THE DECAY OF ENGLISH GAMES.
THERE is an aspect of a question which has lately been a subject of discussion among cricketers—the question of widening the wicket—to which sufficient attention has not yet been drawn. It is an aspect which may be comprehended best, perhaps, in the observation that the suggested change in the rules of " the national game " has not interested the nation. It has interested cricketers, and especially that small and select body of cricketers usually described as "first- class." These latter would have been directly affected by a radical change in the conditions under which cricket is played, and in the case of a good many of them for a very sufficient reason. The projected change might possibly have touched their pockets. That, however, is not precisely the aspect of the question to which we have referred. What strikes us particularly is that the fact that the suggestion of widening the wicket has been made and seriously discussed is, if you look at it closely, in reality a sign of the same decay in cricket as the decay which has eaten into football, considered as a game for men. What was originally a game has become a business.
Let us see how the question of widening the wicket first originated, and why it came to be seriously discussed at a meeting of the Marylebone Cricket Club, in the members of which is vested the power of making alterations in the laws of the game. During the past twenty or thirty years a great change has come over the conditions under which "first- class " cricket has been played. Before the days of an organised county cricket championship, involving a congested table of fixtures and intricate methods of scoring points, the game was played in a far more irresponsible way. Pitches were not so carefully prepared, and the consequence was that even on what was considered a good wicket it was still possible for the bowler to get a great deal of spin on the ball, and for the batsman to find himself beaten by a ball which hung or shot. In those days there were far fewer cricket matches left drawn : the bowler, that is, was on more even terms with the batsman, and consequently the first condition of a good game was fulfilled,—namely, that it should be capable of being lost or won. Gradually, however, groundsmen, naturally anxious to provide as good a wicket as possible, found out various ways of improving pitches, and to-day, given a spell of fine weather, the wickets are so hard and true that a batsman of average skill is, as a rule, the master of the finest bowling that can be brought against him. Of course, on sodden or damaged wickets—especially when a hot sun has caked wet turf, or when exceptional drought or hard wear has made the wicket crumble—the bowler has still the upper hand. But on a " plumb " wicket he has almost everything against him, and the consequence is a dreary succession of drawn matches. Now, with that spectacle before them, what course ought the representatives of county cricket clubs to adopt if their first desire is to obtain the fulfilment of the first condition of a good game,—namely, that it shall be capable, in a reasonable time, of being lost or won ? Clearly there is one course at least open to them,—to go back to the conditions of the days in which it was the exception for cricket matches to be drawn—the days, moreover, in which some of the
greatest of cricketers played—and not to take so much trouble to get a good wicket. On a bad wicket a match may be finished in a day; on a moderate wicket it is practically certain to be finished in three days. Then why, hesitate, and why note make it a rule that no wicket shall be rolled or watered until, say, the day before any match is to take place? That would be a difficult rule to enforce, of course, bet if it were, or could be, enforced, the difficulty of drawn matches would ipco facto disappear ; the bowler would come into 11;s own again. Why, then, not try the experiment ? For one reason,—gate-money. If three-day matches end on the first day, there is two days' gate-money lost to the county club. That is the difficulty ; the game has become a business, and county clubs cannot afford to neglect opportunities of earning money.
In these days, a county club, to have any chance of seeming the cricket championship, must incur large expenses. It must sear* for., or ",attract'.'—often from another county, which is a contradiction in terms if a " county " champion- ship is to have any real meaning—capable professional bowlers and batsmen, who have to he paid high wages. In the case of amateurs, it must often be prepared, especially in dealing with young men who have not much money to spare, to make it worth while for them to play cricket instead of going into business or entering upon a serious career of any kind. Con. sequently, it has to pay the travelling and hotel expenses of these so-called amateurs, and in exceptional cases even to place assistant-secretaryships and so forth at their disposal, in order to retain them as regular members of the county team. There you have the symptom of the decay which has attacked the great game of Association football ; Rugby foot- ball, it may be admitted, still remains a game for gentlemen. In the world of sport is there anything much more melan- choly, and even degrading, than the conditions under which the Football Association Cup is played for ? Two teams are left in for the final round ; one of them, say, represents a Northern club, the other a Southern club. The day for the match is fixed, and thousands of partisans assemble, often after travelling great distances, to see the match played. The match is looked upon as a definite struggle between North and South, and immense interest is taken in it by a vast con• course of spectators. Is it a genuine match between North and South ? It may be, and probably is, nothing of the kind. It may quite conceivably happen that eight or ten of the "Northern" players were born within a dozen miles of Charing Cross, and that the majority of the Southern team are Welshmen, Lancashiremen, York. shiremen, Scots, and Irishmen. Their services have been hired; they have none of the interest in the town for which they play that a native has; next year, perhaps, a Southern player of this year will be playing for a Northern club ; it will depend whether or not he is offered more money than the club he represents can afford to give him. It is all a matter of money; and the club which can offer most money to skilful players, and so secure the services of a number of highly trained human bodies to do its work, fills its coffers and flourishes. The poorer clubs look on, jealous but impotent. They would buy the services of the best players if they could, but they cannot afford to do so. That is the vicious circle ; the club with the longest purse gets the best players; and the best players bring their club the most money.
It is perfectly true, of course, that these remarks, both as regards cricket and football, only apply to what for the sake of euphemism may be called the higher stages of these games. The great majority of genuine cricketers—men who play, when they can spare time, only for the love of a good game— recognise and regret the decay which the money element has introduced into cricket, and the spirit in which cricket should be played. It is perfectly true, too, that those who make the playing of games the chief end and interest of their lives might be worse employed; those also might be worse employed who spend day after day in watching games being played. But the point is, might they not be better employed ? Might not the players of first-class cricket and football—men, that is, who devote the best part of the year to playing r-game and being paid for playing it—serve their country and themselves better by working ? That is the aspect of the wider-wicket question which, to our
mind, is the most important. The question of the wider wicket only arose because another question was insistent, and that question was, not how to make cricket a game better worth playing—because for ordinary players it is still as good a game as it could be—but how to make it attractive to spectators who pay gate-money ; how to ensure a full three days' exhibition of game-playing with the probability of a definite result on the third day. How can any one deeply desirous of knowing that the nation to which be belongs is spending all her available energy in work and progress be unaffected by the sight of these thousands of Englishmen to whom the serious business and interest of life is nothing but the playing of a game, or rather, the playing of what should be a game ? For a game is decaying, and ceases, indeed, to be a game, so soon as the first point to be thought of in playing it is the question of money. We can see but one end to the whole business, and that is that " first-class " cricket will eventually be played solely by pro- fessionals, with possibly a sprinkling of rich men with nothing better to do. Their exhibitions of the game will be watched by thousands, perhaps, day after day, just as plays are watched by the theatre-goers. It is a lamentable prospect of misdirected energy : the only consolation being that no nation consists entirely of serious workers, and that the non-serious workers of our own nation are perhaps better employed than those of others. At least they lead healthy lives, even if the games to which they devote themselves have lost their original savour and vigour.
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