Politics and Cricket
There was, as usual, a lot of good writing in this year's Wisden Almanack. I used to pore over it for the match reports and statistics, but now it's the articles at the beginning which grab my attention. There was a particularly lovely piece by Matthew Engel on the 60-year history of Test Match Special.
Amongst that and several other good ones, the article called Cricket and Politics, though fine enough, was a bit of a damp squib - little more scope and insight than mentioning that there used to be more working class players, and that most cricketers are probably likely to be right-wing. No shit.
So I've decided to have a go myself, ingeniously entitling it Politics and Cricket. Cricket is a special game of rare wonders, rare meaning and context. Sometimes it can be hard to pin that down, but I'll try.
John Major's vision of cricket as the sun goes down on an English village green is all well and good - I've been there and I've loved that, I'm not putting it down, but there's so much more to the game. England may have invented cricket but the game found its soul in the former empire, very often in their triumphs over the former colonial power.
What colour is cricket? To me, it's always been maroon - maroon headwear on brown skin, or, if you will, the colour of Blackwash. I fell in love with cricket in 1984 - the all-conquering, magnificent West Indies team of 1984.
They were brutal, they were fierce, they were glorious. They were a long way from "Play up, Tillingfold, play up".
That's a quote from 'The Cricket Match' by Hugh de Selincourt, a fictional work from just after World War I and a rather marvellous one at that - along with CLR James' 'Beyond a Boundary', one of the most insightful books about cricket I've ever read, though in very different ways.
The most famous quote from Trinidadian Marxist intellectual James' masterpiece (widely considered the greatest ever book on cricket and indeed one of the great sports books) is "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?", which paraphrases Rudyard Kipling's "What should they know of England who only England know" (even the Kipling quote seems rather appropriate for some of the topics I'm going to address ...)
In the West Indies, cricket was more than just a game. For James, the campaign to appoint the first full-time black West Indies cricket captain, which he himself led, was closely tied to the struggles across the West Indies, including in Trinidad, for independence from Britain.
Cricket was where the West Indies found its pride and its unity (they were even, for a few years, a unified federation, reflecting, I suppose, the cricket team, though that fell apart for a variety of reasons). That first black captain, Frank Worrell, was a transformative figure, and not just in the Caribbean. Knighted on his retirement, when he died of leukemia just a few years later, he was the first sportsman to have a memorial service at Westminster Abbey.
Worrell was a universally beloved figure, in the Martin Luther King tradition, if you will. Nor was he the last West Indies captain to attain greatness in a way that transcended the game. Passing over the great Garfield Sobers, a magnificent sportsman whose captaincy itself was successful enough but not overly lauded, then came Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards - Lloyd, like Worrell, was a statesman, though the destructive brand of cricket he pioneered shows he was not a soft touch. Richards, as captain, was a more controversial figure, more explicitly linked with black power and anti-English feeling. With his rastafarian wristbands and his unforgettable swagger, this apparently shy man became The Master Blaster. These were political figures. They brought fire to Babylon.
When a white South African England captain said he would make them grovel, they did not grovel.
Richards' great English mate is his fellow knight, Sir Beefy. Botham is also a political figure. Beefy is a Brexiter. A proud, outspoken Brexiter. Late in the campaign, it was probably him that swung it, eh? Late swing, eh, he was always a master of that? There are many ludicrous things about the Beefmeister (this picture leading the way ...)
but he did say an interesting thing in his general "England should be English" Brexitty ramblings. He said England's natural friends were places like the West Indies, India, Australia etc e.g English-speaking, cricket-playing countries or, to put it another way, places we colonised.
And that was an occasional, disingenuous theme of some other Brexiters, including Farage himself - "No, we're not racist, we love the people we used to enslave and murder, our allies are the Commonwealth, that's where we should be forging links ...".
Those uncultured Europeans, with their petanque and skiing ... what know they of politics who cricket do not know.
Farage had the nerve to invoke cricket, yet in a rather pathetic, blatantly fake way, showing none of John Major's actual love or understanding of the game. What, when he played cricket, was he good at? He was captain, he said ... was he bollocks. ("I was captain" is a pretty standard line for bullshitting idiots who pretend that they've always loved sport. I remember Al-Fayed saying the same thing once ...)
Farage went to Dulwich College, a school with a proud cricketing history (now's not the time to bore you with my personal ups and downs against them ... is it not ... no, David, it's not ...). A couple of other alumni, both of whom won places there because of their cricketing ability, are part of their own interesting stories - Eoin Morgan and Chris Jordan.
Morgan; the Irishman who captains England. Ireland and Afghanistan, if they gain test status later this year, will be the first non-Commonwealth countries to do so (Zimbabwe's left the Commonwealth, but were in when they gained test status). Many are saying it has come a bit late for Ireland. The decision was delayed, momentum was delayed, their best players tried to play for England. England will take players from anywhere and claim them for their own. Including the Caribbean, like Chris Jordan. But the tale there is how few black cricketers have come through for England in the last 20 years.
In the 80s and 90s, the likes of Norman Cowans, Roland Butcher, Devon Malcolm, Gladstone Small, David Lawrence, Chris Lewis, Phil De Freitas (and several more) led the way - England had a significant number of black players, both homegrown and from the Caribbean, and there were several more in county cricket. In the last 20 years - hardly any ... Mark Butcher (the son of a white former England player), Alex Tudor, Michael Carberry, Chris Jordan ... I think that's it.
Why is this? I'll come to that.
There have been more players of Asian origin, though hardly, considering the extent that the Asian community is one of the few places where cricket still thrives, a proportionate amount. An interesting point, though I don't intend to make anything of it, is how few of the many Asian players who've been given an England debut have been an unambiguous success and really cemented their place - really, only Nasser Hussain and currently Moeen Ali. This winter, briefly, there were four players of Asian origin in the test team - there's a decent chance that three of them - Moeen, Haseeb Hameed and Adil Rashid will play significant roles for England for years to come ... about time too.
There's never been any need, of course, for anything like the quota system which has been so controversial (though successful) in South Africa. Rather ironic that that quota system is what drove at least one England great - KP - to ply his trade over here.
England will take players from anywhere - South Africa, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean. State schools? Not so much these days ...
Here's another thing, something another Wisden article called 'Cricket's Battle for the Working Classes' teased out very well - cricket is being played increasingly, at club level, county level and international level, by the elite, by those with the money and opportunities. The statistics are striking compared to past decades. [basically where it used to be 60% state for both county and country, now it's nearer 35%] One little balancing factor which relates to Morgan and Jordan, as well as Joe Root, is that private schools sometimes provide places for highly talented sportspeople, but still ... to some extent, this is something happening in sport in general, what with school sport participation declining over the decades, but cricket has been hit hard by it. A lot of factors - money, lack of grounds, lack of people caring until recently, and of course, cricket leaving terrestrial TV, which everyone has finally realised was a scandal and disaster.
Generally, cricketers are emerging from certain areas, and those areas are not the inner cities. I grew up playing cricket both for my public school against other public schools, where, unsurprisingly, players were mainly white and posh, and for a club, Ealing - now, Ealing is one of the most prestigious clubs in the country and of course, a very well-to-do suburb, and I'm not going to pretend those matches plunged me on to the mean streets (though there were a couple of fights on the pitch I recall) but in our own team, and in our opponents, the likes of Wembley, Southall, Hanwell, Sudbury Court, were many Asian and black players, and players from mixed backgrounds and different schools. Now, that's outer west London, a perennial cricketing heartland, and I don't know if it's changed that much around there since then, but all I can say is that in the 80s and 90s, cricket felt like it was a game that a lot of kids from across the spectrum played - now, clearly, less so.
Until the 60s, there was an annual (or more) game called Gentlemen Vs Players (I know, superb ...) which was Amateurs vs Professionals - basically upper vs working class - the Players, well they gonna play play play, and they won significantly more (125 to 68). Well, now, of course, if there was an Amateurs vs Pros game, it would be a ludicrous mismatch, but what if there were Private School vs State School - the 7% would have more like 60% of the current top players - I mean, Stokes, Anderson, Moeen, who attended state schools, they'd give it a shot, but they'd be outgunned most likely ... the England cricket team struggles to be a cross-section of the country at large these days.
I return to 'The Cricket Match' by De Selincourt. Gosh, I loved that book when I was younger - a proper, insightful novel entirely about cricket. I read it several times. In some ways, it speaks of a long bygone era, in some ways it really doesn't. Tillingfold, the village where the game takes place, is an idyllic place in the South Downs, and if you travel round Kent, Sussex and Surrey, there are plenty, plenty of idyllic cricket pitches to look at, parts of England that probably haven't changed much in 100 years. Playing cricket on a summer's day on one of those grounds, everyone in their whites, the sounds, the smells, the pint with the opposition afterwards - that is a timeless and beautiful feeling (my own time doing so regularly is more than 10 years ago - I'm feeling my own distinct nostalgia for it right now!).
The book gave each player a distinct personality, representing the different strands in English society which existed then and still exist now - the socially striving stout village yeoman, the liberal, arty type, the aristocrat from the manor, the supercilious city gent down for the weekend, the proud working man with a chip on his shoulder, the underclass "brute" (the word in the book) who just happened to be the great bowler, elevated from his daily life every weekend by his cricketing mastery. All the undercurrents were teased out, the differences, the prejudices, all briefly forgotten in the glow of the team's victory.
For decades, cricket had that. It was, in some ways, the most representative of England's team sports - you certainly couldn't say that now.
As I've said, though, those scenes, those beautiful archetypal English cricketing scenes, they still exist. But only in certain places. Cricket thrives in the shires, it thrives in those areas of the map that turn blue. Which brings me to, I suppose, my key question, the one I've been skirting round a little. Is cricket a right-wing game?
Say it ain't so, Joe (and Mo). I love cricket more than I love anything except Bob Dylan and feeling smug - it depresses me a little to think of my sport veering, ideologically, away from me. Are left-wing cricket theorists like CLR James and Mike Marqusee outliers? Can a sport have a political essence?
Well, first, the players. Yes, one most admit, there is not a great history of left-wing cricketers, especially in England. Jack Russell and ... well, I'm sure there are more going under the radar, but if you look at the recent history of England captains, you somehow couldn't pick a more typical bunch of English conservatives in all their varieties - Botham, Boycott, Gower, Gatting, Emburey, Gooch, Stewart, Atherton (I had hopes for Athers, but apparently he went to a Tory event in 1997), Hussain, Vaughan, Strauss, Cook. Brearley? Surely not. Flintoff? Root? More of a glimmer there, maybe, I don't know. If Bob Willis was listening to the lyrics of his beloved Dylan at all, surely he's got a bit of left-wing fire in him (which reminds me of my favourite David Cameron quote, while I'm at it, in referencing to his enjoying the song Eton Rifles while he was in the Eton Corps ... "I don't see why the left should be the only ones allowed to listen to protest songs" ... you don't see ... no? Really?)
Look, its not just cricket. Sportspeople are very often right-wing, something to do with the survival-of-the-fittest, 'i did it all on my own, why can't you' ethos. They listen to Eye of the Tiger and scorn the weaklings. That's why we love them.
But football has its great socialists - Ferguson, Clough, Shankly, Pat Nevin etc. (and you imagine where the first three led, 100s of players followed ...) Social strata play a part - football is more the working class game, and working class people vote Labour ... don't they ... didn't they?
But, also, football has a different essence. Football is more of a true team game, with more intrinsically socialist values. Yes, time to dig out that old Camus quote "Everything I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football." Dig out those old green sweatshirts ...
In football, you're only as strong as your weakest link, every player is continually linked to every single member of their team. Cricket is different. It's a team game for individuals. The best players can carry a team. You do your own job, you do it as well as you can.
Still, that's reductive stuff. I'm not giving up on cricket as a left-wing game just yet.
I mean, look, I say, clutching at straws, cricket has more than its fair share of left-handers, doesn't it? Left-sidedness is an intrinsic advantage in cricket, particularly for batsmen - in fact many natural righties (like Gower) become lefties .... I have tried in vain, though, to find a study which links handedness with politics (apart from the well-known fact about a disproportionate number of US presidents being lefties). Still, I would be convinced, if such a study were to be found, that left-handed people would be more likely to be left-wing/liberal. It just fits with the personality type of left-handedness. I genuinely believe my leftness is all tied in together - I see it as one and the same thing - but I suppose that may be wishful thinking.
I also have often thought that the best cricket captains are rather conservative, especially in test cricket - I often find, ironically, the former England greats in the Sky commentary box like Botham banging on about England needing to be more adventurous and me, sat at home with my left-wing credentials, begging for Vaughan/Strauss/Cook to be as conservative as possible. Well, there's Conservative and conservative, but there may be something in that.
But, really, above and beyond any deeper notions about the essence of cricket, the story in England, especially in recent times, is mainly to do with upbringing and geography. Well-to-do areas, outside of big cities, i.e. Tory-voting areas - of course the people that grow up to be professional cricketers are more likely to be Conservative.
I actually think some very interesting issues are going to emerge with the City 20/20 Franchises. Though, of course, test matches take place in cities, I think most cricket fans are from the shires. Will they really be able to get behind the big cities like they've done in other countries? Notwithstanding issues of weather, long dusks, grounds which aren't quite big enough, is England as well suited to a City 20/20 as India and Australia? We'll see. Hopefully it's a risk worth taking. Maybe it does all the things I've been talking about - brings a new, young, urban fanbase to a game that desperately needs it. Cricket 4 the People!
Cricket's explicit links to politics in England are quite loose - there's John Major, Strauss being touted as a potential Tory MP, Ted Dexter a failed Tory candidate, CB Fry a failed Liberal candidate. Around the world, it's a different story.
Several West Indians, like Learie Constantine, Desmond Haynes and Wes Hall have gone into politics, Steve Waugh was touted as a potential Labour candidate in Australia, Sanath Jayasuriya has had a political role, and of course, the most famous cricketing politician of all is Imran Khan. From what I can tell, his party is described as "centrist", so that's no help at all!
But, he's a good place to start with one of the recurring themes of cricket history: great leaders, of countries England once ruled, sticking it the colonial master. Lloyd's and Richards' West Indies in 79, 80, 84, 86, 88, Imran's Pakistan in 1992, Bradman's, Border's, Waugh's Australia. Think I'm exaggerating and oversimplifying? I'm not so sure.
English people are always baffled by how much people loathe them, whether in a sporting context or any other. Cricket is a civilised game, sure, yes, and Beefy might talk about the great friends and natural partners we have in other cricket nations, but he didn't mention Pakistan, did he, and the court case he was involved with involving Imran Khan?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/botham-and-lamb-bowled-over-by-defeat-in-pounds-500000-high-court-test-1307606.html
Fierce distrust and dislike ... and what about David Lloyd and his "we flippin' murdered 'em" - a light off-the-cuff remark to a jovial Englishman, a lot more to a Zimbabwean.
England is no longer the superpower in cricket, if it ever has been. Right now, it's India, for better or worse. India, has the money, the razzmatazz, the bigwigs, the superstars, the fans. Players like Kohli, Ganguly, Dhoni, Yuvraj carry a certain lordly, entitled air - they won't be dictated to. India rules cricket, though there is currently a bit of a rebellion going on, a bit of an attempt to redress the balance. Watch this space.
Of course, that's another thing about politics and cricket - cricket has enough politics of its own that it hardly need concern itself with the wider world's - even within a single team, there seem to be constant factions and power struggles - then there are the disputes between players and boards, the negotiations between county and country, the regular disputed rule changes, match-fixing punishments, TV rights, franchises, who plays in what tournament where - even a field change can be a negotiation sometimes ... cricket is rich with its own politics, thanks very much. Right now, Australia's test players are threatening to go all Bob Crow ...
Cricket has, throughout history, had its major political moments - whether it's the Bodyline series of 1932/33 which caused a diplomatic crisis, Basil D'Oliveira in 1968 and the banning of South Africa for decades from test cricket (I think it's true that sport did a lot to keep South Africa in the public eye, for better or worse, during that period) and the rebel tours, the Jackman affair of 80/81, the aforementioned West Indies captaincy dispute, the constant tension between India and Pakistan - simply one of the fiercest, most meaningful rivalries in all sport where every match is a major event -, England's forfeiting a game in the 2003 World Cup, and Henry Olonga and Andy Flower's famous protest at the same event, Kumar Sangakkara being offered a diplomatic post as soon as he retired,
Moeen Ali's "Save Gaza" wristbands...
It's a game where people have taken stands, made the front pages, caused riots, affected history, over and over again. Will it continue to do so or will it cease to mean so much, as money and franchise cricket takes a greater hold going forward? We'll see.
I thought I'd have a look ahead to Election Day, June 8th - is there a match on? Champions Trophy, The Oval, India vs Sri Lanka. It feels rich, it seems to speak of the multicultural, inner-city cricketing Britain that is still a possibility. After all, cricket does turn up in the strangest places, whether it's Mount Kilimanjaro, the Vatican City, the parks of Brooklyn, never underestimate its potential reach.
I played a couple of games against the Houses of Commons cricket team in my youth - I have little memory, sadly, if there was anything particularly striking about the way these public servants played the game, whether there were any blatant opposing factions within their team - but I leave you with one defining political image of a more recent member of that team. Balls. So hard to catch.
Amongst that and several other good ones, the article called Cricket and Politics, though fine enough, was a bit of a damp squib - little more scope and insight than mentioning that there used to be more working class players, and that most cricketers are probably likely to be right-wing. No shit.
So I've decided to have a go myself, ingeniously entitling it Politics and Cricket. Cricket is a special game of rare wonders, rare meaning and context. Sometimes it can be hard to pin that down, but I'll try.
John Major's vision of cricket as the sun goes down on an English village green is all well and good - I've been there and I've loved that, I'm not putting it down, but there's so much more to the game. England may have invented cricket but the game found its soul in the former empire, very often in their triumphs over the former colonial power.
What colour is cricket? To me, it's always been maroon - maroon headwear on brown skin, or, if you will, the colour of Blackwash. I fell in love with cricket in 1984 - the all-conquering, magnificent West Indies team of 1984.
They were brutal, they were fierce, they were glorious. They were a long way from "Play up, Tillingfold, play up".
That's a quote from 'The Cricket Match' by Hugh de Selincourt, a fictional work from just after World War I and a rather marvellous one at that - along with CLR James' 'Beyond a Boundary', one of the most insightful books about cricket I've ever read, though in very different ways.
The most famous quote from Trinidadian Marxist intellectual James' masterpiece (widely considered the greatest ever book on cricket and indeed one of the great sports books) is "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?", which paraphrases Rudyard Kipling's "What should they know of England who only England know" (even the Kipling quote seems rather appropriate for some of the topics I'm going to address ...)
In the West Indies, cricket was more than just a game. For James, the campaign to appoint the first full-time black West Indies cricket captain, which he himself led, was closely tied to the struggles across the West Indies, including in Trinidad, for independence from Britain.
Cricket was where the West Indies found its pride and its unity (they were even, for a few years, a unified federation, reflecting, I suppose, the cricket team, though that fell apart for a variety of reasons). That first black captain, Frank Worrell, was a transformative figure, and not just in the Caribbean. Knighted on his retirement, when he died of leukemia just a few years later, he was the first sportsman to have a memorial service at Westminster Abbey.
Worrell was a universally beloved figure, in the Martin Luther King tradition, if you will. Nor was he the last West Indies captain to attain greatness in a way that transcended the game. Passing over the great Garfield Sobers, a magnificent sportsman whose captaincy itself was successful enough but not overly lauded, then came Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards - Lloyd, like Worrell, was a statesman, though the destructive brand of cricket he pioneered shows he was not a soft touch. Richards, as captain, was a more controversial figure, more explicitly linked with black power and anti-English feeling. With his rastafarian wristbands and his unforgettable swagger, this apparently shy man became The Master Blaster. These were political figures. They brought fire to Babylon.
Richards' great English mate is his fellow knight, Sir Beefy. Botham is also a political figure. Beefy is a Brexiter. A proud, outspoken Brexiter. Late in the campaign, it was probably him that swung it, eh? Late swing, eh, he was always a master of that? There are many ludicrous things about the Beefmeister (this picture leading the way ...)
And that was an occasional, disingenuous theme of some other Brexiters, including Farage himself - "No, we're not racist, we love the people we used to enslave and murder, our allies are the Commonwealth, that's where we should be forging links ...".
Those uncultured Europeans, with their petanque and skiing ... what know they of politics who cricket do not know.
Farage had the nerve to invoke cricket, yet in a rather pathetic, blatantly fake way, showing none of John Major's actual love or understanding of the game. What, when he played cricket, was he good at? He was captain, he said ... was he bollocks. ("I was captain" is a pretty standard line for bullshitting idiots who pretend that they've always loved sport. I remember Al-Fayed saying the same thing once ...)
Farage went to Dulwich College, a school with a proud cricketing history (now's not the time to bore you with my personal ups and downs against them ... is it not ... no, David, it's not ...). A couple of other alumni, both of whom won places there because of their cricketing ability, are part of their own interesting stories - Eoin Morgan and Chris Jordan.
Morgan; the Irishman who captains England. Ireland and Afghanistan, if they gain test status later this year, will be the first non-Commonwealth countries to do so (Zimbabwe's left the Commonwealth, but were in when they gained test status). Many are saying it has come a bit late for Ireland. The decision was delayed, momentum was delayed, their best players tried to play for England. England will take players from anywhere and claim them for their own. Including the Caribbean, like Chris Jordan. But the tale there is how few black cricketers have come through for England in the last 20 years.
In the 80s and 90s, the likes of Norman Cowans, Roland Butcher, Devon Malcolm, Gladstone Small, David Lawrence, Chris Lewis, Phil De Freitas (and several more) led the way - England had a significant number of black players, both homegrown and from the Caribbean, and there were several more in county cricket. In the last 20 years - hardly any ... Mark Butcher (the son of a white former England player), Alex Tudor, Michael Carberry, Chris Jordan ... I think that's it.
Why is this? I'll come to that.
There have been more players of Asian origin, though hardly, considering the extent that the Asian community is one of the few places where cricket still thrives, a proportionate amount. An interesting point, though I don't intend to make anything of it, is how few of the many Asian players who've been given an England debut have been an unambiguous success and really cemented their place - really, only Nasser Hussain and currently Moeen Ali. This winter, briefly, there were four players of Asian origin in the test team - there's a decent chance that three of them - Moeen, Haseeb Hameed and Adil Rashid will play significant roles for England for years to come ... about time too.
There's never been any need, of course, for anything like the quota system which has been so controversial (though successful) in South Africa. Rather ironic that that quota system is what drove at least one England great - KP - to ply his trade over here.
England will take players from anywhere - South Africa, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean. State schools? Not so much these days ...
Here's another thing, something another Wisden article called 'Cricket's Battle for the Working Classes' teased out very well - cricket is being played increasingly, at club level, county level and international level, by the elite, by those with the money and opportunities. The statistics are striking compared to past decades. [basically where it used to be 60% state for both county and country, now it's nearer 35%] One little balancing factor which relates to Morgan and Jordan, as well as Joe Root, is that private schools sometimes provide places for highly talented sportspeople, but still ... to some extent, this is something happening in sport in general, what with school sport participation declining over the decades, but cricket has been hit hard by it. A lot of factors - money, lack of grounds, lack of people caring until recently, and of course, cricket leaving terrestrial TV, which everyone has finally realised was a scandal and disaster.
Generally, cricketers are emerging from certain areas, and those areas are not the inner cities. I grew up playing cricket both for my public school against other public schools, where, unsurprisingly, players were mainly white and posh, and for a club, Ealing - now, Ealing is one of the most prestigious clubs in the country and of course, a very well-to-do suburb, and I'm not going to pretend those matches plunged me on to the mean streets (though there were a couple of fights on the pitch I recall) but in our own team, and in our opponents, the likes of Wembley, Southall, Hanwell, Sudbury Court, were many Asian and black players, and players from mixed backgrounds and different schools. Now, that's outer west London, a perennial cricketing heartland, and I don't know if it's changed that much around there since then, but all I can say is that in the 80s and 90s, cricket felt like it was a game that a lot of kids from across the spectrum played - now, clearly, less so.
Until the 60s, there was an annual (or more) game called Gentlemen Vs Players (I know, superb ...) which was Amateurs vs Professionals - basically upper vs working class - the Players, well they gonna play play play, and they won significantly more (125 to 68). Well, now, of course, if there was an Amateurs vs Pros game, it would be a ludicrous mismatch, but what if there were Private School vs State School - the 7% would have more like 60% of the current top players - I mean, Stokes, Anderson, Moeen, who attended state schools, they'd give it a shot, but they'd be outgunned most likely ... the England cricket team struggles to be a cross-section of the country at large these days.
I return to 'The Cricket Match' by De Selincourt. Gosh, I loved that book when I was younger - a proper, insightful novel entirely about cricket. I read it several times. In some ways, it speaks of a long bygone era, in some ways it really doesn't. Tillingfold, the village where the game takes place, is an idyllic place in the South Downs, and if you travel round Kent, Sussex and Surrey, there are plenty, plenty of idyllic cricket pitches to look at, parts of England that probably haven't changed much in 100 years. Playing cricket on a summer's day on one of those grounds, everyone in their whites, the sounds, the smells, the pint with the opposition afterwards - that is a timeless and beautiful feeling (my own time doing so regularly is more than 10 years ago - I'm feeling my own distinct nostalgia for it right now!).
The book gave each player a distinct personality, representing the different strands in English society which existed then and still exist now - the socially striving stout village yeoman, the liberal, arty type, the aristocrat from the manor, the supercilious city gent down for the weekend, the proud working man with a chip on his shoulder, the underclass "brute" (the word in the book) who just happened to be the great bowler, elevated from his daily life every weekend by his cricketing mastery. All the undercurrents were teased out, the differences, the prejudices, all briefly forgotten in the glow of the team's victory.
For decades, cricket had that. It was, in some ways, the most representative of England's team sports - you certainly couldn't say that now.
As I've said, though, those scenes, those beautiful archetypal English cricketing scenes, they still exist. But only in certain places. Cricket thrives in the shires, it thrives in those areas of the map that turn blue. Which brings me to, I suppose, my key question, the one I've been skirting round a little. Is cricket a right-wing game?
Say it ain't so, Joe (and Mo). I love cricket more than I love anything except Bob Dylan and feeling smug - it depresses me a little to think of my sport veering, ideologically, away from me. Are left-wing cricket theorists like CLR James and Mike Marqusee outliers? Can a sport have a political essence?
Well, first, the players. Yes, one most admit, there is not a great history of left-wing cricketers, especially in England. Jack Russell and ... well, I'm sure there are more going under the radar, but if you look at the recent history of England captains, you somehow couldn't pick a more typical bunch of English conservatives in all their varieties - Botham, Boycott, Gower, Gatting, Emburey, Gooch, Stewart, Atherton (I had hopes for Athers, but apparently he went to a Tory event in 1997), Hussain, Vaughan, Strauss, Cook. Brearley? Surely not. Flintoff? Root? More of a glimmer there, maybe, I don't know. If Bob Willis was listening to the lyrics of his beloved Dylan at all, surely he's got a bit of left-wing fire in him (which reminds me of my favourite David Cameron quote, while I'm at it, in referencing to his enjoying the song Eton Rifles while he was in the Eton Corps ... "I don't see why the left should be the only ones allowed to listen to protest songs" ... you don't see ... no? Really?)
Look, its not just cricket. Sportspeople are very often right-wing, something to do with the survival-of-the-fittest, 'i did it all on my own, why can't you' ethos. They listen to Eye of the Tiger and scorn the weaklings. That's why we love them.
But football has its great socialists - Ferguson, Clough, Shankly, Pat Nevin etc. (and you imagine where the first three led, 100s of players followed ...) Social strata play a part - football is more the working class game, and working class people vote Labour ... don't they ... didn't they?
But, also, football has a different essence. Football is more of a true team game, with more intrinsically socialist values. Yes, time to dig out that old Camus quote "Everything I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football." Dig out those old green sweatshirts ...
In football, you're only as strong as your weakest link, every player is continually linked to every single member of their team. Cricket is different. It's a team game for individuals. The best players can carry a team. You do your own job, you do it as well as you can.
Still, that's reductive stuff. I'm not giving up on cricket as a left-wing game just yet.
I mean, look, I say, clutching at straws, cricket has more than its fair share of left-handers, doesn't it? Left-sidedness is an intrinsic advantage in cricket, particularly for batsmen - in fact many natural righties (like Gower) become lefties .... I have tried in vain, though, to find a study which links handedness with politics (apart from the well-known fact about a disproportionate number of US presidents being lefties). Still, I would be convinced, if such a study were to be found, that left-handed people would be more likely to be left-wing/liberal. It just fits with the personality type of left-handedness. I genuinely believe my leftness is all tied in together - I see it as one and the same thing - but I suppose that may be wishful thinking.
I also have often thought that the best cricket captains are rather conservative, especially in test cricket - I often find, ironically, the former England greats in the Sky commentary box like Botham banging on about England needing to be more adventurous and me, sat at home with my left-wing credentials, begging for Vaughan/Strauss/Cook to be as conservative as possible. Well, there's Conservative and conservative, but there may be something in that.
But, really, above and beyond any deeper notions about the essence of cricket, the story in England, especially in recent times, is mainly to do with upbringing and geography. Well-to-do areas, outside of big cities, i.e. Tory-voting areas - of course the people that grow up to be professional cricketers are more likely to be Conservative.
I actually think some very interesting issues are going to emerge with the City 20/20 Franchises. Though, of course, test matches take place in cities, I think most cricket fans are from the shires. Will they really be able to get behind the big cities like they've done in other countries? Notwithstanding issues of weather, long dusks, grounds which aren't quite big enough, is England as well suited to a City 20/20 as India and Australia? We'll see. Hopefully it's a risk worth taking. Maybe it does all the things I've been talking about - brings a new, young, urban fanbase to a game that desperately needs it. Cricket 4 the People!
Cricket's explicit links to politics in England are quite loose - there's John Major, Strauss being touted as a potential Tory MP, Ted Dexter a failed Tory candidate, CB Fry a failed Liberal candidate. Around the world, it's a different story.
Several West Indians, like Learie Constantine, Desmond Haynes and Wes Hall have gone into politics, Steve Waugh was touted as a potential Labour candidate in Australia, Sanath Jayasuriya has had a political role, and of course, the most famous cricketing politician of all is Imran Khan. From what I can tell, his party is described as "centrist", so that's no help at all!
But, he's a good place to start with one of the recurring themes of cricket history: great leaders, of countries England once ruled, sticking it the colonial master. Lloyd's and Richards' West Indies in 79, 80, 84, 86, 88, Imran's Pakistan in 1992, Bradman's, Border's, Waugh's Australia. Think I'm exaggerating and oversimplifying? I'm not so sure.
English people are always baffled by how much people loathe them, whether in a sporting context or any other. Cricket is a civilised game, sure, yes, and Beefy might talk about the great friends and natural partners we have in other cricket nations, but he didn't mention Pakistan, did he, and the court case he was involved with involving Imran Khan?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/botham-and-lamb-bowled-over-by-defeat-in-pounds-500000-high-court-test-1307606.html
Fierce distrust and dislike ... and what about David Lloyd and his "we flippin' murdered 'em" - a light off-the-cuff remark to a jovial Englishman, a lot more to a Zimbabwean.
England is no longer the superpower in cricket, if it ever has been. Right now, it's India, for better or worse. India, has the money, the razzmatazz, the bigwigs, the superstars, the fans. Players like Kohli, Ganguly, Dhoni, Yuvraj carry a certain lordly, entitled air - they won't be dictated to. India rules cricket, though there is currently a bit of a rebellion going on, a bit of an attempt to redress the balance. Watch this space.
Of course, that's another thing about politics and cricket - cricket has enough politics of its own that it hardly need concern itself with the wider world's - even within a single team, there seem to be constant factions and power struggles - then there are the disputes between players and boards, the negotiations between county and country, the regular disputed rule changes, match-fixing punishments, TV rights, franchises, who plays in what tournament where - even a field change can be a negotiation sometimes ... cricket is rich with its own politics, thanks very much. Right now, Australia's test players are threatening to go all Bob Crow ...
Cricket has, throughout history, had its major political moments - whether it's the Bodyline series of 1932/33 which caused a diplomatic crisis, Basil D'Oliveira in 1968 and the banning of South Africa for decades from test cricket (I think it's true that sport did a lot to keep South Africa in the public eye, for better or worse, during that period) and the rebel tours, the Jackman affair of 80/81, the aforementioned West Indies captaincy dispute, the constant tension between India and Pakistan - simply one of the fiercest, most meaningful rivalries in all sport where every match is a major event -, England's forfeiting a game in the 2003 World Cup, and Henry Olonga and Andy Flower's famous protest at the same event, Kumar Sangakkara being offered a diplomatic post as soon as he retired,
Moeen Ali's "Save Gaza" wristbands...
It's a game where people have taken stands, made the front pages, caused riots, affected history, over and over again. Will it continue to do so or will it cease to mean so much, as money and franchise cricket takes a greater hold going forward? We'll see.
I thought I'd have a look ahead to Election Day, June 8th - is there a match on? Champions Trophy, The Oval, India vs Sri Lanka. It feels rich, it seems to speak of the multicultural, inner-city cricketing Britain that is still a possibility. After all, cricket does turn up in the strangest places, whether it's Mount Kilimanjaro, the Vatican City, the parks of Brooklyn, never underestimate its potential reach.
I played a couple of games against the Houses of Commons cricket team in my youth - I have little memory, sadly, if there was anything particularly striking about the way these public servants played the game, whether there were any blatant opposing factions within their team - but I leave you with one defining political image of a more recent member of that team. Balls. So hard to catch.
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