If a film director were asked to create an \u2018establishing shot\u2019 of spectators watching a cricket match, it would probably show a bunch of male buffers from England with yellow-and-red striped MCC ties and matching faces deploring most of the events on the field.<\/p>\n
For many, cricket is indelibly associated with the elites who tend to dominate not only its administration but also its ideology and its aesthetics. Much of the sport\u2019s literature thrums with nostalgia for vanished rural idylls or coming-of-age stories in which cricket turns feeble boys into manly empire-builders.<\/p>\n
Yet, in reality, this has always been a game of two halves\u00a0\u2014 not just an elite pursuit, but a global sport enjoyed by the masses, now played internationally by men and women in more than a hundred countries, the great majority of which were never part of Britain\u2019s political or commercial empires. Through the decades, subversives have resisted the capture of cricket and tried to reconquer it for the left.<\/p>\n
What follows is a celebration of them: a brief highlight reel from this often overlooked history of radicalism.<\/p>\n
This list begins with Tom Paine. Citizen Tom, author of the world-shaping Rights of Man, pillar of two great modern revolutions, was a regular bowls player and was recorded in attendance at a meeting of Hambledon Cricket Club in 1796. It was no small matter for Paine to have been there, since at the time he was living in Paris, having been sentenced to death in England on charges of treason. (Either the record is incorrect\u00a0\u2014 a practical joke by the club secretary, perhaps\u00a0\u2014 or Paine was such a cricket fan that he had entered the country surreptitiously for the gathering.)<\/p>\n
The most famous cricketing joke has a radical origin. After a dramatic defeat at home by Australia in 1882, Reginald Shirley Brooks, a leading campaigner for the Cremation Society, fighting to reform the obsolete Victorian rules on the disposal of the dead, wrote a death notice for English cricket. Thereafter, the Test Match trophy between England and Australia became known as the Ashes.<\/p>\n
In the Victorian era, an even more radical figure than Paine was a notable player at first-class level for Cambridge University and Sussex. H.M. Hyndman introduced Marxism to England and founded the country\u2019s first avowedly socialist party, the Social Democratic Federation, in disappointment at not getting his cricket Blue at Cambridge. One of the early followers of Hyndman and the SDF was another fanatical cricketer, although a less talented one, John Burns.<\/p>\n
A trade unionist who agitated against capitalism, war and imperialism, and in favour of women\u2019s suffrage, Burns became one of the first MPs to be elected for the Labour Party (with Liberal support), as well as the first Cabinet Minister of working-class origins in the Liberal governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith. He was a uniquely successful President of the Local Government Board (normally a political backwater) who promoted public works, especially working-class housing. Amid all this, he found time to play for Parliament\u2019s cricket team, the Lords & Commons, often as captain.<\/p>\n
Clem Attlee\u2019s postwar government, the most transformative of the lot, was packed with cricket-lovers, led by Attlee himself, who wrote of his childhood worship of W.G. Grace. Attlee\u2019s press secretary persuaded him to install a news ticker at Downing Street on the grounds that it would keep him up-to-date with the first-class cricket scores\u00a0\u2014 but the PM was horrified when his \u2018cricket machine\u2019 suddenly started spewing out unfavourable political stories. The then Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, meanwhile made an early (and futile) attempt at cricket diplomacy by taking a bemused Yakov Malik, Stalin\u2019s UN representative, to a match.<\/p>\n
Later Labour governments ostentatiously switched their support to football, \u2018the people\u2019s game\u2019, and allowed cricket to disappear from free-to-air television and from state schools and public open spaces\u00a0\u2014 although when England won a thrilling Ashes series in 2005, Tony Blair discovered that cricket was popular after all and invited the hungover team to a hastily organized reception in Downing Street.<\/p>\n
Affection for the sport was just as widespread in the cultural realm, with left-modernists like Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter known for their fandom. Beckett remains the only Nobel Prizewinner to have played first-class cricket. His obituary in the Wisden Cricketers Almanack in 1989 dwells on his early promise as a cricketer at school and describes his stunning plays both at college and for the Gentlemen of Ireland, suggesting that his literary career was something of a tragic anticlimax.<\/p>\n
Wisden took the same approach the following year with Sam Silkin, tracing his cricketing career from Dulwich College to Cambridge to Glamorgan, and recalling how, having had little success with his leg-breaks for the county, he was obliged to turn to law and politics, \u2018eventually\u2019 becoming Attorney General.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the best book about cricket was written by the Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James. Beyond A Boundary (1963) records his youthful immersion in English cricketing instruction books and general literature, challenging the assumption that the skills and values he learnt there were reserved for the white people who ruled the West Indian islands and dominated their cricket cultures.<\/p>\n
After many years devoted to Trotskyist theory and practice in Britain, the United States and Mexico (including a doctrinal dispute with Trotsky himself), James at last returned to the West Indies and played a leading role in the campaign to make Frank Worrell their first black cricket captain. This was a natural proxy for the wider struggle for independence: if the West Indian territories did not need white tutelage to become a major cricket power, they did not need it for anything.<\/p>\n
Almost at an equal calibre to Beyond The Boundary are two later books by the American Marxist writer Mike Marqusee. In Anyone But England (1995), he takes aim at the snobbery, racism and commercial imperatives which had shaped English cricket, lurking beneath the surface of its idealized and largely mythical conventional history. And in War Minus the Shooting (1997)\u00a0\u2014 a title taken from George Orwell\u00a0\u2014 he analysed the incipient forces of globalised capital taking over the sport at international level. His remedy for all the ills of modern cricket was democracy, restoring the power of its marginalized fans. Far ahead of his time, Marqusee would be even more outraged to see the current role of live spectators, reduced to extras for cutaway shots in televised entertainment.<\/p>\n
Among cricketers themselves, there are more W.G. Graces than H.M. Hyndmans: players who used cricket to accumulate wealth or at least security and status, rather than converting these into tools of political struggle. Yet some stand out in their willingness to challenge the establishment. One of the greatest players of modern times is Kumar Sangakkara of Sri Lanka. Along with his\u00a0remarkable contemporaries Mahela Jayawardene and Muttiah Muralitharan, he supported many efforts at relief and reconciliation for his country after its traumatic civil war.<\/p>\n
In a magnificent lecture to the MCC, given at some personal sacrifice since he was still a player subject to the discipline of its cricket authorities, Sangakkara denounced the corruption and clientelism which pervaded his country\u2019s cricket administration\u00a0\u2014 and, by implication, those of other cricket nations.<\/p>\n
The Australian cricket captain, Pat Cummins, made himself a leading campaigner against climate change and environmental degradation, now the greatest threats to the survival of cricket worldwide. Cummins took a special risk by protesting against the Australian Cricket Board\u2019s long relationship with Alinta Energy, a company heavily invested in coal and gas.<\/p>\n
In England, a handful of cricketers and cricket-lovers refused to stay silent on the collusion between the English cricket establishment and the white-supremacist regime in South Africa. The best-known were John Arlott, David Sheppard and Mike Brearley. Arlott was so revolted by what he saw covering England\u2019s tour of South Africa in the first year of its Nationalist government that he refused to go back there, putting his early career at the BBC in jeopardy. The humanity of Arlott\u2019s commentaries was an inspiration to excluded cricketers in South Africa. He would eventually secure the English lifeline that allowed Basil D\u2019Oliveira to be acknowledged for his greatness.<\/p>\n
Many in this long line of radical cricketers were imbued with nostalgia for a cricketing past that had vanished or may never have existed. This should not be a surprise. Nostalgia can be an insurrectionary force as well as a reactionary one. England\u2019s great protests\u00a0\u2014 the Peasants Revolt, the Civil War, resistance to enclosures and mechanization, the Chartists\u00a0\u2014 were all driven by this impulse. Looking back can often be a way of looking forward. Edward Coke invoked the past to justify Parliament\u2019s resistance to Stuart absolutism by inventing the common law and reviving a forgotten Magna Carta.<\/p>\n
Today, it seems that anyone who is nostalgic about the cricket played in the past, especially first-class long-form cricket, has no choice but to be a radical insurrectionary. Traditional cricket, with its aesthetic and moral values, has been overwhelmed by a neoliberal world where cricket has become the plaything of market forces and vested interests. National and international governance of cricket does nothing to resist this trend. Instead, it merely invents more and more spurious forms of cricket to sell for commercial exploitation. Cricket will not be saved until these weak and complicit governors are conveyed to the tumbrils by mobs of sentimental red-faced buffers. With the ghost of Tom Paine marching alongside.<\/p>\n