Test cricket
Sir: In his article 'What's wrong with Test cricket' (September 15), Labour MP Roy Hattersley suggests that the game is " in endemic decline."
This is a very interesting admission, especially coming from a Labour member of Parliament. For two dictionaries at hand defined 'endemic' as special to one's tribe ', and indigenous'. Now, let us caste our minds back more than three years to when Mr Hattersley's own Labour Party were in power, when, with the active connivance of the Labour Cabinet via their Home Secretary Mr James Callaghan, a certain foreign upstart named Peter HaM, with excessive publicity which is always readily available for Leftist causes, managed to get the imminent England versus South Africa Test series called off.
During that crisis two weeks, when Mr Hain's supporters were threatening all sorts of militant action, I wrote to both Mr Callaghan and MCC Secretary Mr Billy Griffith, suggesting that, the English character being what it is, our game of cricket would die if such 'a Test series were called off on political grounds. I reminded them that you can muck us English about no end, and, with our placid sort. of tolerance, we would take almost everything with equanimity — but NOT the politically motivated banning of our cricket. But, of course, my urgent overtures, and those of many other equally angry Englishmen, were ignored.
And so have the seasons passed until, this very month, Labour MP Mr Roy Hattersley (no doubt unconsciously reflecting the true English subconscious) diagnoses that English cricket is " in endemic decline."
This death sentence on our muchloved brand of cricket is exactly what I warned Mr Hattersley's own Labour government about shortly before, contemptuously disregarding us the English (a Parliamentary habit in these postwar years), they virtually endorsed the threats and acts of rowdy mobs in giving their official blessing and, indeed, exerting their ruling pressure which promptly got that England Ni South Africa Test series cancelled. Thus does cricket die . .
Geoffrey Wood The Garden Cottage, Ightham Court,, Kent.
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