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On a Sticky Wicket 3rd January 2002 Cricket used to be about fair play; the Zimbabwe dispute shows it has become little more than TV fodder. The English Cricket Board may be playing a game - but it clearly isn't cricket. In both planning and stubbornly adhering to the proposed English cricket matches in Zimbabwe, it goes against the distinctive English idea of fair play. Hit for six by public opinion, the ECB responds by hitting below the belt and demanding to be compensated. Since it is part of the English air, it's easy for us to ignore the originality of the idea of fair play. Like a lot of etiquette it is learnt by example and practice - rather than by reading a guidebook. Fair play means respecting the other side and making sure that the adversary doesn't turn into an enemy. It's the social version of the constitutional doctrine of checks and balances. But, rather like the British constitution which has no single authorised version, fair play needs interpretation as times and circumstances change. And this political gift is what is lacking in the ECB's managerial blindness. National sport both reflects and moulds national character. To appreciate baseball is to understand American drive, where the winner takes all. Calvinistic Scotland, unsurprisingly, embraced the solitary and introspective game of golf. And, of all the English games, cricket is the one which has produced the deepest English social consequences - including boredom. The readiness to be bored for quite long periods of time - as both spectator and player - is surely part of cricket's English importance. The original three-day game which encased the tedium evolved from a pre-industrial society. Watching the weather, waiting for it to change, being prepared for adversity: these are the disciplines for survival in an agricultural world where times of plenty alternate with ones of dearth. Times of boredom mean an opportunity to plan ahead. The English Cricket Board shows not a trace of such forethought as it considers the question of its Zimbabwe games. The ECB runs a service industry for a wider sporting culture which is spectatorial and nerdy. English sport is fodder for sporting channels, game shows and presenters who talk a good game without ever having played one. Government likes sport because sports personalities are popular - and to be against sport is to be against virtue. It is now 20 years since the start of Thatcher's privatisation programme in which coal, gas and electricity left the ministerial portfolios. But, strangely, ministers still claim responsibility for sport. They bemoan failures, applaud success, and devise Panglossian strategies for "sporting excellence". This perverse nationalisation explains why the ECB thinks it can demand compensation for lack of ticket sales should the matches be cancelled. Cricket's administrators - and sometimes its players - protest their political innocence. Just as Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement of the 1890s believed in art for art's sake, the ECB believes in an art of sport which is privileged, out of time and out of context. But this is the aesthetics of fantasy. Organised entertainment games are always social events with political consequences. On visiting the Verona amphitheatre, Goethe wrote that "the object of such architecture is to make people feel at one with each other". What was true of the classical architecture was also true of the gladiatorial contests and games which went on in such arenas. They were a part of Roman government policy because ordered mass emotion is a dissolver of individual and awkward criticism. But sport's relationship to politics is not always that obvious. Sporting success is often related to national failure. The Romanian gymnasts and Russian weightlifters of the old Warsaw Pact era, like the Welsh rugby players of the 1960s, came from societies in distress. And their successes bolstered fragile nations. Sport as surrogate nationalism works best in countries which have low self-esteem. Improve the political conditions and some of the silliness of sport disappears. Katerina and Boris on both steroids and a government scholarship have disappeared from track and field. And Gareth beating the English scrum has no heirs on the pitch. But their societies are all the better for the loss. Recovering dignity and self-respect in other areas of life, they don't need that stuff any more. In contrast, much of the new English sport-obsession, especially in soccer, has exploded into life at a time when English national identity has suddenly become uncertain. It's a sign of feebleness, not of vitality. Rather like - in fact - the ECB itself. Hywel
Williams - The Guardian (UK) |