A leisurely game, a place to muse from, an occupation inscribed with technique, finesse and desire – drama and melancholy – forming narrative and disidentifying linguistic turn-of-phrase: cricket. Test cricket, as the purist would have it. Why? A site of sociality, a site of class and racial antagonism, a site of aesthetic pleasure, a site for the literary voice where archaic fragments of England’s past stand forward, accountable and indolent; lending itself to the interpretative quality of writing as archaeological undertaking; where intent and structure determine the subject-position as a ‘writerly’ viewer.
The time on my hands during the pandemic corresponded well to a renewed interest in cricket, specifically international cricket, and particularly test cricket. A game structured through the day, with handy breaks and a leisurely pace chimed through with a meditative quality that feeds the varying levels of concentration and escapist spectacle that the glacial pace and uncertain future that has plagued the last couple years called for, at least for me.
I joined a cricket group chat of mainly old school friends, and began to occasionally contribute to a youtube channel run by one them, live commentating or reviewing particular games. Both spaces provided a forum to discuss and share ideas, opinions and factoids about ongoing matches, occasionally diving into wider issues regarding formats, racism and the women’s game, for instance. In general it was a pass-time, but one where the mind seems to replenish, still active in witnessing the aesthetic quality of stroke-play and rhythm, as well as the deep-dives into stats, and the wider discursive field, something the game is renowned for. In focusing on something seemingly sedate but with a plethora of moods, tones and associated characters, one starts to accumulate various ideas as they relate and explicate other parts of life; something like a totality emerges, as you would expect from spending prolonged time with any cultural form. In any case, here’s my stab at writing, to capture something of the game, and something of its surrounding culture, that is the compositional whole itself.
Duncan Stone’s Different Class: The Untold History of Cricket (Repeater, 2022) is an interesting foray into uncovering the repressed histories of class antagonism within the institution of cricket, namely by highlighting the importance of professionalised club cricket leagues that provided a stark contrast to the amateurism of country cricket. These club cricket leagues, which continued with aplomb well into the 1970s, were predominantly found in the North and Midlands, though the case of the South is perhaps the most elucidating. He outlines how the class fears of unruly proletarianism, sparked initially by fears of encroaching French revolutionary spirit before continuing through the various movements for political and social reform in the nineteenth century, led to a concentration and, in effect, an appropriation of the cricketing infrastructure that proliferated Surrey by the elite class. By outlawing competitive play in Surrey, and by extension the South more generally, the bourgeois-aristocrat nexus that dominated English society effectively made the game accessible to only the ‘gentleman-amateur’; an archetypal figure of Victorian ideology. Cricket was not merely a site that reflected class antagonism, but an actual lever that enacted social and political exclusion and was central to Victorian ideas of class, taste and country.
Issues of contention included: the privileging of county over club cricket, which often relegated urban areas outside of the purview of the highest form of the game; the refusal to regularise meritocratic competition through leagues, seen as ‘ungentlemanly’ and overly-commercial; thus also the refusal to develop a pyramid system that would streamline and centralise the country’s most popular sport at the time – instead football advanced this way; the formal and informal running of the international and county system by private member’s club MCC; the pricing out of working class cricketers from multiple-day first class matches through the lack of professional status and corresponding remuneration. Many of these issues remain today in various guises and will be familiar to most cricket enthusiasts.
While Stone ably delves into the machinations of how the public school elite were able to politically dominate the national institutions of cricket through to the long-overdue establishment of the English Cricket Board (ECB) in 1997, the lasting damage on the game seems irreparable. Where perhaps Stone fails is in truly examining where, conceptually, the true popularity of the sport lies in its early modern formulations. If, as he posits, from at least Elizabethan times cricket was the site of a carnivalesque bacchanal, one that cut across classes, he fails to really interrogate the social and cultural factors that laid the conditions for this form of leisurely sociality to take hold for popular mass. Thinking in terms of subaltern history, that which is not recognised or legible in hegemonic conception, the tracking of the lower classes from their originary point, prior to industrialisation though still at the cusp of contestations over modern sovereignty, may shed light onto the radical opposition to the national myths of Englishness that take their apotheosis in Victorian England.
CLR James is, rightly in my view, criticised by Stone for his naive appraisal of Victorian England in Beyond A Boundary (1963), particularly his adulation of W. G. Grace, wherein he waxes lyrical on the moralism of the day as instituted by the gentleman-amateur. While he may not have known the specific history of the club-versus-county game, he knew full well the importance of club cricket having been a close associate, and biographer of Learie Constantine, the legendary player for West Indies and Nelson CC. Nelson, situated in Lancashire, was at the time a relatively small industrial town, but one that commanded both a strong left-wing political movement and a very popular cricket club, one that paid Constantine far more than he would have earned at a county in the 1930s, despite only playing in local leagues. (You can get a flavour of all this in Mike Dibb’s 1976 documentary Beyond A Boundary.) Arguably, James was trying to situate cricket within a world-historical frame, from where he could understand the aesthetic importance of the game as it related to Britishness, however his aestheticism perhaps missed crucial class tensions in favour of an imperial facade. James compares the test match to a Greek tragedy in its literary qualities of temporality and narrative, and while I generally agree with the aesthetic thrust of his argument — much of which I can’t get into here — there lies suppressed histories attending to the structures of the game as they relate to class and race that he failed to capture.
The issue of institutional racism, particularly against Asian players, highlighted recently by Azeem Rafiq within Yorkshire CCC, is seen by Stone as an instance that stems from the same structural problems that stymied working class club cricket, namely the botched attempts at a regularised meritocratic pyramid system of leagues. While there may be some truth in that, we also know from football, where such a system is in place, that institutional racism against specifically Asian players still exists, arguably at even more virulent rates. Race is not merely another guise of class prejudice in this instance, or, perhaps more usefully, racism provides a more holistic insight into cricket’s governing ideology that would refute modern cricket’s classless pretensions. As BBC’s documentary Race and Pace: The West Indians in East Lancashire (2017) tracks, Nelson CC has become a key battleground for racial integration with Asian players substantially making up many of its teams in recent times, this in the context of a local authority that had the last BNP councillor elected. Once known as Red Nelson due to the prominence of the Communist Party in the town, one could likely track the post-industrial death-throes of the English working class through this one fractal, towards its provincial navel-gazing.
Much of this comes back to this underlying, subterranean impulse that drives social desire, whereupon cricket is but one site of emanation and expression. I’d venture to say there’s a subalternity here, some way to think the cosmopolitan on the cricket green as commensurate with a repressed carnivalesque; the commons as the sensibility of a pre-history, found in dribs and drabs that we may call immanent to the cultural object. Of course any utopian thinking like this must contend with the capture of the commercial – the T20 effect of the Indian Premier League for one.
I have personally dipped in and out of T20 cricket, often mesmerised with the graphics, colours and pageantry, I also have very little memory of what I actually witnessed. The forced spectacle fades rapidly. Conversely, while I have been making slight, long-drawn out attempts to actually play again, much of my conscious day-dreaming consists of visualising shots and bowling techniques. A kind of practice of technique for the mind, sharpening neural performance, which also tends to make me think about writing a lot. Finesse and style. I probably don’t have it, at least not in any exceptional manner, though I guess I’d like to think I refute the idea of individual talent in its individuated contextless form. Social context animates individual action as compositional whole; whence a concatenation of aspects are mediated and emanate. At least that’s the idea.
Perhaps it's simple: cricket-as-game offers modes of respite and autonomy, within and against capitalist time. Or put another way by James in indomitable fashion: ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket knows?’ What do they know of us who only we know.