Cricket in fiction, best writing

Rudyard Kipling argued that athletic contests should not be treated, "as if issues depended upon them as vital to our race as those decided at Trafalgar or Waterloo."

In his poem, The Islanders, he writes about flannelled fools . . .

http://war-poets.blogspot.com/2009/02/flannelled-fools-and-muddied-oafs.html

In a letter from 1902, he wrote with contempt of the "d-d hired pros" who were making money playing cricket in the in the recent tests in Australia. In his view they should've been fighting in SA, (The Boer War.) He said he wished he'd written "hired fools" instead of flannelled, and, "that might have made my meaning clearer. But as usual people have gone off on a side issue."

So, he wasn't a fan then!

Bradman wrote:

taipan wrote:The other point that no one has mentioned is that there were numerous references to cricket gambling in the Flashman book.

In the mid-late 1800s gambling corrupted the English game so much it was effectively stamped out by the bookies who refused to take bets on it.

But but but.

I think that rather turns history on its head!

The point is, the game had its genesis as an aristocratic sport in the countryside, depending largely on bets for sometimes high stakes. Naturally enough, as soon as stars were spotted, they were hired, often per match - as mercenaries if you like. For similar reasons, various forms of cheating were entirely normal in the game from its very origins, and certainly once cricket became a little more widespread, and the big stakes came in.

Derek Birley points this out very clearly in his Social History of English Cricket, contradicting later (and ever since the latter 19th century, very common) views that the game has been in some sort of tragic lamentable (etc.) permanent ethical decay from its origins and its supposed golden ages.

He points out that the new "high-minded" turn went hand in hand with a "virility cult" and a "muscular Christianity" (with the favouring of supposed "amateurism" over professionalism) that was especially driven by the English private schools precisely from the mid-19th century you mention. (And Tom Brown's Schooldays provided several quotes for ever after ....)

And in that same spirit of "purity", the unbearably snobbish MCC was prepared to starve the counties of livelihoods and the profession of cricket altogether fromt he same era onwards, through its domineering grip on the game - and its rewriting of the history of cricket as a supposedly altruistic competition of noble-minded gentlemen.

This "high-minded turn" BTW also led in a straight line to Henry Newbolt's famously imperial claims in his Vitai Lampada.

"Play up! Play up! And play the game!" - Which - like an imperialist version of "Two Little Boys" (!) - is repeated in a different, more serious context than cricket.


Vitai Lampada
("They Pass On The Torch of Life")

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night --
Ten to make and the match to win --
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote --
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

The sand of the desert is sodden red, --
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; --
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the School is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind --
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938)


I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer a leavening of professionalism myself. And some debate over whys and wherefores, and what actually IS "cricket" or is "not cricket". ....

And debate also whether cricket is or shoudl be the ethical measure of all things.