Part-time players
Sir: Bruce Anderson's plea (Politics, 15 August) for more diversity in first-class cricket, 'gentlemen' as well as 'players', is a good deal less snobbish and more practical than it might, prima facie, appear. Two things have conspired to deny our Test team the best British talent. First, organised sport has collapsed in state schools. As a result many potentially first-class cricketers have probably never even picked up a bat. Sec- ond, the remorseless nature of the first-class game (virtually seven-day cricket) means that most of the well-tutored cricketers from private schools cannot contemplate going on to play first-class cricket. They have degrees to win and careers to start. It was the South African journalist Marshall Lee who pointed out to me that many of the schoolboys at the top of Wisden's averages in their teens never feature in county crick- et. The counties insist on full-time squads.
So the answer is a return of the amateur, possibly a less provocative word than 'gen- tleman'. The counties should allow the cream of our school cricketers to play, part- time if necessary.
Peter Bazalgette
29 Kensington Park Gardens, London W11
`Of course, in the old days you had to actually go to a lunatic asylum to jeer at mad people being baited.'
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