SPOJRTING ASPECT
Cricket and the
By H. J. FAIRLIE pROFESSOR DENIS BROGAN, in his excellent book on the English people, ridicules the idea that cricket is the English national game. Look, he says, at the millions who follow association football. Look at the national rite which is performed annually at Wembley. Can anyone doubt- that soccer, the game of the industrial proletariat, is in reality the national game? Professor Brogan, I have always thought, for once missed the point; and it is a point which the Professor of Political Science at Cambridge—who, after all, had the advantage of an Oxford education—should have been the first to grasp. It is agreed, one may assume; that the English, in the arrange- ment of their public life, are skilled at preserving the form and changing the reality. Indeed, the fostering of necessary illusions is the real contribution which the English have made to solving the problem of how men may live peacefully together. Not to put too fine a point on it, they have tried to show the world that deceit is the better part of unwritten constitutions. One pretends that things are not what they are, with the result that the reality of politics can go on without popular passions being too aroused—because popular passions are engaged by the forms.
All this is elementary text-book stuff. One of the weaknesses of so many Continental democracies is that they do not have a false front to hide the real beastliness of democratic politics. (This is not an attack on democracy. All forms of government are beastly. The modern fallacy is to assume that democracy is in some way more virtuous.) if the people of England had the reality of their political processes laid bare to them, they would be so shocked at the manoeuvres, the duplicities, the double-talk which are necessary to it that they would turn in horror to the first benevolent despot who offered to save them. Instead, the English system deceives the people into believing that what they see is the reality, and they are untroubled by the nightmare beneath.
Professor Brogan presumably remembers enough of what he learned at those two nurseries of political thinking—Glasgow University and Balliol—to agree with what has been said so far. Why not, then, realise that the same principles are at work in the field of sport? Indeed, since the English try to take their rules of political behaviour from sport, is it not reasonable to expect that sport will show these principles to be operating even more clearly than in the, world of politics? Of course, Professor Brogan is right : it is an illusion that cricket is the national game. But the illusion is far more important than the reality he so painstakingly reveals.
Let us consider an up-to-date example. The English are as bad losers at sport as any other people. (They could only pretend that they were good losers in the days when there was no chance of their losing.) This being so, ponder the catas- trophe it would have been if soccer had been accepted as the national game—and England had still been defeated 7-1 by Hungary. Questions would have been asked in Parliament. Call-up arrangements would have been altered to exempt from national service any youth who could kick a ball. The Chan- cellor of the Exchequer would have had to amend his Finance Bill in order to assist the League football clubs. The Lancet would have urged the use of medical hypnosis before inter- national games. Universities would have given scholarships to soccer players from Highbury.
Instead, the worst that we have had is the series in the Daily Express on the ' Guilty Men of Soccer.' The English, in fact, can accept the fact that they have been defeated at soccer with a stiff upper lip—because it does not touch the real roots of their national pride, because soccer is not the national game. It would be far different if they were defeated at what is accepted to be the national game, cricket. Then, indeed, they would feel humbled, and the MCC selectors would not just be the Guilty Men of Cricket '; they would be run out of public life. Thig is where the final fiendish cleverness of the English comes in. They keep cricket, their national game, within the Commonwealth, inhere defeat is acceptable and respectable.- All this passes Professor Brogan by, which is perhaps not surprising, since he was born within the sound of the Hampden Roar. But even though he may come from a country where they seem to play football even at the height of summer, his long sojourn in England should have prevented any native prejudices from blinding his judgement. For the English, who are sports mad, cricket is as valuable a safety valve in the field of sport as the more popular aspects of the Monarchy are in the political system. Soccer, which is in reality the national game, is never allowed to get out of proportion in men's minds —as, say, baseball does in some American universities—because all the sillier emotions which sport arouses are harmlessly focused on cricket, which manifestly is not, by Professor Brogan's definition, the national game.
The task of preserving the illusion that cricket is the national game is an important one. Politicians have to play their part; not just by making discriminatory concessions to cricket, as the present Chancellor of the Exchequer has done, but by introducing as often as possible into their speeches metaphors taken from the cricket field. Writers also have to play their part; all the pastoral euphuisms of Mr. Neville Cardus and his imitators, all the invasions of the cricket field by such men as Sir John Squire and Sir James Barrie, all the anthologies of cricket literature—one almost wrote cricket liturgy—are the bricks and mortar of this great and necessary exercise in self- deception. Professor Brogan should go to Fenner's one after- noon and, if it rains, read them.
Lastly, the schoolmasters and headmasters have their part to play. They must encourage among their young charges the illusion that cricket has .some connection with the esprit de corps. (The puritan in the English must always find some moral defence of his pleasures, and he defends his addiction to sports by the argument. that they encourage team spirit, working together, esprit de corps.) Cricket encourages the team spirit less than perhaps any other team game. Except possibly in the field, the whole game is an excuse for individual exhibitionism, for individual feats of glory with the bat or the ball. But the illusion must be preserved, and so far the headmasters of England have kept it alive remarkably well.
So, let me give this advice to Professor Brogan before his book on the English people is' reprinted, as it surely and deservedly will be. Take time off from the'Round Britain Quiz' and go round England on your 'Sunday afternoons. Go to the village cricket matches which have been celebrated in so much ad as well as so much good prose. Put Bagehot in your cket when you go, and as the scene begins to have its hypnotic effect, as you begin to feel that you are being initiated into the mystery, take your Bagehot out, and open it at the chapters on the Monarchy and the House of Lords. You will then Understand both Bagehot and cricket better.
Previous page
