Alex Massie
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Horrific, at least to modern sensibilities; but this is a history soaked in guts and ‘claret’. The English have long enjoyed a spot of ultra-violence, whether in the field or the ring or, it does not seem much of a stretch to say, in the capitals of Europe as and when the England football team is paying a visit. They riot because they can and because a riot is a liberty. Free will, you see, and if it appals all the right people, then good. For ‘the English civil war was a sporting as well as a religious war, and it did not end in 1660’. Puritanism waged war on the parish — Colls is elegiac on this and, indeed, much else — and, consequently ‘King James’s Book of Sports deliberately endorsed Sunday as a day of sport’. Much good it did him and his successors: ‘In 1643, Parliament hanged the Book of Sports in public.’
This is much more than a history of sport; it is really an alternative history of England itself. Colls ranges wherever his fancy takes him. So this book encompasses everything from public schools to Methodism, via enclosure and the meaning of England’s love affair with equestrian painting. There are bold, imaginative leaps too. Thus: ‘It is possible to see the Durham Miners Gala and Northern Ireland’s Orange Parades as two of the 19th century’s most long-lasting popular constitutional performances.’ Each is a form of sport; each is a declaration of meaning accompanied by a certain measure of defiance. This book is full of moments that pull you up short and make you think.
‘Patriotism, in these circumstances,’ Colls writes, ‘was not something imposed from above.’ In this, as in so much else, England really was different from much of continental Europe. It may seem a curious thing to say, but any Remainer who reads this terrific book will understand Brexit a little bit more fully than they did previously.
Other games have rules, but cricket has laws. As Mike Brearley notes in Spirit of Cricket, ‘the game has been a social cement in England’, and that — which is something Colls appreciates too — has given the summer game a classless identity in a land otherwise often riven by class. It makes cricket distinctive and unusual and worth preserving for that reason alone. Cricket helped make England a civilised country, and then helped keep it that way. After all, as G.M. Trevelyan suggested, not entirely in jest, if the French aristocracy had played cricket with their peasants, the Revolution might have been deemed unnecessary.
For Brearley, ‘the spirit of cricket — like “truth” or “goodness” or “the rule of law” — alludes to an ideal, an aspiration, but it also recognises a reality’. It can live in shades of grey, but you know it when you see it, or feel it, or show it.
Brearley, one of the few test cricketers with a second career as a psychoanalyst, is the soul of moderation and perspective. ‘Let’s expect a lot’ from the game — among which is the duty to remember it is a game — ‘but not too much’. So
don’t hype cricket up into something elevated, a golden calf, or imagine that it is too special. If we do, we risk being left with nothing… or with something flat and boring, dull as ditchwater: a drab list of solemn platitudes.
Sport, like life, should be a raucous thing. It is not, as the Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once put it, half tongue-in-cheek, a matter of life and death, for ‘it’s much more important than that’. Or, rather, without sport — or art — existence is only a matter of life and death. ‘And yet, and yet. Cricket is special,’ Brearley concludes, ‘and our better selves can prevail.’
I think Ian Ridley would agree with that. Cricket is the McGuffin for his book The Breath of Sadness, which is really an account and exploration of grief. Following the death from cancer of his wife — the sportswriter Vikki Orvice — Ridley descended into darkness. ‘It would be a fanciful overstatement to suggest that cricket saved me that year after Vikki passed,’ he writes; but a summer spent amid the ‘gentle competitiveness’ of the County Championship certainly helped him, as he puts it, to ‘recover from grief’.
Ridley, an accomplished sportswriter himself, is wincingly honest, and the result is a moving, perceptive, book that is not really about cricket but, instead, is a love song. Like all the best such tunes it is a sad one, yet also, in the end, life-enhancing.
Because you read about poaching
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