AND ANOTHER THING
What's wrong with cricket today is a matter of history
PAUL JOHNSON
The cricket season starts with a painful scandal of financial corruption and match- fixing involving the South African captain and Pakistani and Indian players. That does not surprise me. Indeed, it was inevitable once cricket became totally pro- fessionalised and dominated by the cash- nexus. If only people knew more history, they would not be so anxious to accept 'changes', which are often not new at all but a reversion to the bad old past. Cricket emerged from the village level during the late 18th century, a terrible age for gam- bling. Betting on fiercely fought London games was common. Leading London bookies, including the great Crockford, used to sit in front of the pavilion at Lord's to take bets. In Oxford Street, the Green Man and Still was the headquarters of 'off- pitch' betting. As all the leading players lodged there, an element of corruption was inevitable. Even the Reverend Lord Fred- erick Beauclerk, the distinguished clergy- man who led the first all-England eleven (they played 22 men from Notting- hamshire), admitted that he made £600 a Year at the game. Cricket was turned into an honest and honourable game — indeed, the hallmark of morality and fairness in sport — by a group of high-minded aristos and gentry Who were determined to stamp out betting and skulduggery. Their leader was William Ward (1787-1849), MP for the City of Lon- don and a director of the Bank of England. When the Lord's ground was about to be sold off as a building site in 1825, he pulled out his chequebook and bought it for £5,000, an immense sum in those days, and made it over to MCC in perpetuity. Five years before he had scored 278 on the same ground, which stood as the individual record until Jack Hobbs beat it in 1925. Ward's reputation as a player as much as his money and negotiating skills enabled him to take the chief role in improving and codifying the laws. In his campaign to elim- inate betting he was spurred on by school- masters and dons, who would not allow c9cket in their institutions until the gam- bling element was banned — hence the first Oxford and Cambridge and Eton and Har- row matches date from the 1820s.
At the heart of Ward's campaign was the Gentlemen v. Players fixture, the first of Which was held in 1819. The idea behind it was that the best of the gentlemen, who adored the game, had private grounds on their estates, and wanted cricket to be simon-pure, would work closely with the best of the players, who hated the nastiness which gambling brought into the sport, and wanted to keep the game straight, their annual match being played at Lord's to the highest possible standards and with the closest adherence to the strict laws of the game. This particular match, far from being about snobbery, as was later maintained by 'reformers', was actually about integrity.
So it continued. The gentlemen and play- ers' alliance made the game so honest that 'that's not cricket' became a synonym for fraud, deviousness and crooked behaviour all over the world, and the principle that playing the game was more important than personal success became a vital part of character-training at thousands of good schools. It was still so when I first followed and gloried in this best of all games in the 1930s. The professional players, who were paid a pittance in those days, were even more determined than the gentlemen-ama- teurs to uphold the laws in their spirit as well as to their letter, and to exact impecca- ble behaviour, on and off the pitch, from the young lads they recruited. The martinet of that wonderful epoch, the RSM of the game as it were, was Herbert Sutcliffe of Yorkshire. It was his belief that a good player ought to exceed even a gentleman in courtesy, sportsmanship and dignity. He treated cricket as a kind of religion.
Sutcliffe's greatest discovery, acolyte and pupil was Sir Leonard Hutton (1916-1990), who came from Fulneck near the great Yorkshire cricket centre of Pudsey, where Sutcliffe settled. Fulneck was an ancient Moravian settlement, and many of Hut- ton's forebears had been Moravian minis- ters. Thus in his case the connection between the morality of cricket and a strict form of Christianity was immensely strengthened. Sutcliffe not only coached Hutton into big-time Yorkshire cricket dur- ing the apogee of the county's fortunes, but instilled in him a rigorous code of conduct in every aspect of life, which made him not only the finest player of his generation but the finest gentleman too.
Hutton was the outstanding hero and mentor of my boyhood. My father would say, 'Young Hutton would never do that' or 'That's the Hutton spirit.' In 1938 when most people were anxiously brooding over the Hitler menace, I was rejoicing in Hutton's mastery of Bradman's Australian eleven in the last Test at the Oval. He broke the Don's record for an individual score in Test cricket and went on to notch up 364 runs. In a desperate attempt to halt the flow of strokes Bradman put himself on to bowl, fell and sprained his ankle, so putting himself out of the match.
Hutton's courage and determination were displayed during the war, when he badly dis- located a wrist during military training. After a series of operations he was left with one arm two inches shorter than the other. Most men would have given up the game in despair. Hutton retrained himself, adopted a schoolboy's bat, and in the years 1946-56 became once more the greatest opening batsman in the world, amassing a total of over 40,000 runs, with 129 centuries and an average of 55. He was astonishingly calm, graceful and elegant in his play, performing all the strokes with classical precision, and a few which are rarely played at all. At the Parks in Oxford in, I think, 1947, I saw him carry out a leg-glide, the neatest and most economical stroke I have even seen, turning a nasty ball on the leg stump into an easy four. He also went on to become England's first professional captain, recovering the Ashes, never losing a series, and setting exemplary standards of legitimate cunning, pitch discipline and sportsmanship. He was a `verray parfit gentil knyghf, sans peur et sans reproche. Long after he had retired, I had to speak at some big public dinner, and after- wards he came up to me, said he had read one of my books, and asked for my auto- graph. I barely restrained myself from kneel- ing down. So we did an exchange of signa- tures — what would I not have given to have his in 1938!
I doubt if Sutcliffe or Hutton were ever paid much more than £20 a game. But both retired with something more important — unsullied honour and the respect of all who ever watched them play. Their memory lingers on, at least in my head, and I sus- pect among many more of those who loved the game once but now watch it, if at all, with uneasiness. Making cricket a wholly professional game, and abolishing such fix- tures as Gentlemen v. Players for class-war reasons, has led to many evils and will lead to more. I still relish my annual visit to Paul Getty's superb ground to see a high-level amateur match. But for me big-time cricket is tainted, as it was before William Ward and his friends civilised it.
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