The Changing Face of Cricket

From Imperial to Global Game

Dominic Malcolm, Jon Gemmell, Dominic Malcolm, Jon Gemmell, Nalin Mehta, Dominic Malcolm, Jon Gemmell, Nalin Mehta

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138880542
• eBook ISBN: 9781317969310
• Edition: 1

For cricket enthusiasts there is nothing to match the meaningful contests and excitement generated by the game's subtle shifts in play. Conversely, huge swathes of the world's population find cricket the most obscure and bafflingly impenetrable of sports. The Changing Face of Cricket attempts to account for this paradox.

The Changing Face of Cricket provides an overview of the various ways in which social scientists have analyzed the game's cultural impact. The book's international analysis encompasses Australia, the Caribbean, England, India, Ireland, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. Its interdisciplinary approach allies anthropology, history, literary criticism, political studies and sociology with contributions from cricket administrators and journalists. The collection addresses historical and contemporary issues such as gender equality, global sports development, the impact of cricket mega-events, and the growing influence of commercial and television interests culminating in the Twenty20 revolution.

Whether one loves or hates the game, understands what turns square legs into fine legs, or how mid-offs become silly, The Changing Face of Cricket will enlighten the reader on the game's cultural contours and social impact and prove to be the essential reader in cricket studies.

This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Cricket and modernity: international and interdisciplinary perspectives on the study of the Imperial Game

Dominic Malcolm^a, Jon Gemmell^b and Nalin Mehta^c*

^aSchool of Sport and Exercise Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK; ^bKennet School, Thatcham, Berkshire, UK; ^cSchool of Social Science, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

Cricket is a peculiar sport. Whilst cricket, like the majority of sports, was ‘invented’ in England, it emerged around a century before the other major international team sports – i.e. football and rugby – that currently compete for public and academic attention. Whilst football and rugby emerged in opposition to each other, a consequence, Dunning and Sheard argue, of the status rivalry between Rugby and Eton public schools,¹ cricket seems to have emerged out of consensus, the 1755 code of rules being ‘settled by the several cricket clubs, particularly that of the Star and Garter Club in Pall Mall’ (emphasis added).² Moreover, pupils at Eton, Harrow and Winchester regularly played cricket between themselves and against each other prior to both the nineteenth-century reform of the prefect-fagging system which Dunning and Sheard cite as a precondition to the development of football and rugby,³ and the development of Muscular Christianity and the cult of athleticism which Mangan, amongst others, has argued was significant in the educational adoption of team sports and their diffusion into wider British society in the nineteenth century.⁴ Though currently undergoing significant upheaval (see Mehta, Gemmell and Malcolm’s conclusion to this collection), cricket also had a (relatively) undisputed national governing body, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), some 100 years before the conflict-ridden formation of the Football Association (FA) in 1863 and the Rugby Football Union (RFU) in 1871.⁵

The peculiarity of cricket’s development extends to the internationalization of the game. As befits the historical roots of the respective games, Scotland and England contested the first international football and rugby matches in 1870 and 1872 respectively (interestingly the latter staged at the West of Scotland Cricket Ground), yet the first international cricket match was played between Canada and the United States in 1844, thus pre-empting the English and Scottish footballers by 26 years. Rather contrarily, whilst the English were reluctant participants in the early bureaucratization of international football and rugby union, they were firmly at the helm of the internationalization of cricket. The English FA declined a number of requests to assume leadership of the fledgling international governing body in the 1890s, joining a year after FIFA was established. The relationship continued to be acrimonious, with the FA twice resigning its membership during the inter-war years.⁶ Similarly the RFU was not an original member of the International Rugby Football Board (initially consisting of Scotland, Ireland and Wales) but joined in 1890, four years after its formation. In contrast to this, when, in 1907, Abe Bailey, the President of the South African Cricket Association, suggested that an Imperial Cricket Board be established, the President of the MCC, Lord Chesterfield, and the redoubtable Lord Harris, were instrumental in placating initial objections from Australia and hosted the meetings which led to the formation of the Imperial Cricket Conference (latterly the International Cricket Council or ICC) in 1909. The involvement and dominance of the English in this international venture was formally cemented with the President and Secretary of the MCC installed as the ICC’s ex-officio Chairman and ex-officio Secretary respectively.

Thus cricket has developed along a somewhat different trajectory to that of many of the team games which currently dominate our sporting landscape and, not surprisingly, the game’s peculiarity remains today. Whilst cricket, like football and rugby, is a fully professional sport, closely integrated with media companies and commercial sponsors and part of, and subject to, the broad set of social processes we describe as globalization, its relative popularity is confined to distinct populations (and as the contents of this collection illustrate, primarily the residents of the nation-states of the former British Empire). For some, cricket engages the passions like no other sport. For enthusiasts there is nothing to match the tension and excitement generated by subtle shifts in the game (and its longer versions in particular). For many people in cricket (test) playing nations, no other sport throws up such meaningful contests, which resonate so closely with identity and history. This has much to do with cricket’s place in the British colonizing mission. Equally, cricket has taken on new meanings in the post-colonial world. In this context, for instance, the Indian sociologist Ashis Nandy has famously argued that ‘cricket is an Indian game, invented accidentally by the English’,⁷ and the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha has noted, only partially in jest, that only five things have kept India united: the army, the railways, the English language, bollywood and cricket.⁸ Conversely, it remains the case that huge swathes of the world’s population find cricket the most obscure and bafflingly impenetrable of sports.

Modernity and modern sports forms

Given these brief observations, a more systematic comparison of the similarities and differences between cricket and other sports (and team games in particular) is perhaps warranted. Before introducing the contents of this collection, therefore, we will use this introduction to compare and contrast the structural properties of cricket as a game form with what others have suggested are the dominant characteristics of modern sports. To begin with, however, we need to establish what we mean by ‘modern’, and what distinguishes modern sports from their pre-modern counterparts?

‘Modern’ can be taken to mean ‘up to date’ or ‘contemporary’, but analytically it is more useful to use the term to mean ‘not traditional’. Modern, in this sense, sums up the distinctiveness, complexity and dynamism of a range of social processes which developed in Western Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which, cumulatively, marked a distinct break from traditional ways of living. Some of the more commonly cited features of this transformation include: the development and application of more efficient forms of food production and the subsequent replacement of agriculture as the dominant form of productive activity by industrial manufacture (the industrial revolution); the growth of the capitalist mode of production, capitalist organizations and capitalist ways of thinking; population growth and migration from the countryside to the city (urbanization); new (largely ‘democratic’) forms of government, the growth of the state and secularization; Western colonization of the rest of the world; and, stemming from the Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century, the emergence of new, rational scientific ways of understanding the natural and social worlds which heralded an era of great medical, scientific and technological innovation and the belief in the inevitable and continual progress and advancement of humanity. At the risk of offending postmodernists, sport as we know it today constitutes an explicitly modern institution. Most sports developed in the same time and space as modernity more generally (nineteenth-century Western Europe), are structured by the same set of ideas (progress, rationality, individualism) and have been influenced by the same social processes (industrialization, urbanization, colonization and globalization).

Two of the most useful schema for delineating the specific characteristics of modern sport have been provided by American historian Allen Guttmann and British sociologists, Eric Dunning and Kenneth Sheard. In Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players, Dunning and Sheard list 15 characteristics which distinguish modern sports from their folk game antecedents. These are: specific, formal organization; elaborate, written rules, legitimated by rational-bureaucratic means; rules changed on a rational-bureaucratic basis; national and international standardization of rules; fixed participant numbers and spatial and temporal boundaries to play; importance of fairness and equality rather than natural or social differences; high role differentiation between players (e.g. between defence and offence); strict distinction between playing and spectating roles; high structural differentiation of (i.e. little overlap between) game forms; formal social control of players, with outside agencies to enforce rule compliance, etc.; relatively low levels of socially tolerated violence; the generation of controlled, sublimated ‘battle excitement’; an emphasis on skill rather than physical force; participation through individual choice rather than obligation to community; contests which are nationally and internationally meaningful rather than just locally significant; and recognized hierarchies of playing standards, often rewarded through monetization.⁹

Guttmann, in From Ritual to Record, identifies seven interdependent characteristics of modern sport: 1) secularism – participation in modern sport is rarely related to formal aspects of religious worship; 2) equality – in modern sports considerable stress is placed on the importance of equal opportunity for participation (in the sense that nobody is formally barred) and on literally and metaphorically providing participants with a ‘level playing field’; 3) specialization – in modern sports we clearly distinguish between game forms and increasingly expect elite participants to specialize in terms of one particular sport, and a particular role within that sport; 4) bureaucratization – modern sports are not spontaneously organized or ad hoc, but are administered centrally, often by people who are not themselves participants; 5) rationalization – modern sports are underpinned by an instrumental rationality which leads events to be staged in specially constructed venues with increasing human control over environmental conditions, equipment which is standardized and regulated, and participants who are prepared using the latest scientific techniques and advances in knowledge; 6) quantification – in modern sport actions are translated into numerical data and participants’ performances are measured, recorded and compared; and 7) the quest for records – spectators expect participants in modern sports to produce increasingly advanced performances through which we can see the progression of humanity.¹⁰

It is not our intention to explore the differences between these two models, or to make a claim for the superiority of one over the other. Indeed, there is a great deal of overlap between these two works and perhaps the one major difference – the role of Elias’s theory of civilizing processes in the work of Dunning and Sheard and the emphasis they place on the level of violence in modern sports compared to their folk antecedents – is embraced by Guttmann who has argued that ‘the evolution from premodern to modern sports can be construed as an instance of a civilizing process’.¹¹ Taken together, however, these descriptions of the characteristics of specifically modern sports forms provide a useful framework through which to examine the peculiarity of contemporary cricket.

Cricket as a modern sports form

Cricket, of course, exhibits many of the characteristics of a modern sport. Though particularly in India cricket may evoke the passion and commitment more traditionally associated with established religions, since its codification in the eighteenth century, cricket has been a secular game in the sense that it is not formally played in honour, or with the blessing, of gods. It has a long history of a bureaucratic control over rule changes,¹² and the recent relocation of the ICC from London to Dubai shows that the game is subject to the same hard-nosed commercialism that influences the dealings of other international sports federations (see Mani in this collection).¹³ Currently running to 115 pages, cricket is governed, in Dunning and Sheard’s terms, by elaborate written rules (or laws as they are called in cricket), and indeed many critics of the game argue that the complexity of these rules is a significant barrier to developing the popularity of the game.¹⁴ Moreover, as Dunning and Sheard suggest, cricketing success depends rather more on skill than physical force and, again, critics of the game sometimes comment on the body shape of certain cricketers which suggest a lack of physical fitness. The contemporary game also exhibits relatively low levels of socially tolerated violence compared to its premodern antecedents.¹⁵

Indeed, in some respects cricket is the archetypal modern sport. Cricket publications are replete with quantified data and it is perhaps only baseball which fosters a similar veneration of statistics and records. Few match commentaries pass without the mention of any number of records; the highest partnership for a particular wicket against a particular country, the best bowling figures at a particular venue, etc. The average edition of Wisden contains approximately 1,000 pages of numerical data and 50 pages of text and its main competitor, the Playfair Cricket Annual, provides much of the same. That Wisden is described as the ‘bible’ of cricket demonstrates the traditional importance of quantification to followers of the game. That cricket-orientated websites are similarly packed with statistics shows the extent to which this tradition continues and has been internationally diffused.

Similarly few sports are as widely accredited as being infused with an ethos of fair play and no sport has provided as many phrases to the English language which encapsulate honour and fairness (e.g. ‘it’s not cricket’). No doubt aspects of this ideology of fairness are based on myth and romanticism. Bodyline is perhaps the most often cited example in this regard but, given that cricket is so clearly tied to the colonizing mission of the British Empire, few would argue that its history is not also inextricably tied to the subordination and exploitation of subaltern populations. Some would also claim that commercialization has eroded these values to the extent that cricket is ‘not what it was’, whilst others argue that such changes are not worth mourning (see the comments of Jagmohan Dalmiya in the concluding contribution to this collection). It remains the case, however, that only in cricket (though golf comes close in this respect) do the laws of the game contain a section which explicitly addresses the importance of sportsmanship and formally prescribes the required ‘Spirit of the Game’.

Yet in other respects cricket is peculiarly unmodern. To begin with we can point to the non-standardized nature of the laws. This is not to say that laws are re-negotiated before every contest for, as noted above, cricket has a comprehensive, complex and relatively fixed set of laws. However cricket has multiple and co-existing game forms; that is to say, ‘test’ or ‘first class’ matches, the so-called one-day game consisting of one innings per side of approximately 50 overs,¹⁶ and most recently Twenty20 cricket (see Steen’s contribution to this collection for a discussion of their co-existence). Whilst football and rugby union also have competing game forms (‘5-a-side’ and ‘Sevens’ respectively) their relationships to the main game form are qualitatively different. First, these games use standardized equipment (albeit with a smaller pitch and goals for ‘5-a-side’ football) whilst one-day cricket may be played under artificial lights (to date, first class matches have only been played under lights in South Africa) using a white ball which many believe behaves differently to the red ball used in the longer version of the game. Second, and most importantly, the hierarchy of game forms in football and rugby is much clearer and more widely agreed upon. Whereas FIFA produce a single table ranking the football playing nations of the world, the ICC produce two, one each for both test matches and one day internationals (ODIs). Moreover, the differential status and popularity of the two forms of cricket is reflected in the playing calendars of the different nations. For instance, whilst England’s most capped one-day player is Alec Stewar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Abstracts
• 1 Cricket and modernity: international and interdisciplinary perspectives on the study of the Imperial Game
• 2 Naturally played by Irishmen: a social history of Irish cricket
• 3 South African cricket and British imperialism, 1870 – 1910
• 4 Irish Australians, postcolonialism and the English game
• 5 ‘From far it look like politics’: C.L.R. James and the canon of English cricket literature
• 6 ‘Fiery Fred’: Fred Trueman and cricket celebrity in the 1950s and early 1960s
• 7 Rebellion, race and Rhodesia: international cricketing relations with Rhodesia during UDI
• 8 A national(ist) line in postcolonizing cricket: Viv Richards, biographies and cricketing nationalism
• 9 Brian Lara in poetic form: tradition, talent and the Caribbean ‘mwe’
• 10 Wunderkidz in a Blunderland: tensions and tales from Sri Lankan cricket
• 11 Batting for the flag: cricket, television and globalization in India
• 12 Different hats, different thinking? Technocracy, globalization and the Indian cricket team
• 13 Malign or benign? English national identities and cricket
• 14 ‘Look, it’s a girl’: cricket and gender relations in the UK
• 15 International cricket – the hegemony of commerce, the decline of government interest and the end of morality?
• 16 A legacy deeply mired in contradiction: World Cup 2007 in retrospect
• 17 Burning down the house
• 18 A strong sport growing stronger: a perspective on the growth, development and future of international cricket
• 19 ‘Bombay Sport Exchange’: cricket, globalization and the future
• Index