised nearly 10,000 pound from his testimonial twice the amount that the top 0.0075 per cent of the population earned in a year. But he was worth the money, riling an Australian paper to print 'we did not take kindly to WG. For so big a man he is surprisingly tenacious on very small points. We duly admired him at the wicket, but thought him too apt to wrangle in the spirit of a duo-decimo lawyer over small points of the game'.

Sadly, the administrators were no so money-minded. 'If', writes Birley, 'its leading practitioners had exposed cricket to market forces then, rather than a century later, (perhaps) it would have become a genuine complement to soccer - as baseball is to American football - not an elitist pursuit kept out of the hands of the undiscriminating majority. But then, as every traditionalist will point out, it would not be cricket.'

The concept of not cricket and the attendant snobbery it often engenders has plagued the game ever since. Its greatest adherent was, perhaps, Neville Cardus who would take time out from wearing his knowledge of classical music a little too heavily on his/its sleeve to criticise Wally Hammond for his Savile row suits and Herbert Sutcliffe for speaking not 'with the accents of Yorkshire but of Teddington'. The country cricketer, he wrote huffily has in certain instances become a man of bourgeois profession.

Now the county cricketer has become in all instances a man engaged in a forgotten profession. Birely, having enjoined English cricket lovers to get off our high horses and enjoy the fun, admits this is a revolutionary notion. He writes: 'Those who feel outraged by the suggestion that cricket is supposed to be entertaining, preferring to regard it as something that is good for you, like fasting and prayer, have an easy remedy avoid Test matches and one-day games and attend only three or four day county matches. Quite.

The lesson to be learned from A Social History of English Cricket is that unless English cricket can appeal to a broader range of English society - in terms of class, race and age - then it won't be long before the Test team finds itself languishing at nought for four. A Social History of English Cricket by Derek Birley (Aurum Press 20 pound)