Category Archives: cricket

English sport and the alien invasion

Robert Henderson

In the past few weeks England have lost three times to the All Blacks at rugby and crashed out of the World Cup with only one point from their three pool games . This week  they lost for the first time ever a home  cricket series against Sri Lankra . During the winter the Ashes series was lost 5-0.

What is going wrong? The answer is beautifully simple. English top-flight team sport is suffering from the same sickness that England as a whole is carrying: it is the victim of immigration. Our three  most popular team sports , football, cricket and rugby union, have all opened their doors to any number of foreigners and foreign players, coaches and owners have flooded in.

Football

Of the three most popular teams sports, football is the most advanced in terms of denying places to young English players a, managers and coaches.  This is unsurprising because of the twenty Premiership clubs starting the 2014/15 season ten are foreigner owned,  as are  twelve of the  twenty two Championship clubs. Foreign owners will have no concern for the wellbeing of  English football,  merely a desire to be successful at all costs either from a  desire to make money or for the prestige footballing success brings on the world stage.

The practice  of excluding English players and managers can be found throughout the professional  English football pyramid, but is seen at its most blatant in the Premier League where less than a third of the players regularly starting are English.   This compares with an average of around a third of players being foreign in the top divisions throughout Europe.

The level below the Premier League, the Championship,  is also heavily infiltrated by foreigners and contains one team, Watford, which starkly demonstrates exactly how quickly English players can be squeezed out.   Watford were taken over by the Italian Pozzo  family who also own the Italian Udinese club and Spanish Grenada  club.  The English manager Sean Dyche – who has just led Burnley to the Premiership –  was quickly replaced with the Italian Gianfranco Zola. This was followed by the ridding of the club of most  of the established  English players and their replacement  with foreigners, most being on-loan Italians from Udinese

In addition, the very successful Watford Academy  was  downgraded from  category 1 to category 3 . This  means that Watford can no longer sign boys from nine onwards and can now do so only from the age of 12  and may no  longer compete in the U-21 League which gives experience against the likes of Man U and Arsenal.  This of itself will mean fewer English youngsters coming through the Watford system,  even assuming that young English players will now reach the Watford Academy for it could become a training ground for foreign  imports from Udinese  and Grenada.

Cricket

County cricket  is increasingly  staffed by foreign players and managers.  Foreign ownership does not really come into the picture because county clubs are private members clubs and as such cannot be purchased.  Nor is there the money or  public profile in county cricket to make any attempt to change this situation  worthwhile.

With cricket it is difficult to give an exact percentage for foreign players  because  so many flit in and out of the county game, as they arrive for particular competitions such as the T20 or contract for far less than a full season with a county because they want to play in other T20 leagues  or go away  with  their national sides.

An idea of  the scale of the foreign invasion into county cricket can be gleaned from the Playfair Cricket Annual,  which gives pen portraits of the players  registered for each county for the coming season. By my count the 2014 annual shows  thirty-seven players marked as not  qualified to play for England because they were born outside the UK and have either played for Test teams other than England or have not played for another country but have not lived long enough in England to qualify through residence . A further forty-five who were born outside the UK but have qualified through residence.  Many of the latter group are those who have had a substantial first class career, including in some cases, Test experience , outside of the UK . Few will want or have a realistic chance of playing for England.  They include the likes of the Australian Test player Phil Jacques and  the New Zealand Test player Hamish Marshall. The two groups produce  a  combined figure of eighty-two foreigners either disbarred from playing for England or very unlikely to do so at the beginning of the 2014 season.  Experience shows that additional  foreign players will be employed as the season progresses.  It would not be unreasonable to imagine the eighty-three foreigners at  the beginning of the 2014 season will swell to one hundred plus  by the end of the season.

There are  eighteen  first class county sides which gives 191 places in their first teams.  The vast majority of the foreigners, whether  qualified or not for England,  will be regulars in their county sides, not least because counties are very reluctant to drop a foreign player who has cost  them a good deal of money to hire .   On average there will be three or  four  foreigners in each county side for Championship matches, that is, about  40% of the total  places.   The percentage of foreign players in the limited over games, especially the T20, will probably be higher.

Rugby Union

Rugby Union is a Johnny-come-lately to the paid  sporting ranks, the game only turning professional  in 1995. But it is made up for lost time when it comes to the foreign player stakes , although not to the extent of the football influx, the percentage of foreigners into the Avia Premiership being around a third rather than the two thirds or more of  the Premier League.

Football, cricket and rugby are the main team sports but what has happened to them can be found to varying degrees in all teams sports which have any degree of popularity in Britain  and individual sports  where either there are occasional team events  organised on a national team basis such as the Davis Cup (tennis ) or Ryder Cup (golf) or the sport carries enough popularity and prestige for those controlling the sport to engineer  English or British representation at a high level, no matter how bogus that is. Think of Greg Rusedski  (tennis) or  Zola Budd (athletics).  In principle they should be treated as I suggest sports such as football and cricket should be  treated.

How  foreign players are distributed

The raw number of foreigners is not the only concern. In  any team  sport certain positions are considered to be the most important. In football those positions are the goalkeeper, centre-backs and strikers.  In rugby union it is the scrum half and fly half and full back, in cricket the opening batsmen and fast bowlers.   The foreign imports disproportionately fill those positions.   The consequence is that England teams are left with few players to choose from when selecting people to fill those positions, for example, the England  football team  has very few goalkeepers and strikers to choose from at present.

In the case of cricket, it is almost invariably the case that foreign players are given the plum places in the batting order and if pace bowlers use of the new ball.  That means  English batsmen get pushed down the batting order and English pace bowlers often do not get use of the new ball.

The demoralising effect on English players

English players will be subject to the  politically correct propaganda which the British political elite have institutionalised  within English society.  The mistreatment by the state, the mainstream media and employers of those label led as racist, homophobic or chauvinist  has created considerable fear amongst  the British public, who will often voice politically correct views which they do not subscribe to because they are afraid. The fear also creates a sense of  disconnection with the country which they come from, because they think, rightly, that  they cannot  praise England  without shrieks of racist hurtling in their direction To that can be added the deracination of English children through the emasculation of the English school curriculum so that it does not provide them with their culture history while incessantly promoting any culture and history other than that of the English.

The fact that as budding elite sportsmen they are of necessity forced to live in a world with a great deal of racial and ethnic  variety will reinforce the sense of disconnection and isolation from their own culture and history.  Even if English players did want the situation to change and see the foreigners kicked out  of their sport  there is little they could safely do.  If  they   did wish to protest against the denial of opportunity  to them because of foreign players,  every one of them will know that if they voice criticism of  the influx of foreigners their career will be at best damaged and at worst ended.  It is a toxic environment to work in, especially toxic in clubs where the playing personnel and often the management and coaching  staff are foreign.

In such an environment , the  focus of English players will almost certainly be  concentrated upon their own playing careers to the exclusion of any wider interest  social or national interest in what is happening to their sport.

The selection of English national sides

Pedantically the selection of players who were not English to play for England has been going on for a long time. That is particularly true of cricket where the Indian Ranjitsinji was first  selected in the 1890. But  foreigners in an England shirt were  rarities until the 1980s. Cricket led the way with a horde of  South Africans, Australians and West Indians and the odd New Zealander .   By the 1990s England were regularly putting out sides with four or five foreigners, people such as Alan Lamb, Robin Smith,  Graeme Hick,   Andy Caddick and  Devon Malcolm.  The selectors’ obsession with foreigners waned somewhat in the first half of the  2000s, but strengthened again from 2005 onwards.   Three of the four most recent England Test caps have been unambiguously foreign, that is,  they were both born abroad and spent the large majority of their childhoods in the country of their birth:   Robson (Australian), Jordan (West Indian),  Balance (Zimbabwean ) .  On the managerial side, the Zimbabweans Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower  between them held the position of head coach for  all but two years of the period 1999-2014.

In the case of football most of the foreign input has occurred on the managerial front. Since 2001,   the England side has had  foreign managers  (Sven-Goran  Eriksson  and Fabio Capello)  for  a combined total of nine years.  Nonetheless, there are signs that the FA are now  willing to grab players from anywhere . Last season feelers were put out  to get the Belgium youngster Adnan Januzaj to play for England on the grounds of his residency in England.  Januzai rebuffed the approaches but the attempt demonstrates how the FA have thrown in the towel when it comes to not selecting foreigners.

Rugby Union began to be really promiscuous with the selection of  foreigners in the England side around the time the game  turned professional (1995).  The squad which toured New Zealand in 2014 contained South Sea Islanders  Manusamoa Tuilagiand  and Semesa Rokoduguni , the South African Brad Barritt and  the New Zealander Dylan Hartley.

What can be legally done?

While Britain remains within the EU only players from outside the EU can be excluded from English professional sport. Moreover,  this is weakened to some degree by the ability of players from outside the EU to gain EU state passports. Nonetheless a blanket ban  on non-EU imports would have considerable although varying effects, viz:

1. Football would probably  be least affected because all European states play professional football, most to a decent standard.  Nonetheless, the available talent pool would be massively reduced and make it much more difficult  for clubs to claim that  the players they were bringing were of exceptional talent.

2. Cricket would be the most affected for the simple reason that cricket is not played to a professional standard outside of England within the EU.

3. Rugby would come somewhere between cricket and football because only France and Italy play the game to international level, although there are a few talented individuals outside of those two countries.

What about foreign ownership of English  sporting clubs? This only seriously affects English football of the big three English team sports.  Even as things are foreigners  from outside the EU could be excluded  if the political will was there. Things would be more difficult  with foreigners from within the EU, but it is  debatable whether the free movement of capital rule throughout the  Single Market would be a bar to preventing the sale of English clubs to foreigners within the EU. Certainty the other large EU countries manage to prevent their top clubs falling into foreign hands.

All that is required to substantially restrict the number of foreigners coming into English professional sport  is for the British government to ban every  would-be owner from outside the EU and every manager, coach and player from outside the EU from working in Britain.  The only thing which has prevented this happening is the ghastly ideological commitment to free trade (including in practice the free movement of peoples) to which the British political elite has succumbed.

Apart from banning non-EU foreigners,  much might be done if  politicians, the media and fans  constantly challenged English sporting clubs over the number of foreigners they employ. Sponsors are sensitive to changes in public wants and might well shun clubs if the public atmosphere was strongly against the employment of foreigners. The same would be true of media outlets which earned their money from sales of their product and advertising.   If fans took up the issue they could bring pressure on clubs by not buying the club merchandise or  making it clear with chants and  banners that they wanted English players in their team. But  to be successful I this tactic does require the mainstream parties to take up the issue and start the ball rolling.  In these politically correct times the general public needs to be reassured that they will not find the police feeling their collars if they start chanting slogans  such as “English players for English teams.”

The perfect solution would be for Britain to leave  the EU. Then every foreign manager, coach and

National sides must be national to have a point

The claiming of people as natives of a country when they manifestly are anything but makes a mockery of the very idea of national sporting sides.   There really is no point in an English cricket side comprised of three or four Southern Africans , an Australian and a West Indian or an England football team managed by  a Swede or Italian.

To keep professional   team sports healthy in England what is  needed is a concentration on English owners, managers, coaches and players in our major team sports.  Only  by keeping the personnel English will there be a large enough pool of talent to draw on for the England  national teams, but also because it will mean the players are  living week by week in a thoroughly English atmosphere and that will accustom them to thinking not only of themselves but of the English national interest.

Such a change would also have a beneficial effect on the audiences for the sports. They would go to see English players playing, managed by English managers and clubs owned or controlled by those raised in the country.  Team sports such as football, cricket and rugby are not just games as liberals would have us believe, they are trials of strength, physical prowess and nerve. .  If England started winning consistently that also would boost national sentiment.

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See also

https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/english-football-became-foreign-football-played-in-england/

https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/is-it-in-the-blood-and-the-hypocrisy-of-the-media/

https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/is-it-in-the-blood-peter-oborne-and-the-question-of-englishness/

 

Mending English cricket

Robert Henderson

The dire performance of the England team in Australia this winter is  arguably the worst ever Ashes performance by England,  both because of the lack of spirit and the mediocre quality of the Australian side. When England lost 5-0 in 1920/21  that was in the context of timeless Tests, a very strong Australian side and an England  still suffering from the deprivation of four years of war.  When the 206/7 side lost 5-0 it was to a still very strong Australian side with Warne and McGrath leading the charge.

The utter hopelessness of the English display in the current series is something new, arguing for a lack of  resolution amongst modern England cricketers.  The batting in particular in this series has been flimsy to the point of destruction. The statistics tell their own story. In the 1920/21 series English batsmen scored  four hundreds and seventeen fifties with  Hobbs scoring 505 runs average 50, with Hendren and Douglas exceeding 300 runs. In the  2006/7 series there were three centuries and eleven fifties by England with Pietersen and Collingwood exceeding 400 runs and Bell scoring more than 300. The 2013/14 series have produced  one century and ten fifties by England with no batsnman exceeding 300 runs.  After Ben Stokes’ 120, the next highest score is a measly 87 by Joe Root in the second Test.     In 1920/21 there was a good deal of batting resolution despite facing one of the most frightening of fast bowling pairs in Jack Gregory and Ted MacDonald; in 2006/7 there were batsmen offering some resistance, but in 2013 the entire batting line-up looked demoralised and embarrassingly unable to cope with a single genuinely fast bowler in  Mitchell Johnson.

What has gone so spectacularly wrong? I would suggest this:

1. A lack of first class cricket because of central contracts. This affects the development of players if they reach the Test side early and means that players generally have little practice outside of Tests if they are Test regulars.

2. Central contracts give far too much security. England have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. Before central contracts players were  picked and discarded with gay abandon; since central contracts  players have been given far too much latitude after they have repeatedly failed. Central contracts are  also too generous, particularly for those who do not play Test cricket regularly. Some players will be motivated by playing for England regardless of their wealth, but it is irrational to believe that all or even most will not suffer some degree of loss of competitive desire.

3. The wholesale employment of foreigners in county cricket. This both restricts opportunities for  English players in general and young English players in particular and gives foreign players invaluable experience in playing first class cricket in English conditions and of English society at large. This experience is invaluable when foreign players come in touring parties to this country  to play England.  In addition, the large number of foreign players in country cricket reduces the sense of Englishness in the county sides where the English players must often feel that they are just one ethnic group amongst many. County cricket has not reached the dire state of  football but it is going that way.  No other Test playing nation allows the wholesale importation of foreigners into their domestic first class game.  There is also the fact that foreign players take a good deal of money out of the English game, not least  because they are more highly paid on average than English players.  That money could be used to employ far more young English players on county staffs than  the number of foreigners currently employed because the young English players would be much cheaper.

4. The employment of foreigners in the England side. The likes of Pietersen and  Trott cannot by definition feel patriotic when they play for England. The presence of such players will also inhibit any display of patriotism amongst the English players in these pc times. How could Cook say to his team, “Right let’s go out and do it for England? “ The ambience of such a fractured England side will inevitably engender a feeling amongst even some  the English players that they are playing for themselves not the country.

5. The employment of foreigners in the management and coaching of English players. This will  also inhibit any display of English patriotic feeling.   However competent such people are, their desire for English success can only be driven by a desire to forward their own careers as managers and coaches. That will tend to make them more reckless than an Englishman in such posts would be,  because they would be lacking the natural rein on behaving recklessly which anyone managing or coaching their own national team will possess.  Take bowling coaches. Both James Anderson and Stephen Finn have been persuaded to radically change their bowling styles and in each case the effect has been unhappy. Anderson lost his way for a number of years before reverting to something like his natural action; Finn is still struggling with the new run-up and delivery position he has been converted to.  I am not suggesting that the coach in either case has consciously done something which would damage the bowler’s performance, merely saying that a foreign coach will be more likely to behave recklessly than they would be if coaching their own national side.

6. The lack of adequate first class cricket outside of Test matches when England is playing abroad. This means that players who are not regulars in the Test side are reduced to spectators for most of the tour and established players going through a bad patch have few opportunities to recover their form in matches outside of the Tests. The England management should arrange for at least four first class matches before the first Test and one further match between each Test after the first Test.

7. County Championship matches are squeezed into the beginning and end of the season.  This reduces the interest for spectators in general and members in particular and lessens  the opportunity for spin bowlers. These matches should be spread evenly throughout the season.

8. To ensure that cricketers are not overworked and the season does not become overly long, there should be the Championship (17 games of 4 days = 68 days), a T20 competition played as a league  (17 games = 17 days and  there could still be a finals day with the top four teams battling it out) and a fifty overs competition on a straight knock-out basis  with  the bottom four teams in the Championship in the previous season playing one of the  bottom four in a preliminary round  to reduce the number of teams to 16 (a maximum of 5 days assuming one of the preliminary round winners made the final). That would be at most  90 days of cricket. To that should be added a four day game against the tourists with the strongest side put out by the county both as a courtesy to the tourists and as a bargaining chip to getr proper practice matches when England tour.  I would also favour a North v South game (4 days) to occupy the place in the middle of the season . The universities should no longer be first class because they have shown themselves over many years to be far  too  weak to have any pretensions to such as status.   If a  maximum of around 100 days cricket in a season was established that could be fitted comfortably in a season starting on 1st May and ending on 15th September, a total of 138 days.

9. The split into two divisions  of the County Championship and other competitions operating in leagues two divisions should be ended.  If you have more than one division it by definition forms a hierarchy .  If there is no serious difference in quality there is no point in splitting it into two divisions. That is the case here. Claims that the first division is considerably stronger than the second division are  bogus as can be seen by the success of promoted sides from the second division being successful in the first division immediately and successful first division teams in one season being demoted the next. Lancashire were  county champions one season and demoted the next  to provide a recent outstanding example.  However, the most important drawback  of having two divisions is that spectators (and members in particular)   will only be able to see at most eight other sides in a season playing their county. That is a great disincentive for  people not to take out or renew  memberships. Much better to have all the counties in one division to allow members the chance of following their county against all other counties once a season

10. Simplifying the fixture list. Implementing 7,8,9 would allow the fixture list to be greatly simplified. Half the Championship matches could played at home one season and the same fixtures played away the next season. For example, Surrey would play Yorkshire at home in the first season and Yorkshire away in the second season. The same could apply to the T20 League. Indeed, to make things really simple  the T20 games could be played in the same week as the Championship match between the same counties. For example, Middlesex  could play Essex at Lords over five days  with the T20 game taking place on a Friday evening and the Championship match running from the  Saturday to Tuesday.  Such a change would remove the chaos of the fixture list inflicted on cricket followers in recent years. That might improve the number of spectators generally and raise county memberships. It would also reduce the burden of travelling on players and reduce the cost to the counties of scurrying backwards and forwards.

11. The county pitch inspection regime is too concerned with protecting batsmen from pitches which assist bowlers. There is also a special prejudice  against spin bowlers in the inspection regime. If twenty wickets fall to pace bowlers on the first day of a Championship match, the inspectors may or may not deem the pitch unfit: if those twenty wickets fall to spinners you can more or less guarantee that the pitch will be deemed unfit.  The pitch inspection regime should be ended and counties allowed to prepare pitches as they choose. A variety of pitches (and more demanding pitches generally) will improve batting techniques and most probably lead to a resurgence of spin bowling which will make the game more interesting.

12. There is a lamentable lack of effort put into promoting the  county game. The ECB seems to think their remit is simply to make money from the England side to keep the counties afloat, while the counties lack the money to seriously promote county cricket. Here is a cost free scheme for promoting Championship  cricket directly.  There are hundreds of thousands of tickets sold in England every year for matches involving the England side. Allow anyone with such a ticket to show the ticket stub at any county championship match and gain a day’s  free admission for an adult and two children. It is a beautifully simple scheme which would cost precisely nothing. There would be no further issuing of tickets, no need to take money at the county ground. All that would need to be done would be for someone to take the ticket stubs off people as they entered the county match.

What needs to be done – a summary

–          Modify central contracts so that the three-quarters of the player’s income comes directly from playing for England.

–          Make those under central contracts play county championship matches wherever possible.

–          Ban all foreign players from county cricket.

–          Employ only  English players in the England side.

–          Employ only Englishmen as coaches and managers.

–          Make certain adequate first class matches outside of Tests is available to England touring sides.

–          Spread Championship matches evenly throughout the season.

–          Reduce the number of county competitions to three: the Championship, a T20 league and 50 over knock-out competition.

–          Revert to a single division County Championship and T20 league.

–          Simplify the fixture list .

–          Allow counties to prepare pitches as they choose.

–          Promote the county game as suggested in 12.

Jack Wilshere and the English

Robert Henderson

The young England and Arsenal footballer Jack Wilshere  put the cat emphatically amongst the politically correct pigeons when he came up with the novel idea (in these pc times)  that only Englishmen should be picked to play for England. Answering a question about whether Manchester United’s Belgian-born and raised teenager Adnan Januzaj , who is of Albanian descent, should be picked for England if he qualifies by residence  Wilshere said

“The only people who should play for England are English people,’’ he said after training at St George’s Park in preparation for Friday’s World Cup   qualifier with Montenegro.

“If you live in England for five years it doesn’t make you English. You shouldn’t play. It doesn’t mean you can play for a country. If I went to Spain and lived there for five years I’m not going to play for Spain.’’

 ‘We have to remember what we are, we are English and we tackle hard and we are tough on the pitch and we are hard to beat. We have great characters. You think of Spain and they are technical, but you think of England and you think they are brave and they tackle hard.  (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2450234/Jack-Wilshere-I-dont-want-Adnan-Januzaj-play-England.html#ixzz2hFufujIy)

These are  truly  remarkable public statements by a young English footballer on the edge of a probably glittering international career.  Political correctness has now such a grip  on British society  that any statement which suggests  national identity is valuable and  should be preserved  risks a media  cry of “racist” followed by an ensuing witch-hunt.   It is made all the more remarkable by the fact that he is making the point about being English, a doubly risky business in 21st century Britain where  the idea of Englishness is alternately portrayed by the white liberal left elite and their ethnic minority auxiliaries as  “dangerous” or “non-existent”, often absurdly both by the same person at the same time.  Wilshere  was taking a real risk  with his career by speaking as he did.

Wilshere has backtracked a little as he faced the all too predictable attack from  politicians, the mainstream media , liberal left interest groups and members of ethnic minorities. This passage from the Daily Telegraph’s chief sports writer Paul Hayward offering on Wilshere is a good example of the mainstream media response:

The real culprit is a thoroughly anachronistic gentlemen’s agreement between the home unions in 1993 to opt out of the residency rule. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all agreed to be high-minded (or discriminatory, depending on your view). Talk about beggars being choosers. None of those four associations is in a position to reject available talent, assuming it fits international criteria.

“The FA finally wants to modernise its talent identification process. No longer can a country that allows its top league to be staffed with 67 per cent foreign players adopt a Little Englander approach to its national set-up. The feeling engendered by London 2012 is here to stay, and should be encouraged by our biggest sport, which has made no inroads, for example, into the country’s large Asian population.

“Each case should be judged on its merits, but an escape from the St George chauvinism is entirely overdue, which the best minds at the FA understand.

“This is not dilution, it is regeneration, in keeping with the way Britain has evolved.”

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/england/10365247/Jack-Wilshere-is-wrong-Mo-Farah-is-proof-we-should-embrace-Britains-diverse-society.html)

That is a pretty good example of the liberal left mind-set. You can either view it as defeatist or treasonous.

The idea that nothing can be done about the influx of immigrants to English top-level sport is  wrong even as things stand now. It would be possible to ban any player from playing in English professional sport who came from outside the European Economic Area (EEA- the EU plus Norway,  Iceland and  Liechtenstein. Switzerland has on a bilateral basis a similar relationship with the EU). This the British authorities have refused and continue to refuse to do.  All the British government would have to do is legislate to make the foreign sportsmen   affected ineligible for work permits.  This would be particularly useful in the case of cricket. There would also be nothing in principle to stop any English sporting group deciding amongst themselves to play only English men and women.

Wilshere clarified early reports of his words which suggested he wanted only those born in England to play for England.  In a response to the  South African cricketer Kevin Pietersen who plays for England Wilshere made it clear that he was not advocating that  only players born in England  (or the  rest of the UK) should be eligible, but rather that some unspecified period of cultural acclimatisation is necessary: “ To be clear, never said ‘born in England’ – I said English people should play for England. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/england/10367391/Kevin-Pietersen-hits-back-at-Jack-Wilsheres-comments-that-only-home-grown-players-should-play-for-England.html). However, as Wilshere dismisses five years as not doing the job of turning an immigrant into an Englishman he is presumably thinking of something pretty substantial in terms of  residence and cultural and emotional imprinting.

A sense of national place is demonstrably not simply derived from living in a country – as Wellington said to those who insisted on calling him an Irishman, ‘Just because a man is born in a stable it does not make him a horse.’ To that I would add that if a man is born in a house but later chooses to live in a stable, he does not become a horse.

His clarification that birthplace is not the sole or primary determining criterion for Englishness strengthens rather than weakens Wilshere’s  position.  It means  he does not back himself into a corner whereby merely being born in a country grants automatic membership of the English nation  regardless of their upbringing.

In 1995 I addressed the question of  the validity of  having an England cricket  eleven which contained people who were not in any meaningful sense English in an article entitled Is it in the blood?  (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/is-it-in-the-blood-peter-oborne-and-the-question-of-englishness/) . This was published in the July 1995 edition of  Wisden Cricket Monthly and caused  a great storm of political and media protest. Although it was about the England cricket team the issues raised are generally pertinent to sports men and women representing England,  regardless of their sport.

Mainstream commentators are reluctant to publicly question the England qualifications of those   sportsmen and women who come to this country in their late adolescence or early manhood and  they dismiss the question as irrelevant when it comes to those who were either born here or arrived at an early age. The pc treading  mainstream party  line is that a person’s qualification to represent England should be where they learnt their sport. If for example, an immigrant becomes a professional cricketer after coming to this country at the age of, say, fourteen, he is automatically, in the minds of the politically correct,  qualified to play for England. This is something of a nonsense because it takes no account of players who spent their childhoods in several countries. Nor is it satisfactory for those players who were brought up in England, but who clearly think of themselves as belonging to a different culture or ethnic group.

In Is it in the blood? I dealt not only with those who had arrived in England in their mid-teens or later,  but also the commitment to England of those who arrived before their  mid-teens  or were even born and raised  in England. There are pressing reasons to question their commitment  simply on the grounds of the increasingly  commented upon widespread failure of ethnic minorities to  assimilate which can be found in the mainstream media, for example, Ed Miliband’s 2012 speech in which he rejected  the idea that people can “live side by side in their own communities, respecting each other but living separate lives, protected from hatreds but never building a common bond – never learning to appreciate one another” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20715253).

But there are also examples of  individual ethnic minority and   immigrant sportsmen   giving direct evidence which suggests that their heart might lie otherwise than with England. The England cricketer Mark Ramprakash has an  Indo-Guyanese father and an English mother. Ramprakash might seem just the type of second generation immigrant who would be fully assimilated into English society, whose entire loyalty would be to England.  Yet the prominent cricketing journalist and commentator Christopher Martin Jenkins wrote this  about him: ‘Colleagues on this touring party [the 1993/94 West Indies tour side] have suggested of him …that Ramprakash sometimes seems more at home with West Indian players, that his cricketing hero and chief confidant is Desmond Haynes; that he would be just as happy in the other camp [the West Indies]‘ CMJ Daily Telegraph 16/3/94).

Another good example of the immigrant player not fully assimilating in the one-time England captain Nasser Hussain. Hussain was born in India and came to England aged six. He has an Asian father and English mother.   In  an  interview  with  Rob Steen  published  in  the  Daily  Telegraph   he said ‘If anyone asks about my nationality, I’m  proud  to say ‘Indian’,  but I’ve never given any thought  to         playing  for  India.  In cricketing terms I’m  English.’  

As with Ramprakash, Hussain might  be thought to have  a  pretty good chance of assimilation  into English life.  Yet here we have him  saying that  he  is proud to describe himself as Indian.  I  do  not  criticise Mr Hussain or any other player of foreign  ancestry for feeling this way. It is an entirely natural thing to wish to  retain  one’s  racial/cultural  identity.  Moreover,  the energetic  public promotion of  “multiculturalism” in  England  has  actively  encouraged such expressions  of  independence. But none of that makes them a suitable choice for an England team.

If those born and raised in England from a young age have difficulty assimilating, the chances of immigrants who come here well into their childhood  becoming English in their thoughts and outlook is considerably less.  Take the case of the  black England footballer John Barnes who came to England aged 12 from Jamaica.  He makes his  anti-English feelings shriekingly   clear in his autobiography, viz:

I am fortunate my England career is now complete so I  don’t  have to sound patriotic any more.(P69 – John Barnes: the autobiography)

I feel more Jamaican than English because  I’m black.  A lot of black people born  in  England feel more Jamaican than English because they are not accepted  in  the land of their birth on  account of their colour, (P 71)

Was I more patriotic for England than I would have been for  Scotland?  No.  To keep everyone happy  throughout  my  international career,  I always  said  that  my  only  choice was England because England is where I settled,  but that wasn’t true. (p72)

When I played for England, I could never declare that nationalism is loathsome and illogical.  I couldn’t say that if I played for France, I would try just as hard, which I would. I tried hard for  England out of professional pride  not patriotism  – because I never felt any. (P72)

It is not only black and Asian players who have displayed an ambivalence about England.  The white Zimbabwean Graeme Hick,  who came to England aged 17,  felt like a foreigner when he first entered the England changing room. Unsurprising because that is precisely what he was. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/england/3130952/Graeme-Hick-I-felt-like-a-foreigner-in-the-England-dressing-room-Cricket.html).

So where does that leave us  as far as the qualification for an England sporting side  is concerned?  Well, I suggest that the qualification for playing for an England national team should be the same as  that which I consider would be a sane basis for the citizenship of any country, namely, the imbibing of a culture.  Where  a man is born  is  irrelevant.  What distinguishes him is his instinctive allegiance to a culture and people and the assumption in childhood of the manners and values of that culture. The successful ingestion of manners and values produces the social colouring necessary for any coherent society and allows a man’s peers to accept him without question as one of themselves. That unquestioning acceptance is  the only objective test of belonging. The most unhappy and unnatural beings are the Mr Melmottes of the World who ‘…speak half a dozen languages but none like a native.’ These are men without country or psychological place.

The natural criterion for selection for an England sporting side, apart from  talent, is surely the sense that a person has that they are  naturally part of a nation, for if national sides do not embody the nation what distinguishes them from any collection of disparate individuals? What is it that gives a man such a sense of place and a natural loyalty? There are, I think, three things which determine this sentiment: parental culture/national loyalty, their physical race and the nature of the society into which the immigrant moves. Their relationship is not simple and, as with all human behaviour, one may speak only of tendencies rather than absolutes. Nonetheless, these tendencies are pronounced enough to allow general statements to be made.

Where an immigrant physically resembles the numerically dominant population, the likelihood is that his children will fully assume the culture and develop a natural loyalty to their birthplace. Hence, the children of white immigrants to Australia and New Zealand will most probably think of themselves as Australian or New Zealanders. However, even in such a situation, the child’s full acceptance of his birthplace community will probably depend on whether his parents remain in their adopted country. If the parents return to their native land, their children, even if they have reached adulthood, often decide to follow and adopt the native national loyalty of their parents. Where a child’s parents (and hence the child) are abroad for reasons of business or public service, the child will almost always adopt the parent’s native culture and nationality as their own.

Where the immigrant is not of the same physical type as the physically dominant national group, his children will normally attach themselves to the group within the country which most closely resembles the parents in physical type and culture. Where a large immigrant population from one cultural/racial source exists in a country, for example, Jamaicans in England, the children of such immigrants will make particularly strenuous efforts to retain a separate identity, a task made easier by their physical difference from the dominant group. Where a child is the issue of a mixed race marriage he will tend to identify with his coloured parent, although this tendency may be mitigated if the father is a member of the racially dominant national group.

Using the criteria detailed above, rationally  there should be much less  doubt about the instinctive loyalty of the children of white immigrants born in England or raised there from a young age than there would be attached to black and Asians born in England or brought there when young. That is because white immigrants  will be much more likely to be  fully accepted, and feel themselves to be fully accepted, by English society.

Qualifications based on legal definitions of nationality, birth or residence are practically irrelevant in the context of national sporting teams, for the instinctive emotional commitment and sense of oneness, which are an essential part of a successful national side, cannot be gained so mechanically.  That is particularly true of a country like England which currently has no legal status and possesses a history stretching back 1,500 years.  Being English is a matter of culture and ancestry.

The trouble with England

I wrote The trouble with England in 1993. It provided the basis for Is it in the blood? which was published by Wisden Cricket Monthly in 1995. The article is towards the bottom of this blog post –  http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/is-it-in-the-blood-peter-oborne-and-the-question-of-englishness/

The general thrust of the article holds true, although the details of players and performances would be different if I was writing the article today.

The foreign invasion of English professional team sport applies to all our major team games, most notably cricket and football but also rugby union and rugby league. The invasion has been massive and,  in the case of football’s Premier League, has reduced the number of English players to a small minority of the total number of players.

It is just sport I hear you says? Far from it because the  question of foreigners in English sport goes far beyond the activities themselves.   Games such as cricket and football are accelerated microcosms of what English society will become if mass immigration is not stopped.

Apart from the  dilution of English representation in our national  games,  our national sports teams act as propaganda vehicles for the multiculturalists. It is also true that individual sports such as athletics can and are used to proselytise for the benefits of one worldism.

To ask what constitutes an English  national sporting team is a proxy for asking what constitutes English nationality.

Robert Henderson 22 August 2013 

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The trouble with England

In May 1991 I argued in Wisden Cricket Monthly that the primary reasons for England’s increasingly poor performances were the selection of sides containing players who lacked an instinctive commitment to England (or Britain for the pedantically inclined) and the employment in county cricket of Official Overseas Players and many cricketers of foreign
parentage or upbringing – let us call the latter Interlopers. A further two years of ever increasing, and I believe unparalleled – because England is losing to even the weakest
cricketing nations – humiliation prompts me to return to the subject.

Recently there have been some public murmurings about the appropriateness of playing men without unequivocal ties to this country. However, the matter is still not being discussed honestly because of that bugbear of modern English society, fear of being called a racist. A Test Match Special discussion on the first morning of the Manchester Test neatly illustrates the problem. Doubts were expressed about white Interlopers such as Smith and Caddick (who both, incidentally, have two British parents), but not a word was
uttered against the playing of men of colour, for example, Devon Malcolm and Gladstone Small, who similarly came to England in their late adolescence, but without any ties of
parentage or culture.

Derek Pringle  writing in the Daily Telegraph of 21st June perhaps came the nearest of any regular commentator to acknowledging the general problem when he wrote “…there
will be people claiming that playing for one’s country is surely motivation enough. Perhaps it still is, but with a team whose individual origins are as diverse as a vat of Heinz baked beans, unquestioning patriotism cannot be taken for granted.” He then provided a good example of the negative public mindset of the English professional cricketing world for, having crossed the Rubicon of admitting that players’ origins might be at least partly responsible for England’s failure, he did not draw the obvious conclusion that, if this is so, England would be better off with eleven unequivocally English players even if they were no more talented than the Interlopers, even perhaps, if they were less talented, for team spirit and the will to win is an immense part of Test cricket. Instead, he tacitly accepted that nothing can be done to change the composition of the England eleven and restricted himself to a few banalities about bowlers bowling more imaginatively and talent at the county level being ”focused and encouraged” as the means of improving England’s cricketing circumstances.

If commentators are reluctant to publicly question the England qualifications of coloured players who came to this country in their late adolescence or early manhood, they dismiss the question as irrelevant when it comes to those who were either born here or arrived at an early age. The party line is that a man’s qualification for a Test side should be determined by where he learnt his cricket. This is something of a nonsense because it takes no account of players who spent their childhoods in several countries. Nor is it satisfactory for those players who were brought up in one country, but clearly think of themselves as belonging to a different culture. This last point is of crucial importance because it strikes directly at the purpose of a national side.

Qualifications based on legal definitions of nationality, birth or residence are practically irrelevant in the context of national sporting teams, for the instinctive emotional commitment and sense of oneness, which are an essential part of a successful national side, cannot be gained so mechanically. And that is often true even where a conscious decision to emigrate has been made by a player’s parents. A sense of national place is demonstrably not simply derived from living in a country – as Wellington said to those who insisted on calling him an Irishman, ‘Just because a man is born in a stable it does not make him a
horse.’

The natural criterion for Test selection, apart from cricketing talent, is surely the sense a man has that he is naturally part of a nation, for if national sides do not embody the nation what distinguishes them from any collection of disparate individuals? What is it that gives a man such a sense of place and a natural loyalty? There are, I think, three things which determine this sentiment: parental culture/national loyalty, physical race and the nature of the society into which the immigrant moves. Their relationship is not simple and, as with all human behaviour, one may speak only of tendencies rather than absolutes. Nonetheless, these tendencies are pronounced enough to allow general statements to be made.

Where an immigrant physically resembles the numerically dominant population, the likelihood is that his children will fully assume the culture and develop a natural loyalty
to their birthplace. Hence, the children of white immigrants to Australia and New Zealand will most probably think of themselves as Australian or New Zealanders. However, even in
such a situation, the child’s full acceptance of his birthplace community will probably depend on whether his parents remain in their adopted country. If the parents return to their native land, their children, even if they have reached adulthood, often decide to follow and adopt the native national loyalty of their parents. Where a child’s parents (and hence the child) are abroad for reasons of business or public service, the child will almost always
adopt the parent’s native culture and nationality as their own.

Where the immigrant is not of the same physical type as the physically dominant national group, his children will normally attach themselves to the group within the country which most closely resembles the parents in physical type and culture. Where a large immigrant population from one cultural/racial source exists in a country, for example, Jamaicans in England, the children of such immigrants will make particularly strenuous efforts to retain a separate identity, a task made easier by their physical difference from the dominant group. Where a child is the issue of a mixed race marriage he will tend to identify with his
coloured parent, although this tendency may be mitigated if the father is a member of the racially dominant national group.

Using the criteria detailed above, there should be little doubt about the instinctive loyalty of the children of white immigrants to England, because such people will normally be fully accepted, and feel themselves to be fully accepted, by English society, in short, to be English. Moreover, the number of white immigrants to England is comparatively small. This gives them less opportunity to form ghettos and more incentive to integrate fully. (Perhaps the nearest to a culturally self-contained white immigrant group in England are the Greek Cypriots.) In any case the children of white immigrants from places other than the old Dominions have made little, if any, impact on county cricket, so the question of the commitment of the children of white immigrants who do not share what might be broadly described as Anglo-Saxon culture, is academic at the moment. The position is rather different with the children of coloured immigrants to England. The point is powerfully demonstrated by Nasser Hussain.

In an interview with Rob Steen published in the Daily Telegraph (11/8/89) he said ‘If anyone asks about my nationality, I’m proud to say ‘Indian’, but I’ve never given any thought to playing for India. In cricketing terms I’m English.’ Mr Hussain has an English mother. He has lived in this country since he was six. He attended an English public school and an English university. Of all the England qualified players with black or Asian blood currently playing county cricket, he might be thought to have had the best chance of a full integration into English life. Yet here we have him saying that he is proud to describe himself as Indian. I do not criticise Mr Hussain or any other player of foreign ancestry for feeling this way. It is an entirely natural thing to wish to retain one’s racial/cultural identity. Moreover, the energetic public promotion of “multiculturalism” in England has actively encouraged such expressions of independence. However, with such an attitude, and whatever his professional pride as a cricketer, it is difficult to believe that Mr Hussain has any sense of wanting to play above himself simply because he is playing for England. From what, after all, could such a feeling derive? If Mr Hussain has such a lack of sentimental regard for the country which nurtured him, how much less reason have those without even one English parent or any of his educational advantages to feel a deep, unquestioning commitment to England. Norman Tebbit’s cricket test is as pertinent for players as it is
for spectators.

It is even possible that part of a coloured England qualified player rejoices in seeing England humiliated, perhaps subconsciously, because of post imperial myths of oppression and exploitation. An article in the August 1991 edition of WCM entitled ‘England’s  Caribbean Heritage’ by Clayton Goodwin, a white English journalist with particularly
pronounced Caribbean sympathies,lends credence to such a view. Mr Goodwin argues that children born in this country of West Indian parents do not feel part of English society
and, consequently, tend to identify only with sporting heroes who share their own physical race – significantly, no white or Asian sporting figure supported by this group is mentioned
in the article, although many negroes are. A few quotes will give the flavour:-

“Naturally those West Indians who came as immigrants have a nostalgic respect for their
‘home’ region – longing for the lost ‘good old days’ is not solely the white man’s preserve. Their children, humiliated and made to feel inferior in every aspect of their day-to-day life, will relish the chance of using the success of others sharing the same physical attribute [blackness] for which they are downgraded to show, however vicariously, that they do have worth.”

“You can’t blame the put-upon black people of Britain for feeling similar justifiable pride when Viv Richards and his team, who in other circumstances might be regarded as ‘second class citizens’ like themselves, have put one over their detractors.”

“The youth of Peckham, Brixton, Pitsmoor and the Broadwater Farm would want any of Nigel Benn, Chris Eubank, Michael Watson or Herol Graham, black Britons who have grown up among them and shared their social experience, to beat the Jamaican middleweight boxer Malcolm MaCallum if the opportunity should arise.”

“The ethnic majority [the white population] are not aware of how isolated and shut out from the national cricket game the black population is made to feel. That is not solely to question why Surrey have included only one regular black player, Monte Lynch…” [In fact, England qualified players of West Indian parentage are well represented in County cricket having more than 6% of places on County staffs, a percentage well above their share of the national population].

Having, I think, accurately described the generally resentful and separatist mentality of the West Indian descended population in England – doubters should cast their minds back
to the riots of the eighties, take a stroll around Brixton, Deptford, Hackney, Moss Side, St Pauls et al and think of Haringey cricket college which I believe never had a member who was not a negro – Mr Goodwin goes on to claim that ”…surely nobody would doubt that the players [England caps of West Indian ancestry] are proud to represent England.”
Exactly why he is so confident of their pride is unclear. There would seem to be no obvious reason why players such as DeFreitas and Lewis should not share the mentality he ascribes to the general West Indian derived population. At the very least, it is difficult to see how playing for England could be anything more than a means of  personal advancement and achievement for players of West Indian ancestry. Of what else could they logically be proud if, as Mr Goodwin claims, they feel excluded from and humiliated by English society?

The obverse of the commitment coin is the effect the Interlopers have on the unequivocally English players and consequently on team spirit. One’s common experience of mixed groups makes it immensely difficult to accept that a changing room comprised of say six Englishmen, two WestIndians, two Southern Africans and a New Zealander are going to develop the same camaraderie as eleven unequivocal Englishmen.

The problem for the England selectors is perhaps that of England as a nation. For thirty years or more those with authority in education, assisted by politicians and those in the mass media have conspired, in the sociological sense of creating a climate of opinion, to produce a public ideology designed to remove any sense of pride or sense of place in
the hearts of those who are unequivocally English. It has not been entirely successful, but it has had a profound effect on the national self-confidence of many Englishmen. Indeed,
perhaps even some of the unequivocally English players lack a sufficient sense of pride in playing for England. (All the more reason to ensure that the team is unequivocally English
so that the majority can infect any fainthearts with their pride.)
In summary, the essence of my case is that for a man to feel the pull of ‘cricketing patriotism’ he must be so imbued with a sense of cultural belonging, that it is second nature
to go beyond the call of duty, to give that little bit extra. All the England players whom I would describe as foreigners, may well be trying at a conscious level, but is that desire
to succeed instinctive, a matter of biology? There lies the heart of the matter.

It is not only the possible lack of commitment and the effect on team spirit which should raise English eyebrows. Even on pure cricketing grounds the selection of most of the Interlopers is dubious. As can be seen from the table [insert table one somewhere within the text] the record of most of those who have played for England since 1969 has been mediocre. Only Robin Smith and Tony Greig have produced figures which put them in the front rank of Test players. Of the rest, Allan Lamb has achieved an average competence. Interestingly, all three players have two British parents. Indeed, the performance of the white Interlopers has been generally superior to that of the coloured which is further circumstantial evidence that physical race and/or parental culture does have an effect on performance at Test level.

The Interlopers’ overall career records mirror their Test records being generally mediocre, with white players performing decidedly better than coloured. Their respective global career records are:

batting average bowling average

White          37.70                  29.06

Coloured     25.92                  31.36

Remarkably, despite mediocre performances, many of these players have continued to hold England places for long periods, a tolerance rarely extended to unequivocally English
players, even established ones. There are plenty of English batsmen outside the Test team who would, in all probability, have exceeded Hick’s Test record given his opportunities, for example,  John and Hugh Morris, Bailey, Moxon, Fordham, Benson, Taylor, Darren Bicknell, Thorpe and Curtis.
Then there is the mysterious case of DeFreitas, Malcolm and Lewis who have taken most of the pace bowling places in England sides since 1989. Are we to believe that any three from Martin Bicknell, who has particular cause for complaint, Mallender, Newport, Millns, Igglesden, Cork, Ilott, Munton, and Watkin would not have been able to at least match their collectively abysmal record of 221 wickets at 37.24 in 77 Tests?

Christopher Martin-Jenkins perhaps expressed the feelings of many Englishmen when, after Neil Williams’ selection in 1990, he complained on a Radio 2 Sportsdesk that the England selectors “Seemed to have a fixation with West Indian born fast bowlers”. However, as this season has shown, it might be truer to say that the selectors have a fixation with any England qualified bowler who is not unequivocally English. Caddick’s case is, I think, particularly illuminating of the selectors’ mentality.

His record in his one full season was no more than averagely good and poorer than that of a number of unequivocally English bowlers. Yet he was immediately selected for the ‘A’ Team, rushed into the England side at the first opportunity and retained after taking only one wicket in his first two Tests. Readers might like to contrast this with the cases of
Watkin and Mallender who took five and ten wickets respectively in their first two Test Matches and were promptly dropped.

Without being privy to the selection process, one cannot do more than guess at why Interlopers should be so often preferred, but several possible explanations present
themselves. The first is that the selectors have what might be described as the slave mentality. By this I mean they believe, again perhaps subconsciously, that someone from
their own community cannot be the equal of members of other communities. The second is that the selectors have a desire to seem to be fair to all men regardless of origin and overcompensate by selecting players who are not unequivocally English at every opportunity. (As I write the news has just been released of Keith Fletcher’s wish to take
Van Troost on the next England ‘A’ tour). The third, which only applies to coloured players, is that the selectors are scared of selecting teams which do not contain some coloured
men because of people like Mr Goodwin who complain about lack of coloured representation – think, also, of the insidious pressure being placed on Yorkshire to play a
Yorkshire born Asian effectively regardless of merit – and having once selected such players, are reluctant to drop them for the same reason.

I believe these three considerations also work at county level, together with another, the idea that quick success should be gained without regard to any ill effects this may have on the national side. (During the Trent Bridge Test Neville Oliver told an illuminating story
of county clubs which have written to Australian state sides asking for details of players with an England birth qualification).

The extent to which the Interlopers have infiltrated the English first class game is probably not realised by most cricket followers. According to the 1993 Playfair Annual there are 416 contracted players on county staffs. Of these no fewer than 63 are Interlopers, the majority (42) having black or Asian ancestry.  Add the 18 Overseas Players to the Interlopers to produce a total of 81 and a fifth of county places are taken by players who either cannot play for England or whose commitment is doubtful. In fact, the case is
worse than that because Overseas Players have an almost guaranteed place in their sides and 30 (50%) of the Interlopers are capped players – a good guide to first eleven inclusion – as opposed to 130 (40%) of the English players. Hence approximately 50 (25%) of the 198 first team places are generally taken by the disqualified and the dubiously committed. The effect is most pronounced in pace bowling.

There are thirty six new ball places in county sides. Twelve are normally taken by official Overseas Players. Add Mortenson, Van Troost, Lefebrve and Curran, who enjoy the anomalous status of being qualified to play in county cricket but not for England, and the total of new ball places for England qualified bowlers is reduced to about twenty. However, some of these are taken by players who are never going to come under serious consideration, for example Cooper, Radford and Connor. The pool of current England qualified bowlers, even including Interlopers, who frequently take the new ball and who merit serious consideration for selection, probably comes down to the following fifteen: Cork, Foster, Ilott, Watkin, Igglesden, Taylor, Mallender, Bicknell, Newport, Jarvis, Malcolm, McCague, DeFreitas, Lewis, Caddick. Five of these are Interlopers, three of whom have already been given extensive opportunities and been found wanting. It is small wonder that the selectors have problems with selecting a first rate pace attack from such a restricted field.

The position with batting is healthier – I will stick my neck out and say that there are at least two young players – Ali Brown (a stupendously talented player) and John Crawley – who will be recognised as great by the end of their careers. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the unequivocally English batsman gets far more opportunity than his bowling counterpart because of (1) the preponderance of bowlers amongst the Overseas players and Interlopers and (2) the greater number of top order batting places – say the first four – compared with opening bowling opportunities. Spin bowling and wicketkeeping have not been significantly affected by Overseas Players and Interlopers, although the
practice of employing fast bowlers as Overseas Players may well have contributed to the emphasis on pace in the past fifteen years.

The question of England’s cricketing strength is not simply a parochial matter, for the finances of other Test playing countries benefit hugely from tours of England. If England
continues to fail consistently, or even succeeds with a side which is not felt to represent England by the unequivocally English, eventually Test attendances in this country will
fail from want of pride or identification. The same will probably happen when England tour abroad. Then all will be impoverished, some countries perhaps to the point at which
they cannot continue to play Test cricket – I think particularly of the West Indies – Moreover, although other nations may enjoy beating England now, continual winning will
soon dull their pallets. Then, I suspect, they will realise that a successful England is not merely financially desirable, but an important psychological feeding block around which they all enjoy mustering.

In the nature of things, it cannot be proved conclusively that England is failing primarily because of selection policies, at national and county level, which unduly favour the employment of Interlopers and Overseas Players.  Conversely, it cannot be conclusively disproved. But the balance of probability, as our legal friends say, is overwhelmingly in that direction. England’s performance has declined steadily since the relaxation of qualification rules in 1969. Perhaps most significantly, England’s fortunes have waned most dramatically since the mid eighties, by which time most of the pre-1969 vintage of English players had retired and since when more and more Interlopers have entered the game. To argue, as some still do, that the employment of great foreign players has raised the standard of the English game is demonstrable nonsense. It is also noteworthy that while England have been employing Interlopers, the rest of the Test playing world has retained, in practice, strict
national selection policies. In the case of the West Indies, they have even ceased to select white and Asian players, since when they have become the most powerful cricketing
nation. (This is almost certainly a deliberate policy. Viv Richards, I seem to recall, has proudly described the Windies as ‘An African side’.) Interestingly, in the old West Indian sides one has the nearest analogy to the present England Team, full of racial tension and inter country rivalry and so often unsuccessful when on paper they had a strong team.

That is the problem described. What can be done to improve matters? Official Overseas Players should be excluded completely, preferably immediately. This could be done by the
TCCB meeting the existing contractual financial obligations. This would not only have the beneficial effect of freeing many new ball bowling places for England bowlers, but would remove a damaging psychological effect. At the county level the Overseas Player has occupied the place of the League Pro. This trait has been particularly pronounced in the case of pace bowlers. The result has been that young English players have not learnt to take responsibility and without doing that the transition to Test cricket becomes doubly difficult. Negatively, England would benefit because Overseas Players would be denied opportunities to take responsibility and gain knowledge of English conditions.

The position regarding Interlopers is undeniably difficult. Nonetheless, I think a combination of rules, restraint and common sense can produce a workable solution. I suggest that any white player raised abroad with a birth and/or parental qualification for England should only be accepted as England qualified if his parents have not formally emigrated or, if they have, the person has been continually resident in Britain for ten years. If it is legally possible, such a player would be expected to take British nationality and renounce his original nationality. White players without at least one British parent and a British upbringing should be absolutely excluded.

Because of legal restraints, it is currently impossible to formally refuse cricketing registration to British and other EEC nationals on grounds of race or origin. However, the
counties could exercise a self-denying ordinance and refuse to employ other EEC nationals such as the Dutch and Danish. As for those born in Britain of black  and Asian parentage, I
would simply suggest that county clubs and the England selectors think carefully about employing such players in view of their generally poor performance in the past. They might, in particular, care to think of the inordinate number of county opportunities given to graduates of Haringey Cricket College (for example, to Ricardo Williams, Carlos
Remy, Steve Bastien) and the staggeringly poor return which has resulted from such an investment. (Only Alleyne and Piper command regular county places). Coloured immigrants without a British upbringing should be absolutely excluded. Both England and county selectors would benefit from understanding one of the fundamentals of moral philosophy: the fact that something is legal does not necessarily mean it is morally right.

The counties should reflect on the fact that Derbyshire has the lowest membership and the highest number of Interlopers and ask themselves whether the two facts are related. Members need to identify with their players, perhaps to an even greater extent than England supporters. What must a Derby member feel when he sees his average team comprised of three West Indians, an Australian, a South African, a Dane and five
Englishmen?

Perhaps the most fundamental argument against playing men of doubtful commitment remains to be made. Let us suppose that an England eleven comprised largely, or even entirely, of Interlopers was supremely successful. What would be the point? If national sides are to have any meaning they must represent nations in fact as well as name. That is their raison d’etre. A respectable case can be made against the idea of national sporting representation. None can be made for ersatz national sides. Let us hope that we never see a Dutchman opening the bowling for England.

Michael Vaughan and the greatest English Test bowler

Robert Henderson

There has been a good deal of hyperbole about Jimmy Anderson recently with Michael Vaughan  going so far as to claim that he was the greatest ever England bowler on Test Match Special after the recent Test match at Trent Bridge where Anderson returned match figures of 10-158.  In making his case Vaughan was  adamant that Fred Trueman was an inferior bowler to Anderson.

There are severe objections to Vaughan’s claims.  To begin with the obvious many English pace  bowlers with substantial Test careers  have far superior Test averages to that of Anderson who has taken  his Test wickets at more than 30 runs apiece.  For example,  Trueman took 307 at less than 22 runs each, Brian Statham and Alec Bedser 252 and 228 respectively at an average of 24, SF Barnes 189 at 16 and George Lohman 112 at 10.

Even allowing for different playing conditions through the history of Test cricket  it is very difficult to explain why Anderson’s wickets should be so much more expensive than bowlers from previous eras if he is supposedly the best ever.  It is also noteworthy that the best Test  pace bowlers from the period 1980-2000 (when playing conditions and equipment were not startlingly different from today) – Marshall, Ambrose, Waqar Younis, Wazim Akram, McGrath and the best of  today, Steyn ,  all managed to take their wickets at under 25 runs with Marshall and Ambrose at less than  21 runs each.  It is also true that English bowlers operating since 1980  such as Botham, Willis, Dilley, Fraser and  Cork  all managed to take 100 or more Test wickets with an average of less than 30. If all these bowlers could manage to take their wickets at better averages than Anderson  what magical change has occurred in the past decade or so to make the supposedly “greatest ever England bowler” more expensive?  The only radical change has been DRS which aids rather than hinders bowlers.

When challenged on his claim Vaughan takes refuge in the idea that playing conditions in the past, even in the relatively recent past of the 1950s, were so much more in favour of the bowlers than they are now that this explained the much higher averages of  Anderson and most other modern pace bowlers.   Let us test this idea.

Uncovered pitches

In comparing Anderson with other English bowlers,  Vaughan  has made much of the fact that players such as Fred Trueman bowled on uncovered pitches and that this greatly assisted their averages. (Trueman’s Test career spanned the years 1952-1965).

This is a very odd idea for several reasons.  To begin with the fact that a pitch is or is not covered says little about the way it will play in most circumstances. If the weather is dry,  the uncovered pitch will last much the same way as a covered pitch will do. It is only when rain affects a pitch and it then dries  under the influence of sun or  wind that it  becomes really difficult. When that happens, guess what, the pace bowlers cannot bowl when it is really difficult because the run-ups are also wet (assuming the run-ups are not covered,  as was the case in the 1950s and 1960s. Nor  did run-ups dry quickly in the past because the drainage on most grounds was poor. But even when the run-ups became useable for the quick bowlers,  often  they did not get much opportunity to bowl when the rain damaged pitch still had some spite in it  because the spinners would have shot the side out when  the pitch  was at it its most difficult.  Trueman and his ilk were, on balance,  disadvantaged not advantaged by playing on uncovered pitches.

The number of draws

Another  awkward  fact facing  Vaughan is  the number of draws on uncovered pitches. If uncovered pitches were so much more helpful to bowlers,  how was it that draws were much more plentiful in the 1950s  and 1960s than they are now despite the much lower Test bowling averages then?  The  short answer is they were generally playing on good batting pitches which were rarely rain-damaged against Test  batsmen  who had (certainly amongst the stronger Test playing nations)  vastly better batting techniques and far more patience  then than now. More on that later.

The length of Tests before WW2

It was in the 1950s that five day Tests became the norm throughout the Test playing nations and matches  were all played on uncovered pitches.  Before then it was mixture of three day Tests (mainly  in England) 4 day Tests, 5 day Tests   and timeless Tests which were long the norm in Australia and which were only abandoned after 1945. However,  it should be remembered that bowling rates were at around  20 overs to the hour  before  WW2  compared with 15 overs now, so the actual play in a three day match would be equal to four days now and  a four day match equal to five and a third days and so on.   In the 1950s Test over rates were about 18 an hour  so those matches, if they went the full five days,  would contain the equivalent of another day’s play at present day  over rates.

It is instructive to look at how long timeless Tests took. Take the Bodyline series in 1932/33. It might be imagined that the matches were over quickly because of the onslaught of Larwood and Voce and their taming of Bradman.  Not a bit of it. The series had one Test extending to four days, two Tests to five days and two Tests to six days.

That Tests on uncovered pitches often lasted for a long time is unsurprising. Apart from the early years of Test cricket, groundsmen generally prepared pitches as they do today, namely, to last for as long as the matches were scheduled, or in the case of timeless Tests, for a seriously  extended game.  If a grass pitch was uncovered in Australia, South Africa or the West Indies  it was unlikely to seriously deteriorate quickly because there was little likelihood of rain. (Where matting pitches were used – mainly in South Africa –  the rain damaged pitch problem did not arise).

Bowlers’ skills

Another of Vaughan’s claims is that pace bowlers are more skilful these days because they have reverse swing. Why reverse swing should outweigh all the other weapons in the pace bowler’s armoury he has not made clear.   Modern bowlers may have reverse swing but often they do not do a great deal with the ball otherwise.  Seam bowling, that is, using the seam on the pitch  rather than in the air,  in particular seems a dying art.  Nor are modern bowlers  anything like as accurate as those in the past. This is not sentimentality on my part. Look at videos of any extended bowling by Test bowlers from fifty or sixty years ago and you will see that not only can they bowl to their field consistently – something modern bowlers are very poor at doing – but they attack the stumps far more. To those who think that bowling a consistent line and length get you nowhere in Test cricket I would say just two words: Glen McGrath.

Vaughan  also ventured the very odd idea that Trueman was a bowler without versatility.  The reverse is the case. In his twenties, a genuine express,  who swung the ball away late and had excellent control of line and length. In the latter part of his career, where appropriate,   he adapted to conditions by bowling fast-medium offcutters, most notably at Headingly in 1961 when he took 11-88 and won the match for England.

The quality of batting

Batting techniques and mentality are very different today to what they were when Trueman was playing in the 1950s and 1960s. Batsmen in Trueman’s time had only pads, still rudimentary gloves, an unconvincing box and, if they were lucky , a single inadequate thigh pad strapped to their leading leg.  This lack of protection meant that only those who were proficient hookers and pullers played the shots against anyone faster than military medium.  Even high-quality players like Bobbie Simpson and John Edrich simply did not hook.

The pitches English players played on in England  outside of Test matches  in Trueman’s day were prepared by each county as they saw fit without any interference from the then ruling body the MCC.  This meant, for example, that if a team travelled to Southend to play Essex they would be met by a greentop to suit Bailey, Preston and Knight while a trip to Bristol to play Gloucestershire would almost certainly mean a pitch turning sharply on the first morning to suit the spinners Mortimore, Allen, Wells and Cook. This variety of pitches – and there were few which were anodyne or  batting paradises – meant that county players had to become very proficient players of the ball, spinning, seaming and swinging.  Nor did they have the distraction of limited overs cricket to breed bad habits  of impatience and  reckless shot selection and invention.

Overseas batsmen played either on mainly fast bouncy pitches (Australia, West Indies, South Africa) or slow, low  pitches which nonetheless took a great amount of spin (India).  In addition, touring players from all countries gained considerable experience of conditions other than those of their native country  because tours were long and included a large number of  first class games in addition to Test matches. That included England teams on tour. Consequently, every Test playing nation had a reasonable  experience of different conditions for first class cricket  in the various Test playing countries, something which they do not get today – England are the only country to hinder their chances of success by allowing foreign players to take part in large numbers in a domestic first class competition.

The modern batsman plays only on covered pitches (which in English domestic cricket have to be  prepared in a way to ensure they do not offer much help to the bowler) and is both encumbered and protected by a remarkable array of equipment: bumper bras, armguards, large  thigh pads on both thighs, decent gloves  and most importantly helmets. Unlike their helmetless predecessors, the modern  batsman, whether proficient or not at the strokes, hooks and pulls with great frequency, often very incompetently.   Touring sides rarely play many first class  matches outside of Tests and limited over games  and so lack the extensive experience of different conditions in foreign countries which was once the norm for a touring side. Lastly, the introduction of limited overs cricket generally and T20 in particularly has bred loose batting habits and a disastrous lack of patience.

Vaughan also claimed that the heavier bats used by modern players make heavier scoring inevitable.  It is certainly true that shots which are not middle can go for six with heavy modern bats,  but against that these heavy bats reduce the deftness of shot. They also encourage reckless hitting because batsmen think they can get away with false strokes.

The present Australian batting shows the modern  defects of technique and mentality most dramatically, but no current Test side with the possible exception of South Africa could honestly be called a strong batting side.  This is of cardinal importance when judging bowlers. It  is one thing to be bowling at the present Australian side and quite another to be bowling against the 1930s and 1940s sides containing Bradman supported by  four or five of the following: Ponsford,  Woodfull, Mc Cabe, Kippax, Hassett, Morris, Harvey  Barnes, Brown, Fingleton and  Miller.  Ditto the present West Indian batting line-up compared to the 1950s cast of the three Ws, Sobers, Stollmeyer, Rae, Hunte, Kanhai and  Oggie Smith. Ditto the South African side of the 1960s with Richards, McGlew, Goddard,  Barlow, Graeme Pollock, Bland,  Lindsay and Proctor.

The lack of technique, especially against the moving ball, the reckless shot selection, especially the repeated flashing outside the offstump  and incompetently executed hooks and pulls, the introduction to Test cricket from limited overs cricket of wildly inappropriate shots such as the reverse sweep and scoop and a seemingly pathological inability to be patient generally and leave balls in particular make modern Test players easy meat for bowlers compared with their predecessors.

The weakness of lower batting orders in the past

Vaughan also maintained that lower order batsmen in Trueman’s era were only too glad to give their wickets away because they lacked the helmets and other batting protection which the modern batsman has, this is contrast to the lower orders today. This is a myth, both in Trueman’s day and really throughout Test cricket’s history.  For example, in the first full decade of Test cricket (the 1880s)  England regularly turned out sides  in England which batted right the way down with the likes of Briggs, Peel, Lohmann, Bates, Barnes, CT Studd, A Lyttleton, Tylecote, Barlow batting in the positions 7-11.

In the 1950s the majority of England’s bowling was done by Bailey, Bedser, Trueman, Statham, Tyson, Laker,  Lock and Wardle.  Bailey was  great allrounder and batted in various positions in the top six. The others generally occupied positions 8-11.  Bedser, Laker, Lock and Wardle all scored Test fifties. Bedser,  Trueman and Laker scored first class hundreds.  Tyson was a competent lower order player. Even Statham averaged over 10. The England tail in the 1950s was not a quivering collective wreck waiting to tread on the square leg umpire’s toes in their anxiety to get away from any bowler quicker than medium. In the 1960s England batted even deeper with players such as Titmus, Allen, Knight, Murray often batting at 8 or 9.

Other Test playing nations also had tails which were capable of wagging vigorously. An Australian lower order in the 1950s would probably be any five from Benaud,  Mackay, Lindwall,  Archer, Davidson, Johnson, Tallon,  Langley,  Grout,  Johnston.  Only Johnston could not bat.   Benaud, Lindwall, Archer and Johnson scored Test hundreds.  The West Indies might have had two non-batsmen Rhamadin and Valentine at nos 9, 10 or 11, but they frequently had the likes of Gomez,   Alexander, Oggie Smith,  Goddard, Atkinson  at 7, 8 and sometimes even 9, all of whom were serious batsmen.   South Africa generally had competent batting down to number eight  and even their regular nine and ten,  Heine and Tayfield,  could both hold a bat.

The quality of Test playing nations

The original Test playing nations were England and Australia who played the first Test in 1976. South Africa were added in 1889. No other Test side emerged until 1928 when the West Indies played their first Test (against England in the West Indies). New Zealand arrived in 1930,  India in 1932, Pakistan in 1952, Sri Lanka in 1982, Zimbabwe in 1992 and Bangladesh in 2000.

Players before 1928 played most of their Test cricket in England/Australia matches. South Africa started to become a serious Test side in the early 20th century and were a genuine force in their own country where they played on matting pitches and had an army of good googly bowlers shortly after Bosanquet unveiled the googly to exploit them.

Teams which toured, especially English ones, were often far from the strongest that could be put out if playing at home. Many of the best English amateurs, most notably FS Jackson,  never toured Australia because they could not afford it.  The English sides which toured South Africa were generally weaker than those which toured Australia.  It was not until the mid-1950s that a full English side toured Australia as a matter of course, and even then there were amateur absentees such as David Shepherd in 1954/55 and Pater May in 1962/3.  The first really representative English touring party went to South Africa in 1956/7, to the West Indies 1959/60, to India 1976/7, to Pakistan 1977/8 .  New Zealand faced stronger England sides in New Zealand from 1932/3 onwards because the matches were tacked on to the end of an Ashes series in Australia, although some players from the Australian part of the tour would miss the NZ trip.  Bangladesh and Zimbabwe have faced full England sides since the start of  their Tests careers.

The picture is complicated further by the use of  matches of the weaker Test playing nations as trial matches for players with no or little Test experience. In a very limited way this still happens, but in the past England have used Tests to try out large numbers of players. For example, in the home series against India in 1959 which England won 5-0, these players were given their first Test caps: Greenhough, Martin Horton, Ken Taylor, Pullar, Harold Rhodes and these players with a few caps were given a run-out: Milton, Barrington, Moss, Close, Illingworth, MJK Smith, Swetman and Subba Row.  Only Pullar, Illingworth ,  Barrington, Subba Row and MJK Smith had significant Test careers.

Australia toured less than England, and were sparing in their games, at both home and abroad, against sides other than England and South Africa until the 1950s. The sides they sent on tour were generally stronger than those of England. Other Test sides have tended to always select something near to their strongest side to tour.

All of this meant that until the late 1970s regular bowlers from the stronger Test playing nations generally played more of their Tests against other strong nations than has subsequently been the case.  The granting of Test status to Zimbabwe and Bangladesh also produced Test opponents who were weaker than any since the South Africans during the 1890s. Moreover, unlike the South Africans or any of the other Test playing nations in their early years who played few Tests, Zimbabwe  until their Test status was suspended played and Bangladesh played and continue to play many Tests.

The changing  laws of cricket

The laws  are not tablets set in stone. Since overarm bowling was legalised in 1864 (marking the beginning of the modern era) there have been some radical changes.  On the whole these have favoured  bowlers as time has moved on.

The ball was  reduced in size by over half an inch in diameter  in  1927 , which made it easier to grip ,  and the wicket was increased by an inch in height and an inch in width 1931.  Both changes unequivocally  aided the bowler.

Until the change in the LBW law in 1935 bowlers had to pitch a ball on the wicket and hit the batsman in front of the wicket. In 1935 the LBW was experimentally  changed to allow a ball pitching outside the offstump and hitting the batsman in front of the stumps to potentially qualify for an LBW. (The LBW law  was formally changed in 1937) IN 1972, after some trials in previous years, the LBW law was amended again to allow balls pitching outside the offstump which hit the pad when the pad was outside the offstump if it was judged that the batsman had offered no stroke and the ball would have gone on to hit the stumps.  All these changes aided bowlers, although complaints were made for a long time after 1935 that they penalised bowlers who moved the ball away from the bat.

The changes in the LBW law in 1935 brought complaints that it made for dull cricket because it favoured  pace bowlers who swung the ball in or cut it in from the pitch and offbreak bowlers.  There was certainly a cultural shift from leg spin to offspin in England, but it is difficult to attribute this to the new LBW law because it was noticeable that high-quality leg spinners who  learned their cricket  before the  1935 –  Wright, Hollies, Jenkins , Peter Smith, Mitchell, Freeman – all continued to be successful under the new law as did  slow left armers  whether or not they began their careers before 1935.

Nonetheless, during the mid-1950s it was decided not to change the LBW law, but to deal with the perceived problem of inswing and offbreak bowlers by restricting the number of fielders behind the popping crease on the onside to two.  Whether this radically disadvantaged inswing and offspin bowlers is debatable because , as with legspinners after the 1935 revision,  the high quality offspin bowlers who established themselves before the change in the law – Laker, Titmus, Tattersall, Illingworth, Allen, Mortimore – continued to be successful once the two fielder restriction was introduced.  Nonetheless,  in principle it was a change which disadvantaged  many bowlers.  It also set a very bad precedent because it is  the only change to the laws made to reduce the effectiveness of bowlers for reasons other than safety.

In 1962  the no ball law was changed from part of the back foot being behind the bowling crease to part of the front foot (whether grounded or not)  being behind the popping crease.   Under the back foot law bowlers (essentially quick bowlers) who dragged the back foot could deliver a ball perhaps two feet or even a yard closer to the batsman than they could under the front foot law.  However,  many pace bowlers did not drag significantly so the effect of the law change is debatable. Nonetheless, it must go down as a disadvantage to the pace bowler.

The introduction of DRS is still very young (made legal in 2009) and it is not used in all Tests. Nonetheless,  it undoubtedly assists bowlers more than it hinders them. That is particularly true of spinners.  Would Swann have had such an outstanding Test career without it? I doubt it.  It is also true that even before the introduction of  DRS that umpires were influenced by the use of technology such as Hawkeye by broadcasters to give more LBWs.

The careers of bowlers have to be put in the context of the laws during their time. Those bowling before 1927 undoubtedly had the toughest regime. With DRS and the changes in the LBW law since 1935 (undoubtedly  the two most influential law changes) arguably  those playing now have the easiest regime.

Spinners cannot be ignored

If Vaughan wishes to hail  Anderson as  the greatest English Test bowler,  spinners cannot be left out of consideration, the likes of Bobbie Peel, Johnny Briggs, Wilfred Rhodes, Colin Blythe,  Hedley Verity and Jim Laker and Derek Underwood.   Peel, Briggs and Blythe (all slow left armers) have with Lohmann and Barnes the distinction of being the only five English Test bowlers to have taken 100 Test wickets at less than 20 runs apiece.  Hedley Verity on the unforgiving  Test pitches of the 1930s  had an average of less than  25.

Who was the best English spin bowler ? Some players with good Test records  have uneven careers. For example, Jim Laker has the lowest Test average  (21) of any spinner taking 100 or more Test wickets for any country since 1945.  Good as his record he only had one outstanding series, that against Australia in 1956 when he took 46 wickets for 9.60 each.   Because of this I would rule him out as best English spinner.  The same applies to Verity who only rarely  ran through a side in Test (his  15 wickets at Lords against Australia in 1934 was on a rain damaged pitch). Swann’s record although good has him taking his wickets at around 29 and he is greatly assisted by DRS and the general lack of experience and expertise against spin of most modern Test players.  So who is the best English spinner?  Based purely on accomplishment that title has to go to Bobby Peel who played in the 1880s and 1889s. .

He  took all his 102  (ave 16.81) wickets against Australia in only 20 matches, so there were no cheap wickets against 19th century South Africa to lessen his bowling average as it did with Johnny Briggs.   Peel was consistently successful in both England and Australia  over a period of 10 years. 64 of his wickets were taken in Australia  where rain damaged pitches do not often come into play and where scoring was generally higher than in England,  both because of the climate and Tests not being restricted to three days. Peel took  21 wickets in the 1884/5 series (5 matches) , 9 in 1887/8, (1 match), 24 in 1888 (3 matches), 6 in 1890 (1 match),  16 1891/2 (3 matches) 0 in 1893 (1 match), 27 in 1894/5 (five matches), 8 in 1896 (1 match).   It is rare for any English spinner to take 20 wickets in a series and even rarer to do so against Australia. Peel managed to do it twice in Australia and once in England despite never playing more than three matches in a series in England.

But no English spinner can match the performance of certainly Lohmann and SF Barnes and arguably Bedser and  Trueman.   I shall deal with Lohmann separately, but  the other three have strong claims both in terms of extended  excellence in varied conditions.

Barnes’ average (16.43) is  the lowest of any Test bowler beginning their career after 1900  -Colin Blythe is with an average of 18.63 is his nearest challenger.  All of Barnes’ wickets were taken against Australia (106) and South Africa (83). Of his 106 wickets (average 21) against Australia  79 were taken in 13 matches in Australia and 27 in England in 7 matches.  His 83 wickets against South Africa were taken in 7 matches.  Vaughan tried to shrug off Barnes’ Test record by sneering at the fact that he  had taken wickets on matting pitches in SA. In fact, Barnes only played 4 matches on matting pitches (in 1913/14).  Nor is there any reason to believe matting pitches are generally bowler friendly. Barnes took 49 wickets in his four Tests on matting. The other bowlers – who included Woolley, Rhodes and Johnny Douglas – managed 31 wickets between them in these Tests with no bowler other than Barnes taking more than 8 wickets (Douglas).

Trueman took some time to establish himself in the England side but from 1957 to 1963  he reached 20 or more wickets in a series twice against  Australia (1961 and 1962/3), once against South Africa (196)) three times against  the West Indies (1957, 1959/60, 1963), twice against India (1952, 1959) and Pakistan (1962).   His best series was the 1963 one against the West Indies (a very strong batting side) when he took 34 wickets at 17.   No other English fast bowler has ever been so consistent for so long.  His bowling average of 21.57 is also the third  lowest in Test cricket for those taking 100 wickets or more, being beaten only by Ambrose and Marshall who averaged under 21.

Alec Bedser’s career falls into two halves. The first is the immediate post-war years when he had little support in the England side and had to deal with two seasons of Bradman.  The second half dates from his second tour of Australia in 1950/51. On that tour he took 30 wickets. In the following summer against South Africa he took another 30 wickets. In 1952 Bedser harvested  20 wickets in four Tests against India. This was followed by a Herculean effort in the 1953 Ashes series  when he ended up with a then record for Ashes Tests of 39 wickets. Between the beginning of the 1950/51 tour of Australia and the 1953 Ashes  series Bedser took 119 wickets at 16 in 19 Tests. Taking into the quality of the opposition and the bowling support Bedser had (not very strong ) that is arguably the best run of extended form any Test bowler has had.

Who has the best claim to the title of best  English Test bowler?

Barnes, Peel, Trueman and Bedser were all great bowlers but there is one English bowler who has an objective claim to be not only the greatest English Test bowler but the greatest bowler from any country in the history of Test cricket. He is George Lohmann who played for Surrey in the 1880s and 1890s before dying of TB in 1901 at the tragically early age of 36.  His career lasted less than ten full English seasons.

With SF Barnes, Maurice Tate and Alec Bedser, Lohmann forms a  quartet of classic  English fast medium bowlers.  He was also a dangerous attacking late middle order batsman and one of the great slip fielders of his day.

Cricketers can be judged in two ways: against their contemporaries and against players from any period.  If they are the best of their time and the best or any time then it makes a strong  case possible for saying that they are the best ever.  If they are the best of their time and are better than their contemporaries by a greater margin than the best of other periods are superior to their contemporaries, then the case becomes virtually indestructible.  Lohmann ticks all these boxes at both Test and overall first class level.

Lohmann’s Test and career first class statistics are so good it is difficult to credit them:

Matches     Wickets     Average    5WI     10WM

Test                        18                112            10.75          9            5

First class            293                1841           13.73       176         57

http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Players/0/92/f_Bowling_by_Opponent.html

Lohmann’s Test average is by far the lowest of those bowlers (from all Test playing nations) who have taken more than 100 or more Test wickets, beating the next by more than five runs per wicket – the closest  to him are SF Barnes with 189 wickets @  16.43, CTB Turner 101 @ 16.53 and Bobbie Peel 102  @ 16.81.

Taking 100 Test wickets at less than 20 runs each might seem to the ahistorical modern mind to be  no great feat before the Great War when they  erroneously imagine pitches were much friendlier to bowlers.   But not only  is  it rare for English bowlers (just five of them),  but it was even rarer for bowlers from other Test playing nations.  On one non-English player has managed to take 100 Test wickets at an average of less than 20, the late Victorian medium pacer CTB Turner.

It is true that Lohmann’s Test figures include a three match series against South Africa in South  Africa  on matting pitches before South Africa were a serious Test playing nation.  In those three games he turned the startling figures of 35 wickets for 203 runs, an average  per wicket of 5.80, but even if those are subtracted from his record he still comes out with the extraordinary figures of 77 wickets in a mere 15 Tests against Australia at an average of 13.01. This is by far the lowest average for a bowler in Ashes Tests taking 50 or more wickets. The nearest to him is the great Nottinghamshire pace-bowling allrounder of the 1880s  Billy Barnes with 51 @ 15.54.

Lohmann’s overall  first class record is also record breaking. His career average of 13.73 is the lowest of any bowler starting his career after 1879  and taking 1,000 or more first class wickets.

The woeful  lack of historical knowledge of many commentators

The problem with Vaughan and some other cricket commentators and summarisers is that they so often have no understanding of the history of the game before their own time, either in terms of the players or the playing conditions.   Because so many of the new broadcasters, the  summarisers in particular, are youngish, they do not even have a decent understanding of the cricketers and cricket over the past half century through their direct experience of cricket.  This would not be an insuperable problem if they simply restricted themselves to commentating and summarising the play they are watching. Sadly they do not.

Is it in the blood?, CMJ and the hypocrisy of the media

Robert Henderson
The long-serving BBC cricket  commentator and journalist Christopher Martin-Jenkins died on Ist January 2013.  The press and broadcasters in Britain were crammed with tributes which veered perilously close to the fulsome.  This was more than a little strange because until the mid-1990s Martin-Jenkins had decidedly non-pc views on foreigners  being selected for the England cricket team  and doubts about the commitment to England of at least one much capped ethnic minority England player Mark Ramprakash. who was born and raised in England.  A selection of CMJ’s comments on the subject of foreigners and Ramprakash are in the second letter to CMJ reproduced below.
To the best of my knowledge none of CMJ’s views of foreigners playing for England appeared in the tributes and obituaries. Not only that when I posted a comment giving details of his non-pc views   on Cricinfo the comment went up but then was taken down. The cricket establishment was very determined that CMJ’s views should be buried.
When my article Is it in the blood? was published in the July 1995 issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly it created a howl of collective anguish from the politically correct British media and some politicians.  Over 50,000 words of criticism and outright crude abuse  abuse appeared in the mainstream press and broadcasters to which I was allowed no opportunity to reply (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/is-it-in-the-blood-peter-oborne-and-the-question-of-englishness/  Because of  this I wrote to CMJ in 1996 asking for his assistance in  bringing my inability reply to public notice. He refused. My letters below give the story.
After I had contacted CMJ he ceased to comment on foreigners or British raised ethnic minority players being selected to England.   The fear of the pc police had got hold of him. But he did not merely stay silent from then on; rather  he towed the politically correct line on the employment of foreigners.
13-November 1996
Tel:0171/387/5018
Mr C. Martin-Jenkins 29 Cavendish Road Redhill Surrey RH1 4AH
Mr Martin-Jenkins,
I enclose an account of my dealings with the media since the publication of ‘Is it in the blood?’
You will doubtless wish to bring the hypocrisy, the self-serving censorship and the general lack of moral sense shown by mediafolk in this matter to the attention of the public through your newspaper and broadcasting outlets.
What is it that mediafolk are always bleating on about? The public’s right know…the Press’ duty to expose immorality in the public interest…? Something along those lines I think.
Yours sincerely,
Robert Henderson
————————————————————————————————————————-
18-February 1997
Mr C. Martin-Jenkins C/O Daily Telegraph London E14
Dear Mr Martin-Jenkins,
Thank you for your letter. You are being naive in suggesting that I approach someone like Charles Moore in an attempt to put my case before the public. Not only have I approached Mr Moore, but the editors of every other national Sunday and Daily, all specialist cricket magazines and the Spectator. All have refused to allow me a word in my defence. Mr Moore did not even have the courtesy to reply to the letter I enclose.
If you want a prime example of the absence of moral sense exhibited by mediafolk in this matter, read the comments about me written by Mathew Engel in the 1996 Wisden after he knew (1) that Frith had lied about his absolute support for my opinions (see letter dated 30/3/94); (2) that the title was Frith’s; (3) that Frith had edited the article and changed its balance and (4) that I had been denied any opportunity for reply. Engel also lied about knowing who I was in his Guardian column of 3/7/95. All this from a man who wrote in the 1995 Wisden:
‘It cannot be irrelevant to England’s long term failures that so many of their recent Test players were either born overseas and/or spent their formative years as citizens of other countries. In the heat of Test cricket, there is a difference between a cohesive team with a common goal, and a coalition of individuals whose major ambitions are for themselves…There is a vast difference between wanting to play Test cricket and wanting to play Test cricket for England.’
And in the 1996 Wisden:
“It is reasonable to believe that not everyone who has chosen to regard himself as English has done so out of any deep patriotic commitment.”
I have asked Mr Engel to explain the difference between his position and mine but he is unable to do so.
The corruption goes far beyond the press, as you will discover from the extended essay I enclose entitled ‘The liberal censorship’. The broadcasters have been every bit as cynically intolerant and self serving as the press – my experiences with the BBC are barely credible. Worse, everywhere I have turned for redress – from the PCC, the BCC, my MP, the judge who presided at the libel settlement hearings, the Bar Council and the Law Society – has been met with same blanket refusal to offer me even the form let alone the reality of justice.
You excuse yourself from publicly revealing my treatment and exposing the misbehaviour of your colleagues by the curious device of stating that you had no obligation to do so because you did not write on the subject of my article. Since when did journalists only feel an obligation to write about matters in which they were personally involved? Moreover, democracy only works if every man defends every other man’s right to free expression.
You also say that you are unconvinced by my arguments. Really, Mr Martin-Jenkins? Here are a few of your thoughts on the subject of national commitment:
August 1990 Radio 2 Sportsdesk (in a tone of profound complaint): “The selectors seem to be obsessed with West Indian born pace bowlers.”
‘Over the weekend both Robin Smith, born and schooled in South Africa and Graham Hick, born and schooled in Zimbabwe, have had their recent form closely analysed. You could easily have made a case for neither being retained for the third Test this week, when Graham Thorpe and John Crawley seem ready. Apart from a debate based purely on cricketing criteria, the latter two have been English since birth. Will not their dedication to the cause of England be that much deeper when they are tied to it by blood as well as money?’ Christopher Martin-Jenkins (CMJ) Daily Telegraph 27/6/94)
May 23rd 1994 Daily Telegraph “… we shall not have a consistently successful England team…until we produce more Goughs; that is to say English born, English bred products of English schools”
‘Tony Greig and Ian Greig, Chris Smith and Robin Smith, Allan Lamb and Graeme Hick, have all used the England cap as a flag of convenience, a point reinforced when the first three left England for Australia on retirement.’ (CMJ Daily Telegraph 10/7/1994)
They [Southern African born England caps] tried their hardest as every England player does, and were more competitive than most. But were they trying to succeed in their cricket careers on behalf of England? Or were they trying to make England win at cricket? (CMJ Daily Telegraph 10/7/1994)
‘Colleagues on this touring party [1993/94 West Indies tour side] have suggested of him …that Ramprakash sometimes seems more at home with West Indian players, that his cricketing hero and chief confidant is Desmond Haynes; that he would be just as happy in the other camp [the West Indies]‘ CMJ Daily Telegraph 16/3/94)
This matter is a general scandal Mr Martin-Jenkins. Are you still unwilling to help me?
Yours sincerely,
Robert Henderson

England: the mother of modern sport

Contents

1. Sport is stitched into the English social DNA

2. The organisation of sport

3. International  Sport

4. Cricket – the first modern game

5. Football – the world game

6. The amateur and the professional

7. The importance of sport

8. Why was England in the sporting  vanguard?

9. English sport is a mirror of English society

10. The political dimension

Robert Henderson

1. Sport is stitched into the English social DNA

“We [the Coca Cola Championship] are the fourth best supported division in  Europe  with  nearly  10  million  fans  last  season,   after  the Premiership  [12.88 million],  Bundesliga [11.57 million] and  La  Liga [10.92].  We are ahead of Seria A.”   Lord Mahwinny,  Chairman  of  the Football League – Daily Telegraph 28 7 2005.

The English have  a most tremendous sporting culture.  By that I do not mean that England is always winning everything at the national level  – although  they  do far better than is generally realised –  but  rather that the interest in sport is exceptionally deep and wide. As the quote from Mahwinny shows,  not only is the top division of English  football(the Premiership)  the most watched in Europe,   the second    division (the  Coca Cola Championship) attracts  more spectators than   all  but two of the top divisions  in Europe,  beating even the top division  of that supposed bastion of football Italy.

The  colossal   support   for  football in  England  is  all  the  more extraordinary  because the country has so many other  sports  seriously competing  for  spectators,   arguably more  than   any  other  country because  England  competes at a serious level in almost all  the  major international   sports  – basketball, handball, volleyball and   and  alpine  sports   are    the exceptions.  This all round sporting participation resulted in  England in the early 1990s coming within touching distance of becoming    world champions in football,  rugby and cricket. In 1990 England  lost in the semi-finals  on  penalties   to Germany in the football World  Cup;  in 1991 they lost the final of the Rugby World Cup and in 1992  they  lost in  the  final  the  Cricket World Cup.  No  other  country,  not  even Australia, could have shown as strongly in all three sports. The  intense English interest in sport at club level is carried through to  the national sides.   England’s rugby,  cricket and football  teams have  immense  support wherever they go,  whether it be  the  amazingly loyal   England  football  supporters or  cricket’s   Barmy  Army,  the special quality of their support is  recognised by foreigners:  “German fans  want to be like the English fans.  They want to be 100  per  cent for  their team,  for their land.” (German supporter at World Cup  2006 – Daily Telegraph 6 7 2006)

This wonderful English  attachment to  sport  is not so strange when it is  remembered  that  most important international sports  were  either created by the English or the English  had a large hand in establishing them as international sports.   In addition,    other important  sports are  plausibly derived from English games,  most notably  American  and Australian  Rules  football from rugby,   baseball  from  rounders  and basketball  from netball.  In fact,  all the major team games in  their modern forms  originated in Anglo-Saxon countries:  cricket,  football, rugby  union,  rugby  league,  American  football,   Australian  rules, baseball,  basketball,  ice hockey,  hockey.   Even the modern  Olympic games  were  inspired  by the Englishman   Dr  William  Penny  Brookes’ “Olympic Games” at Much Wenlock in Shropshire which he founded in 1850.

A visit to the Wenlock gave the founder of the modern Olympic movement, Baron Pierre de Coubertin,  his idea for reviving the Olympic Games  in Athens.  Brookes was a tireless advocate of such a revival  himself and only  died in 1894 shortly before  the first modern Olympic  games  was held  in  1896.   On  the 100th anniversary  of  his  death,  the  then president  of  the  International  Olympic  Committee,   Juan   Antonio Samaranch   laid a wreath on Brookes’  grave with the words “I come  to pay homage and tribute to Dr Brooks, who really was the founder of  the modern Olympic games.” (Bridgnorth Information).    It would not be too much  of  an  exaggeration  to say that  the  English  invented  modern spectator sport.

Of  the  games directly created,   to the one game which  deserves  the title of a world sport – football – the English may add  cricket, rugby (both codes),  snooker, hockey, lawn tennis, badminton,  squash,  table tennis   and  snooker,  Those who  yawn  at the likes of hockey,  table tennis  and squash should reflect on the fact  that sports vary greatly in   popularity  from  country  to  country.   Hockey  is  the   Indian Subcontinent’s second game:  squash,  badminton and table tennis are to the  fore  throughout  Asia,   while  snooker  is  rapidly  growing  in popularity in the Far East.

2. The organisation of sport

The difference between sports  before the modern era  and those  in the modern  era   is  that the pre-modern sports   were  not  organised  or standardised. In  pre-modern times sports lacked both a standard set of rules  and  governing bodies to enforce the common rules.  The  English changed all that and they began the process  very early,  most  notably in  cricket where a governing body, the MCC,  and a generally  accepted set  of  rules (known as laws) were established before the end  of  the 18th  century.   Some  of major sports  where England  had  the  first national association and  established the first generally accepted  set of  rules are:

Association  Football   –  Football Association  formed  in   1863,  FA established the laws of the game

Cricket – First published Laws 1744, MCC formed 1787

Hockey  –  1883  standard set of rules  published  by  Wimbledon  Club,

Hockey Association founded 1886

Lawn  Tennis – Wimbledon championships established 1877 with first  set of rules resembling the game as it is now

Rugby Union – 1871 The Rugby Union formed and the  first laws published

The  dominance  of  England as a creator and  organiser  of  sports  is further illustrated by  the existence of  iconic  sporting   venues such as Lords (cricket),  Wembley (football),  Twickenham (Rugby Union) and Wimbledon (tennis),  all of which have a resonance that   stretches far beyond  England.

3. International  Sport

Anyone who wonders why the four home nations  (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland),  are allowed to play as separate teams  in major sports  such  as  football  and   rugby   even  though  they  are   not independent  countries need wonder no longer.  The answer is  that  the four home nations were the four original international players in these sports.

The  Rugby Union arranged the first international rugby  match  between England  and Scotland in 1871, while the  first football  international between England and Scotland kicked off in  1872.

Further afield  cricket led the way.   The first international  cricket tour  was   in  1859 when a team of Englishmen  toured  North  America. Further tours took place to Australia in the 1860s and 1870s.  What was later  recognised  as the first cricket Test match was  played  between England an Australia in Australia 1877. The first Test match in England was played between England and Australia in 1880 at the Oval.

Of  course it was not only formal efforts which spread English  sports. Everywhere  the  English went they took their games with them.  In  the time  of  the  Empire  and  Britain’s  dominance  as  an  economic  and political power this meant almost the entire world.  Most of the  world was eager to adopt at  least some English sports.  Indeed,  of the many cultural  things  England have exported,  sports  have a good claim  to be the most eagerly received.  The games which England invented did not need to be forced upon others. The opposite was often the case.  Within the   Empire  complaints  were  not  frequently  made  by  the   native populations that they were excluded from participation in games such as football and cricket.

4. Cricket – the first modern game

Cricket  was the first team game to be a great spectator sport,  indeed one might argue that it was the first great spectator game of any  sort as  opposed to a sport such as horse-racing,  running,  boxing  or  the more  disreputable pursuits of cock and dog fighting and bear  baiting.

Cricket  might also reasonably claim  to have inaugurated the  idea  of international  sport with the first cricket tour to  North  America  in 1859 – see above.

The game is very old.  It can be dated certainly  from the 16th century, but as a pursuit it is reasonable to assume it was much older –  before the  age of printing little was recorded about any subject.  There  are some  intriguing  references  in old manuscripts  which  may  refer  to cricket,  for example, an entry in the wardrobe accounts of Edward I in 1300 which records a payment for the Kings sons playing  at “Creag”  (H S Altham p20 A History of Cricket Vol I).

The  game probably became more than simply  a rustic or boys’   pursuit towards  the end of the 17th  century. The gentry took it up  –  George III’s father,  Frederick, was a very keen player and actually died from an  abscess  caused  by being hit by a cricket ball –  and  teams  were raised  by   great  aristocrats such as the Duke of  Dorset,  Such  men effectively created the first cricketing professionals by employing the best  players  on  their estates,  ostensibly to  do  other  jobs,  but primarily  to ensure they played cricket for a particular team.  Partly because  of  this  and partly because the game grew  out  of  a   still overwhelmingly rural England with its much closer relationship  between the classes than later existed,  English  cricket was always a socially inclusive    game,   with  dukes  literally   rubbing  shoulders   with ploughmen.

The game was early organised. Sides representing counties such as Kent, Hampshire and Sussex were competing with each other by  the first  half of the 18th century.   Teams  called All-England, England or the Rest of England were also  got up to play either a strong county or,  in the second half  of the  century,  the Hambledon Club,  a club based in  a  tiny  Hampshire village.   Hambledon were surprising modern in their  thinking,  having built  the  18th  century  equivalent of the  team  coach  –   a  great pantechnicon  –  to   transport  the team and  its  followers  to  away matches.

During  its  first  century  or so as a  spectator  sport  cricket  was bedevilled by betting.  Important matches  were played  for very  large purses,  sometimes more than a thousand pounds,   a fortune in the 18th century.  Even more insidious was individual betting on results or  the performances  of  individual players within the game –  the  nature  of cricket absolutely lends itself to the latter.   But although the  game was always under suspicion of foul play, much as horse racing is today, betting must have increased interest in the game.

With  the  coming  of  the  railways  cricket  moved  into  the  modern professional  era with the formation of the All-England Eleven and  its imitators  such as the United South of England Eleven.   These  touring professional   sides   took  cricket  around   England  and  laid   the foundation  for  the modern county game.   During the same  period  the county  clubs as we know them today began to be  formally  established, with Surrey dating from 1845.   By the 1870s the work of the travelling professional sides was done and county  cricket became the mainstay  of English cricket.

H.S.Altham  entitled  a  chapter in his  History  of  Cricket  somewhat blasphemously  as the Coming of W.G.Grace.  This was not hyperbole.  In the  high  Victorian age two people were known as the  GOM  (Grand  Old Man). The first was Gladstone, the second was Grace. It is a moot point who  was  the better known.  It is no moot point who  was  the  greater celebrity: W.G. won hands down.

Grace was the first great popular games playing  hero.  His first class career lasted an amazing 43 years (1865-1908).  He made his first class debut at the age of 15.   His Test career began in 1880 with a score of 152.  He played his last Test at the age of 50 in 1899.   At the age of 47  (1995)  he scored a thousand runs in May,  the first man to  do  so (only five other men have ever managed it).

About  the  only two organisational  things seen in modern  team  sport which  cricket did not invent are  cup competitions and leagues  –  the honour for doing so rests with football,  although an unofficial county championship existed before the formation of the Football League.

5. Football – the world game

Football  is  the  nearest there is to  a world game.  There  are  easy reasons for this. At its most basic football  is a game  which requires the  most  rudimentary  of equipment,  a ball.  Its  rules  are  simple compared with those of other  games such as rugby or cricket.   But  it is  more  than  that.  Football is also the game  which  arguably  best combines  pure  athleticism  with the felicity  of  human  thought  and movement to which we give too often the bone-achingly dull  description “hand/eye coordination.”

Football  was  in a state of flux until the middle  of  the  nineteenth century.   Various  forms  existed.  Some codes allowed  kicking  only, others handling.   There were disputes over whether hacking and gouging were allowed.  In 1863 the Football Association was created and stopped the confusion. It was the first national sporting association which was purely  that.  The MCC in practice directed  English  cricket  and  was responsible for the laws of the game, but they were first and foremost, a private club,  as was the Jockey Club. The FA was  the first formally constituted   sporting body created to explicitly to direct  an  entire sport.

No sport has had such a rapid rise to popularity.  In the last  quarter of  the  nineteenth century  it went from a poorly organised  game,  to something  which  was recognisable as the game we  know  today.  Famous clubs  of  today were formed by Public School Old  Boys,  vicars,  boys clubs,  public  houses,  in the work place and  by cricket  clubs.  The first  international  game took place between England and  Scotland  in 1872.  The world’s first cup competition, the FA Cup, was born in 1872.

In  1888 the world’s first  sporting  league was formed,  the  Football League.    International matches involving countries other than England were being played well before the First World War and   football was an Olympic  sport  from  early on in the modern  Olympiad’s  history.  Not least,  football’s  world governing body, FIFA, was founded as early as 1904 (with no encouragement from England it has to be said).

By  1900 the top teams had become overwhelmingly professional and  club owners were often drawn from the ranks of local businessmen.  The  game had become  much more of a business than any other sport.

6. The amateur and the professional

Top  class   sport is now so tied to money that it may seem  quaint  to his  generation  that for all  of the nineteenth century and  much  of twentieth century the  amateur played a major  role in many of the more popular sports.  This was due to the fact that most major sports originated in England, where the spirit of amateurism was very strong, and these became spread across the globe when Britain had the only world empire worthy of the name and was also the most industrial advanced and economically powerful state in the world.  Other nations who took up the games had a natural inclination to imitate the English way in sport, because of where the games originated and because of England’s prominent position in the world.

There was also a strong class element. This was a time when class and status was still very much an issue throughout Europe and those parts of the world which were within the British Empire. Nor was the United States immune to the lure of class. As the amateur was associated with being a gentleman and a professional classed as a working man, it suited the better-off to support the distinction.  It also provided in some games, especially cricket, the means by which, in even a very socially stratified society, people of very different social status could play together.

But there was more to it than that. The English elite of the 19th century was in thrall to an idealised version of the ancient world and from this came the prime amateur ideals of doing something praiseworthy for its own sake and behaving honourably in the observance of  not only the laws but the spirit of a game.

Football,  cricket and golf  had professionals from their early days as public spectacles, but even within  games those  the amateur had a long run.  Other  major sports such as athletics,  tennis  and  rugby  union remained in  theory at least amateur until well into the latter half of the twentieth century,  although shamateurism,  the paying of  amateurs illicitly  through devices such  as inflated expenses or  salaries  for non-sporting  jobs  which were never actually performed,  tainted  most major sports.  But even though this dishonesty went on there were still many   genuine amateurs in top  class sport until quite  recent  times.

It is also true that the shamateurs were paid minute sums compared with the vast amounts many openly professional sportsmen get today. The  amateur  had  a prominent playing role partly because it  was  the upper and middle classes  who developed and ran modern sport.  Even the archetypal  working  class  game,  Association  football,  had  at  its foundations the public schools and innumerable worthies from the gentry and  mercantile  classes who founded many of the clubs  which  are  now household  names.  The true amateur was also cheap because at worst  he drew  only expenses (shamateurs were a different kettle of fish,  often being considerably more expensive to employ than an official pro).

But there was more to amateurism in top class sport  than simple  class dominance  and  cheapness.  The middle and upper classes  brought  with them a rather noble ethos.  Being an amateur  was more than just  being a person who played without being paid.  Games were seen having a moral purpose  in  the  building  of  character.  Team  sports    taught  the individual  to  subordinate  their own interests to that of the  group, while  individual competition forced a boy  to confront their  personal responsibility.  Playing for its own sake was something pure, untainted by the crudity of commercialism.

That  the amateur ethos was always battling with the vagaries of  human nature, which in many people invariably seeks to gain advantage unfairly,  is neither here nor there.  The important thing is the existence of the ideal.  Like  most  noble ideals it was followed to  some  degree   and behaviour during play   was as a general rule rather more sporting than it  is in a purely professional game.   Moreover,  even where  a  sport became  at   a fairly early stage  overwhelmingly professional  on  the playing side,  as  was the case of football,   the existence of  people with  the amateur spirit administering and controlling the  game  meant their mentality  was reflected in the way professionals behaved – a pro who did otherwise would risk the end of his career.  This was important because   the  behaviour of everyone who plays or watches  a  sport  is influenced by the behaviour of those at the top.

The true amateur was also thought to bring a spirt of adventure to  top class  sport  because he  was not weighed down by the thought  that  he must perform if his employment in the sport was to continue.  This  was one  of  the most powerful arguments cited in support  of  the  amateur captain in county cricket. It had a certain force to it.

I  regret  the virtual extinction  of the amateur in  the  popular  top level sports.  In my ideal world all sport would be amateur.   There is something constricting about all-professional sport. Players do have to consider the next contract.  They do have to consider their performance if  they wish to move to a  bigger club or take part in   international sport.   The  talented sportsman who is not a  professional  is  simply excluded.   Such a person may simply not be able to gain a professional opportunity   or he may simply not want to be a full time  professional sportsman. Either way he is lost to the top level of his sport. Cricket in    particular   has   suffered   from   the   abolition    of    the amateur/professional distinction,  with few if any players who are  not contracted  to a county club having any chance to play for the  county.

Professional  sport  has  too much of the closed shop about  it  to  be healthy. Attached  to  amateur  ideal was that of  the   “allrounder”.  For  the gentleman the ideal was the  scholar athlete,  an ideal approached most famously   by the Victorian Charles Burgess Fry,  who  won  a  classics scholarship  to Oxford,  set the world long jump record  whilst  there, obtained Blues  for cricket,  football, rugby and athletics and went on to play cricket and football for England. But there was also a professional niche as a sporting  allrounder. Many famous  footballers  played  cricket  professionally  and  many  famous cricketers,  football,  perhaps most notably Denis Comptom  who  played cricket  for  Middlesex  and England while spending  his  winters  from cricket  tours  speeding down the left wing for  Arsenal.   Sadly,  the extension  of the football season to ten months of the year has  killed the  professional  footballer/cricketer.   Phil  Neal  who  batted  for Worcestershire  and played left back for Lincoln City in the 1970s  and 1980s was the last of the breed.

7. The importance of sport

Those  who say “it’s only sport”  should stand back and reflect on  the amount of time, effort and money which is spent throughout the world on sport. Women may be generally less enthusiastic,  but sports  obviously speak to a deep seated desire within men.

Man  is  a  tribal animal.  If he were not it would matter  not  a  jot whether  one team won or another,  unless money was on the result.  But manifestly men do care and care passionately when no material advantage is  to  be  gained or lost by the result.  In  fact,  the  relationship between  a football fan and his club is probably the most  enduring  of his life, for it commonly begins in childhood and ends only with death.

The  outpouring  of joy when a goal is scored dwarfs any  other  public expression  of  positive  feeling  today.  Those  who  imagine  that  a football  club  is merely a business and that selling  football  is  no different from selling baked beans fail to understand the game and  the fan.

Team sports are war games, a war game in fact as well where men meet in a  form  of  direct  physical confrontation  which  is  a  pretty  good substitute  for  tribal war,  war fought hand to hand  with  sword  and shield  and  spear.  Sport is  war without the  weapons.  That  is  its primary  glamour, that is its excitement.

Sporting heroes are heroes in the literal sense.  Watch even a powerful man  in  the presence of his sporting hero and the  powerful  man  will almost certainly be unconsciously  deferring to the sportsman.

But  sport has much more to it than tribalism.  It is a constant  in  a changing world.  It is a source of aesthetic delight.  It speaks to the whole range of human emotions.

8. Why was England in the sporting  vanguard?

Why did England invent so many games and show such an appetite for them as players,   spectators  and administrators  that modern  sport became possible?

Industrialisation  undoubtedly  provided  the  opportunity  for  modern spectator sports by  moving England early from a predominantly rural to a predominantly  urban  society. Large agglomerations of people provide the  audience  for  sport.  The growing  wealth  of  the  country  from industrialisation provided the money to support professional sport. But that  does  not explain why it happened in England when it did  not  in occur in  other non-Anglo-Saxon industrialising nations,  which  either showed  less interest in sport  or adopted and followed English  sports rather  than  making  their own indigenous  sports  serious   spectator sports.    There had to be something special in the  English  character and society which provided the impetus to take the opportunity when  it was offered.

The  answer I suspect is that the English  have always been a  sporting people,  whether  it  be  pre-modern games  of  football  and  cricket, archery,  dog fighting and so on. The love of the chase remains to this day in  fox hunting.  Athletic pursuits were widely admired before  the modern  era,  especially by the educated Englishman brought up  on  the classics  with  their frequent descriptions of physical  prowess.  Long before the  much Wenlock “Olympic Games”,   Robert Dover of    Chipping Camden  in  Gloucestershire  held his “Cotswold Olimpick Games”  –  the games  were first held in 1612 – which included sledgehammer  throwing, horse racing and wrestling.

But the fact the English have always had an abnormal love of sport begs the question of why. It is probably simply an expression of the general English love of liberty and the practical realisation of that love in a society which until recent times has not oppressed the English man  and woman  with  much  state intrusion into  their  lives.  (Sadly,  recent governments,  most notably that of Blair,  have seriously  changed  the traditional  free nature of English society).   Over the centuries  the English became habituated to the idea that the individual counts,  that a free-born Englishman,  however humble, had a dignity and worth simply as an individual.

This  mentality is important because participation in a sport  requires freedom  from  oppressive elite who frown upon public  gatherings   and societies with  a dominant  ideology which considers the ordinary   man as  next  to  nothing at best and a threat to public  order  at  worst. English  society   has  not been free of such  qualities   but  it  has probably suffered much less severely from them than any other nation.

As  for why England has been so successful in exporting its sports,  it cannot  simply be the consequence of the British Empire and   Britain’s economic  and political dominance.  Sports are demonstrably not  easily transferrable from one society and another.  Other European nations had empires  and their colonies did not take up French sports.  The  United States  for  all  their economic and  cultural  dominance  have  failed largely  to export their two most important native sports, baseball and American  football.   Basketball  and  ice  hockey  have  enjoyed  more popularity   but  nothing  approaching  the  popularity  of   football. Australian  Rules football,  wildly popular  in Australia,  remains  an essentially domestic pursuit.  Ditto  Gaelic games such as hurling   in Ireland.  Cricket and football gained a hold abroad  and maintained  it because  they  are  inherently good and satisfying  games,  the  former immensely  technical to play yet simple in its basic idea,  the  latter the  simplest  and cheapest  game to play – two sweaters  down  on  the ground for a goal and a ball and you have a game.

9. English sport is a mirror of English society

Sport  holds up a mirror to any society.  Sadly,  much of English  sport  today shares  the ills of English society at large. Due to the actions of the British  elite  professional  team sport in England  has  been  heavily infiltrated  by   foreign players just as the country has a  whole  has been left open to de facto foreign colonisation.

Cricket  was  the  first  to fall prey to  the  disease.  In  1969  the qualification  rules  for foreign players appearing in  county  cricket were effectively thrown away.  Before 1969 any foreign player  had   to qualify by two years residence in the county:  after 1969 they could be specially registered without any qualifying period.

Since 1969 there have been various attempts to stem the number  foreign players.   Official overseas players – those not qualified to play  for England by any route  –  have been at various times  restricted to  two per   county side,  then one per side before reverting back to two  per side. As of 2012 its is back to one per side in County Championship matches.

In the past few years  the number of  foreign players in county cricket has   been greatly expanded by  a  ruling  that any EU  state  national must be allowed to play in county cricket whether  England qualified or not – this has resulted in many Australians and South Africans claiming EU  state passports of one sort or another.   The final breach  in  the sporting  emigration  wall has been  the granting of  the  same  rights possessed  by   EU state  passport holders to  people   from  countries which  have  treaties  with the EU that   allow  them  certain  trading rights.

This   loosening  of immigration rules  applies  to all  other  sports, many  of  which   are even more vulnerable  to  invasion  than  cricket because cricket is not played seriously on the continent.  Football and rugby  are  played within the EU and both games in  England  have  been substantially  colonised by continentals.  The situation with  football has  become  especially  serious  with well over  half  the  places  in Premiership  sides being filled by players not qualified  for  England.

Following England’s exit from the 2006 World Cup the ex-England manager Graham  Taylor  voiced his fears that   England might never  again  win the World Cup simply because of the lack of opportunity being given  to English players (BBC R5 Victoria Derbyshire 7 7 2006).

The  other  side  of the foreign infiltration coin  is  the  widespread employment  of  those  who are not unequivocally  English  in   English national teams. These people fall into two camps: (1) those who came to England  as adults  and  (2) ethnic minority players  either  born  and raised in England or at least largely raised here.    Their  employment by  England  has  been generally a failure,  both  in  terms  of  their individual  performances  and in the performance  of  their  respective England teams.

Take  the  two major English team sports cricket and football.  Of  the players  who played any substantial amount of cricket for England  only one  (Robin Smith) has managed a Test batting average of 40 and only two   of the bowlers (Andy Caddick and Dean Headley)has ended witgh a Test bowling average of less than 30.

As  for  football,  the only players in the  immigrant/ethnic  minority category   to show themselves to be of true international standard  are probably Paul Ince and Des Walker.  It is difficult to see the sporting justification   for  the repeated and extensive selection  of   players such  as  Mark Ramprakash (lowest every batting  average – 27 –  for  a front  line England batsman who has played my than 40 Tests)   or  John Barnes  (79  England caps and a man who rarely if ever  reproduced  his club  form  for  England).   Perhaps  the  answer  lies  in   political correctness,  a  desire on the part of selectors  to  guard  themselves against  accusations of racism or simply an ideological  commitment  to multiculturalism.   Here is Stephen Wagg writing in Catalyst, the CRE’s new   propaganda magazine funded by the taxpayer:  “…it is  important that  this  team [the England cricket side] speaks for  a  multi-ethnic England.” (Racism and the English cricket party – Catalyst June 2006).

There is also the attitude of the players  to consider. Some  of those who have  played for England have been blunt about  their attitude  towards turning out for the side.   Here  is  ex-England captain Nasser Hussain interviewed by Rob Steen:

‘If anyone asks about my nationality, I’m proud  to say ‘Indian’,  but I’ve never given any thought  to  playing  for  India.   In  cricketing terms I’m  English.’ Daily Telegraph 11 8 1989

Or  take the black Jamaican England footballer John Barnes in his autobiography:

“I    am  fortunate my England career is now  complete  so   I   don’t have to sound patriotic  any  more.” (P69)

“I     feel    more   Jamaican    than     English     because      I’m black.    A  lot  of black  people born    in    England    feel   more Jamaican  than English because  they  are   not  accepted     in    the land of  their  birth  on account of their  colour, (P 71)

Clearly such mentalities exclude any emotional commitment to doing well for  the sake of English pride.  The most they could have been  playing for was their own ambition.  As the editor of Wisden Matthew Engel  put it:

“It  cannot  be  irrelevant  to  England’s  long  term  failures   that so   many   of   their   recent  Test   players   were   either    born overseas    and/or  spent  their  formative  years  as   citizens    of other   countries.   In  the  heat  of  Test  cricket,   there   is   a difference  between  a  cohesive  team  with  a  common  goal,   and  a coalition    of   individuals   whose   major   ambitions    are    for themselves…There    is  a  vast  difference  between    wanting    to play   Test   cricket   and  wanting  to   play   Test   cricket    for England.” (Editor’s notes 1995 Wisden).

In  the  1990s an England cricket eleven was  routinely   comprised  of something  like  five white Englishmen, two Southern Africans,   a  New Zealander  and three West Indians.  The idea that their  captain  could appeal to their patriotism as a team of Englishmen is risible.  Nor  is it  clear  how  any English man or woman could have seen  it  as  their national side.

10. The political dimension

Because of their  function as lightening rods of national feeling  that the  existence of England sides are so hated and feared by  our  elite. The  erstwhile  and now deceased Labour Sports minister,   Tony  Banks, persistently  puffed  the idea of a British football  team,   something that is indubitably not wanted by any of the four home FAs or the  vastmajority of fans.

The  political  dimension  goes beyond  the  English  national   sides. Sporting  crowds  generally  and football crowds in  particular  are  a source  of concern to our  liberal elite because they provide  the  one opportunity  where large numbers of the white working class can  gather together  with any regularity without having to gain the permission  of the police.

In  these politically correct times sporting crowds in England for  the major sports are also disturbingly white for the liberal  bigot  elite. Vast amounts of time and money have been devoted to making crowds “more representative”, happily with precious little  success.

Finally,  there  is the general contempt which the British  elite  have developed for the white working class.  In English sport this  contempt tends  to be focused on the football fan.  Margaret Thatcher more  than any  other  individual  fostered  the  contempt    when  she  routinely painted  English football supporters as hooligans and  enthusiastically promoted  the  exclusion  of English football clubs  after  the  Heysel stadium  tragedy at the 1985 European Cup final between  Liverpool  and Juventus.

Sport  has  a  particular  importance to  England  at  present  because sporting sides are the only source of national focus the English  have. The  English  are  denied a parliament,  they  are  betrayed  by  their political  elite who shudder at the idea of English  nationalism,  they are constantly insulted by the national media,   but the national sides continue. These sporting institutions  permit the English to articulate their  feelings as a tribe.  Even  English men  and women  without  any interest in sport should support them for that reason if no other.

Well, at least there wasn’t a six-foot dancing penis

Robert Henderson

Prior to the  opening ceremony of the  London Olympics,  the last time Britain put on a taxpayer-funded  entertainment that was  meant  to project the country to the world was on 31 January 1999.  The event was broadcast   from the  Dome (now the O2 Arena)  to mark the new millennium.  True to the politically correct  dicta of the time, the Millennium show  said precisely nothing about British history or culture and was an exceptionally  trite mishmash of  the “we are all one happy global family” variety of painfully right on exhortation and posturing  (see http://wwp.millennium-dome.com/news/news-dome-990916show.htm).  The lowlight of the show was a six-foot dancing penis.

In 1999 the liberal left propaganda concentrated on pretending that Britain’s past had nothing of merit at best or was positively  and unreservedly shameful at worst, while projecting the politically correct wonders of the joyous and fruitful  multicultural and multiracial society they fondly but erroneously imagined Britain was in the process of becoming.

By 2012  the politically correct narrative of Britain had changed.  The brighter amongst the  liberal left had realised that there were  dangers in both crudely alienating  the native British population at large (and especially the English and the white working class) and in allowing state sponsorship of ethnic and racial divisions through multiculturalism.  Consequently, they  began to develop a new narrative.   The liberal left  would present  the British past in terms which  allowed the multicultural message to be  imported into  it, most overtly by the pedantically true but grotesquely misleading claim that Britain has  received immigrants since time out of mind and  non-white immigrants for at least several centuries.  (What the pedantically true statement fails to mention is the small numbers and the nature of the immigration – overwhelmingly  white and European –  until the post-1945 mass influx .)  One  of the most enthusiastic proponents  of the “blacks have always been in Britain” school  is the black Labour MP Diane Abbott  (a history graduate God help us) who wrote a piece for the BBC’s black history month in which contained this gem:  “The earliest blacks in Britain were probably black Roman centurions that came over hundreds of years before Christ.”  (Like Captain Queeg I kid you not – see http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/dabbott_01.shtml.  For those unfamiliar with British history, let me point out that the first known Roman contact with Britain was in 55 BC  – Julius Caesar –  and the first Roman settlement in Britain -the Claudian invasion –  dates from 43 AD. As for her curious idea that “black centurions” were the likely first black settlers in Britain, I can only guess that she confuses centurion – an officer rank with various meanings in the Roman military –  with the ordinary Roman soldier).  Three  questions arise from Ms Abbott’s concept of British history – how did she obtain a place to read history at Newham College, Cambridge; how did she managed to take a history degree and what does it say about the fruits of positive discrimination, official or unofficial?)

But the storyline that Britain had always been multicultural  and multiracial  has  a gaping practical drawback. The politically correct could fudge present British realities by using their control of the mainstream media to promote the false idea that blacks and Asians occupy a central place in British society by the  gross over-representation of  ethnic minorities as active participants in programmes and as the subject of programmes.  But they could not control the past effectively  because  the overwhelming majority of those standing large in British history were white, Christian  and not immigrants.  Of course, attempts were made to promote the idea that non-whites had produced great British figures, such as the attempt in recent years to present the Victorian  black woman Mary Seacole – as the equal of Florence Nightingale (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/seacole_mary.shtml) . But these efforts were inevitably  puny because there were so few non-whites of note in British history.

Multiculturalist from the word go

The London Olympics were wrapped in the multiculturalist credo from the word go.  The central plank of the bid was that a London Olympics would be multicultural celebration not merely in terms of the competitors,  but through its positioning in London and specifically a part of London which contained a very  large non-white population.  Here is the leader of the bid Seb Coe in Singapore making the final bid for the games:

“… we’re serious about inspiring young people.  Each of them comes from east London, from the communities who will be touched most directly by our Games. 

And thanks to London’s multi-cultural mix of 200 nations, they also represent the youth of the world. Their families have come from every continent.  They practice every religion and every faith.  What unites them is London. “ (http://www.london2012.com/mm/Document/aboutus/General/01/22/85/87/singapore-presentation-speeches.pdf).

The official London Olympics website makes no bones about its mission either:

“It is our aim to make diversity and inclusion a key differentiator of our Games, celebrating the many differences among the cultures and communities of the United Kingdom.

It’s not simply about recruiting a diverse workforce. It’s about the suppliers, the competitors, the officials and the spectators – in fact, everyone connected with the Games, from the security guards to the bus drivers. Diversity and inclusion influence every detail of our Games-time planning, from accessible transport to our Food Vision.” (http://www.london2012.com/about-us/diversity-and-inclusion/)

Danny Boyle

The man given the job of producing  an Olympic ceremony which would accord with  the new politically correct propaganda strategy was Danny Boyle,  the director of,  amongst other films, the heroinfest   Trainspotting and the Indian-sited Slumdog Millionaire.  Boyle did not have to be told what to do because it would be what he would do naturally.  He was  Old Labour temperamentally but  also plugged into the one world politically correct switchboard.

Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically in the light of the  very unTory  nature of the Coalition Government, Boyle was appointed by  the Coalition.  However, as the appointment occurred on 17 June 2010 (six weeks after the Coalition assumed office)  it is reasonable to suppose that the Tory-led Coalition were  rubber-stamping  what the Brown Government had arranged without giving the matter much thought.  Nonetheless the appointment got some ringing  Tory support:

Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, said: “The opening and closing ceremonies are the jewels in the crown of any Olympics and Paralympics and are one of the benchmarks against which all games are judged.

“I am very pleased that British directors and producers of such outstanding international calibre and acclaim have given their backing to London 2012.

With their creativity and expertises on board, I’m sure that London’s showpiece events will make Britain proud.”

His sentiments were echoed by the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who said the “brilliant” team had brought together “some of the most imaginative people in the world”.

“The work they have produced over the years has been quite extraordinary, with an impact not just in the UK, but also on the international stage,” he said.

“They exemplify some of the greatest attributes we have – creativity, vision, and intelligence – which will be critical to ensuring shows that are as stunning as they are uniquely British.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10338048)

The multicultural message is reinforced relentlessly by the mainstream British media. Someone drawing their idea of the make-up of the British Olympic team  from British newspapers and broadcasters  could be forgiven for thinking that the team was largely composed of  black and Asian competitors. The truth is rather  different. The Daily Telegraph on 27 July  (2012) thoughtfully provided photos of all 541 British Olympic competitors. There were only 40 black, brown and yellow faces amongst them, less than  8% of the total.  The  small number of black and Asian participants is even more striking  when  taking into account the fact that  blacks and Asians in Britain are on average substantially  younger than white Britons and consequently there are  proportionately far more blacks and Asians than there are white Britons in the age group suitable for the Olympics.

A political opening ceremony

By its very nature the Olympics  opening ceremony should be apolitical because of the vast range of political behaviours and ideologies  which are represented by the two hundred or so competing nations.  No overtly political production could do other than irritate many whilst pleasing few.   It should have gone without saying that that the opening ceremony should have eschewed any ideological message.

Boyle  ignored this imperative wholesale and pumped out the  liberal internationalist message with shards of Old Labour  thinking embedded within it.   The world audience was treated to an idealisation of  pre-industrial Britain fit for a chocolate box being devoured by industrialisation,   toiling workers, suffragettes, Jarrow Hunger Marchers,  the arrival of the Windrush symbolising the beginning of the  post-war mass immigration,  nurses and patients bouncing on beds and dancing to supposedly extol the virtues of the NHS and CND marchers.  Apart from being  politically partisan it was doubly crass because the  overwhelming majority of the foreign audience would not have had a clue about what was going on.   The  British have  an additional beef because they were  taxpayers paying for unambiguous political propaganda which came from only one side of the political spectrum. Judging by phones-ins and comments left on blogs, newsgroups and mainstream media comment boards quite a few Britons cavilled at that.

The  use of cultural references which were unlikely to be anything other than Greek to foreigners went beyond the politically partisan. Who outside of Britain would be likely to understand references to the film Gregory’s Girl  or  had a clue what was meant by  the attempt to portray the significance of the inventor of the World Wide Webb Tim Berners-Leigh  by wrapping him up in a story of staggering banality about British youngsters connecting with each other digitally?  It is pointless when catering for the widest of audiences to make references to national events and cultural artefacts which do not  have  either a wide international currency  or are of a nature which is self-explanatory.

There were also what can only be hoped were  the last throes of Blair’s  “Cool Britannia” , with the celebration of the inane and superficial.  Various British personalities with  international traction were wheeled out: David Beckham,  Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean, Daniel Craig as James Bond, JK Rowling and the Queen as herself, sadly  reduced to the status of a pantomime walk-on.   The idea that going for a night out represented modern British society at its most emblematic was beyond risible.

To understand how inappropriate Boyle’s show was,  imagine an equally politically  partisan and uncritical show put on by a director with non-pc  nationalist sympathies crossed with a religious belief in free enterprise. (This would be  a stupendously improbable event in modern Britain but  do your best to get your imagination to stretch to the Herculean lengths required) .  Such a director might   have started by extolling the British Empire as a great civilising force,  portrayed pre-industrial Britain as a place of poverty  and brutality which was transformed into a much wealthier and more ordered  society by industrial capitalism, created a narrative which  depicted state interference with the economy as disastrous with the nationalised industries of Attlee including the NHS being shown as inefficient and wracked with political activists, treated the dockers’  march of 1968 in support of Enoch Powell  after his  Rivers of Blood speech  resulted in his sacking by Tory leader Ted heath and  the Notting Hill riots as legitimate political protests against mass immigration before ending  with a scene encapsulating the  erosion of freedom in Britain by the  combination of politically correctness   and the vast  opportunities for surveillance offered by modern  digital technology. This last could have Tim Berners-Leigh with his head in his hands as a court sentenced someone to prison for putting out a non-pc message on Twitter.  All that would have been as inappropriate as Boyle’s offering but no more so.

No irony intended

Strenuous attempts have been made to suggest that Boyle was being ironic in his broad  historical commentary with his  portrayal of Britain as being a pastoral idyll before this was rudely disturbed by the  industrial revolution. I wish I could believe he was, but I cannot because this is just the type of sentimental ahistorical pap which a certain type of  left liberal  adores and, even more worryingly, believes. I would not mind betting that Boyle is an fervent admirer of William Morris and the Arts and Craft Movement of Victorian England, with its wistful looking back to a non-existent pre-industrial golden age.

Boyle’s  putative historical representation of a blissful agrarian life filled with peasants who were trampled by the grinding face of capitalist engineered industrialisation is  ludicrous to anyone who has any understanding of British and in particular English history.   The peasantry of England had effectively ceased to exist long before the industrial revolution because the very extensive enclosure movements of   the 15th century onwards had  turned huge numbers of peasants off land they worked themselves and forced them  to migrate to the towns,  work as casual labourers or become sturdy beggars.  By the time the industrial revolution  began circa 1700 there was no real peasantry,  the nearest  being yeoman farmers.

The second absurdity is the idea that pre-industrial Britain was a pre-lapsarian paradise. Life in agrarian societies is and was  no bed of roses. Pre-industrial Britain was no exception.  Famines were frequent, both because of  general crop failures and the absence of a system of reliable roads and fast  transport to move food around.   Heavy manual labour was the norm and the production of what we now call consumer goods was small. Sanitation was  poor to non-existent  and cities, especially London,  were death traps because of their propensity to spread diseases.  Medicine  was  so rudimentary that doctors, even those attending the rich, were as likely to kill their patients as not, often with a great deal of unnecessary suffering as  Charles II found out to his cost.   Industrialisation, and its fellow traveller science, eventually changed or at least greatly ameliorated those ills.

Nor is it true that the industrial revolution was simply a catalogue of cruelty and social dislocation. Great entrepreneurs of the early industrial revolution such as Josiah Wedgewood and Matthew Boulton  took a pride in the fine condition of their factories and later industrialists such as Titus Salt built model villages for their workers.  Moreover, even where conditions were extremely poor in rapidly growing industrial centres such as 19th Century  Manchester,  on which Friedrich Engels reported so vividly in the 1840s in his The Condition of the Working Class in England ,  there is no firm evidence that they were qualitatively worse than the conditions  experienced in cities before the coming of the mills and factories.  Nor was pre-industrial  agrarian labour a sinecure, with most of the work being strictly manual.  Imagine cutting a field of corn with scythes.

Boyle’s physical depiction of bucolic pre-industrial England  had all the authenticity of a Christmas scene in one of Harrod’s windows.  Not only were all things bright and fully sanitary, there was a cricket match of truly howling anachronism.  The cricket played in Boyle’s  fantasy was modern cricket, with modern pads and bats, wickets with three stump and bails  and overarm bowling,. The cricket  played in pre-industrial England had batsmen  with curved bats, no protective equipment, wickets with two stumps and bowlers delivering the ball underarm.    Boyle’s cricket match also carried forward the idea of Britain as a multicultural land way back when because the bowler was black, a sight as rare as a unicorn in the  seventeenth, or being generous, the  eighteenth century .

The relentless political correctness

The politically correct propaganda did not end with overt message of the various events.  It continued with the personnel. Take the  nine bearers of the Olympic Flag:   Ban-ki Moon, the United Nations secretary general , the runner Haile Gebrselassie , Muhammad Ali ,  Leyma Gbowee, a Nobel peace prize winner credited with ending the civil war in Liberia,  Marina Silva, who has fought against the destruction of the rainforest,    musician Daniel Barenboim, Sally Becker, known as the Angel of Mostar for her work rescuing  children from war-torn Bosnia,  Shami Chakrabarti  the director of human rights body Liberty and  Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager whose murder in 1993 led to the Metropolitan police being accused of “institutional racism”.    All fitted in with the liberal internationalist  Boyle theme, both in terms of  what they were noted for and their multicultural nature.  The racial and ethnic breakdown of the nine is five black, two Asian and two Jewish. The last three on the list represented Britain: a Jew, an Asian and  a black.

I mention this not because I think there should be no ethnic and racial diversity on display in such events. Indeed, it is inherently appropriate that they are. But it is a matter of proportion. Boyle’s show was unashamedly slanted towards the politically correct credo and the selection of flag bearers was emblematic of this bias, a bias which completely excluded the large majority of the British population who do not belong to ethnic or racial minorities. It also excluded the wider mainstream European populations and their offshoots in the New World and Australasia. Far from being that favourite modern liberal word “inclusive”, Boyle was excluding vast swathes of humanity. 

Chakrabarti coyly worried whether her inclusion might  be thought politically correct by bravely overcame her qualms because “… if, like me, you believe internationalism can be for people and values, not just corporations and military alliances, how can you resist sharing the optimism of Boyle’s ambition?” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/news/9436921/London-2012-Olympics-Shami-Chakrabarti-had-doubts-over-flag-honour.html)

The inclusion of Muhammad Ali amused me as it always does. He has  totemic status amongst liberals , yet this is a man who,  until he became non compos mentis , was an unashamed anti-white racist who disapproved mixed racial sexual relationships and was happy to lend  his name to the Nation of Islam, a group led by  men such as Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan – see http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/muhammad-ali-and-the-white-liberals/.

The British media and politicians

The fare  Boyle   offered up was not to Tory MPs’ taste , but there was precious little public dissent by politicians from the mainstream media view that Boyle’s show  was generally a triumph. Good examples  of the crawlingly  uncritical media response can be found within a supposedly conservative newspaper  at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/9434563/London-2012-the-experts-view-of-the-Olympic-opening-ceremony.html.

There were apparently rumblings behind the scenes in Tory ministerial ranks about Boyle’s politicisation of the ceremony, but these came to nothing:

“  In one account of the meeting Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, was said to have scored the ceremony just four out 10, a claim his spokesman denied last night.

Mr Gove was also said to have objected to the absence of Winston Churchill from the ceremony.

According to this version, Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, was also sceptical about some of the scenes, while Theresa May, the Home Secretary, was said to have intervened to defend Boyle and to have told her colleagues it was unfair to judge the ceremony in such a crude way…” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/london-2012/9435509/Ministers-pushed-for-changes-to-opening-ceremony.html)

Just one Tory MP, Aidan Burley, spoke out publicly against the  political nature of the Boyle’s show. For this he has been roundly attacked by not only his own party leader and politicians of all colours,  but by the  mainstream media  with calls for his expulsion from the Tory Party. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jul/28/olympics-opening-ceremony-multicultural-crap-tory-mp).Small wonder in the ideologically claustrophobic world of politically correct Britain that there was little open criticism from public figures.

Amongst the media Prof Mary Beard ,  Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, took the pc biscuit with her “ I liked ‘that kiss’ too – the split-second clip of two female characters from Brookside, the 90s soap opera – and what it achieved. What a great way to get the first gay kiss onto Saudi Arabian TV.”  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/9434563/London-2012-the-experts-view-of-the-Olympic-opening-ceremony.html).

She went on to give the standard multicultural line on Britishness:

“ Governments are always complaining that we don’t feel proud to be British. They wag their fingers at us and instruct us to feel patriotic. But it’s a rather punitive approach to history and to identity – with all that checklist of Kings and Queens we’re supposed to know, and the nasty insinuation that you aren’t a ‘proper’ Brit unless you’ve read The Faerie Queene, or Merchant of Venice, or whatever.

Strikingly, Danny Boyle actually showed us that we are proud to be British.

It wasn’t a parade of majesty; the only monarch who featured was our own dear Queen. But instead of one official version, the stage made room for all sorts of people and many different narratives.

 It recognised all kinds of things that people care about – from Amy Winehouse to CND marches – and it let them into the story as symbols that can stand for Britain, and have played their own part in shaping our history. It was a really alert reading of what matters to people in Britain today – from JK Rowling to the NHS – and because of that Boyle managed to inspire pride where finger-wagging governments have failed.

He was able to play with the great symbols of Britain in a way that was both ironic and supportive; that takes a special gift. There are many different sorts and styles of histories. This wasn’t a competition with the Jubilee, which brought us pomp and majesty, this was something different: the people’s story.”

So there you have, it was “the people’s story”, a phrase as redolent of the bogus as  Blair’s description of Princess Dianna as “the people’s princess”.   Back in the real world,   opinion poll after opinion poll says what really matters  to the British today are mass immigration and its consequences,  the economic mess we are in and our membership of the EU.

The blind alley of Britishness

The claimed promotion of Britishness by the show was bogus for two reasons.  Even at its strongest Britishness was not a natural nationality. But in the aftermath of the second world war it did have a certain overarching reach throughout the four home nations and a continuing emotional pull for countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand.   A mixture of mass immigration from all ends of the Earth,  the religious promotion of multiculturalism by the British elite, the devolution of political power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland  and  the weakening of links with  the old dominions caused by Britain’s entry into what is now the EU have killed Britishness as a functional concept.  Liberals left still cling to it because it is the fig-leaf which covers the consequences of mass immigration and to a lesser extent  of devolution.  Immigrants reluctant to call themselves English call themselves British, although that is usually a hyphenated British such a black-British or Pakistani-British. Pro-unionists insist that everyone is British. What Britrishness no longer represents is the native inhabitants of Britain.

But what Boyle gave the audience  in his parade of was not even this bogus  Britishness . He gave them  Englishness. Not an honest Englishness of course, but Englishness as filtered through the grossly distorting prism of political correctness.  The rural pre-industrial idyll could only have been England with its cricket and soft  greenness.  The industrial revolution scenes are set in an English context with Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Not only that but the industrial revolution  began in England and spread outwards: all the important early industrial advances took place in England: the invention of the steam engine , the smelting of  iron using coke,  the various machines which mechanised the cloth industry,  the great  factories of Wedgewood  and Boulton  and later the railways which utter transformed the distribution of  goods and people.  The personalities such as Daniel Craig, David Beckham, JK Rowling and the Queen are all English by birth and upbringing.

An appropriate show

What would have been an appropriate Olympic show for the world audience? There was a truly gaping  open goal for Boyle  to shoot into. All he had to do was narrow his focus and produce a show based on Britain’s immense contribution to the foundation and formulation of modern sport, including her considerable influence on the founder of the modern Olympics ,   Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin.  Apart from being highly appropriate this would have been something unique because no other country could have done  it  because they do not have the sporting history.

The show could have begun with a general  run through of the games and sports which originated in Britain – football, cricket, rugby union and league,  lawn tennis, golf, badminton, squash, table tennis, snooker – those which were derived from  British games  such as baseball and American and Australian football ,  and the strong hand of other pursuits such as rowing and horse racing which although not unique to Britain appeared as organised  sports very early in Britain.

Having established the British sporting foundations,  the show could go on to examine the  role played by Britain in establishing large scale spectator sport which could run from the 18th century  with cricket and horseracing to the 19th century with the coming of the railways opening the way to sport becoming national and then international as first the four home countries of the UK – England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales played one another at football and rugby then other countries as the 20th century came while   England and Australia became the first Test playing cricketing nations to meet.  The theme of Britain taking sport to the world could have been expanded with reference to the Empire and the considerable efforts made by private organisations such as the Marylebone Cricket Club to spread individual sports and games.

Having laid out the sporting DNA of Britain, the show could conclude with the long standing idea of Olympic games  in Britain,  drawing first on the  Cotswold  Olipick Games  of Robert Dover which began in 1612 and ran,  with a break during the English civil war and Protectorate, until 1852.  A modern revival began in 1965 (http://www.olimpickgames.co.uk/).  This would be followed by Dr William Penny Brookes’  Wenlock Olympian Games http://www.wenlock-olympian-society.org.uk/olympian-games/index.shtml and the subsequent formation, by Brooks and others  of the  National Olympic Association in 1865 (which continued to 1883) with the first  National Olympic games being held in  1866 (http://www.tiger2.f2s.com/JohnHulleyMemorialFund/national_olympian_association.shtml ).

The extent of Brookes influence on the modern Olympic movement  was recalled by Juan Antonio Samaranch when  president of the International Olympic Committee . He visited Much Wenlock in 1994 and laid a wreath at Brookes’ grave and in a speech said  “I came to pay homage and tribute to Dr Brookes, who really was the founder of the modern Olympic Games.” (http://www.shropshiretourism.co.uk/much-wenlock/).

What does the opening ceremony tell us?

The extent to which the media and politicians have fallen into line with the Boyle politicking demonstrates the success the liberal left have had in acquiring the levers of power and working them ruthlessly.  Whenever a highly contentious subject provokes little public debate you may bet your life on it being the consequence of the suppression of one side of the debate. It is no wonder that in present day Britain so little public opposition to the nature of Boyle’s show should have occurred.  Politicians and people with access to the mainstream media know only too well that to go against the politically correct tide is to invite serious trouble.

The real message of the Olympic opening ceremony is simple: the liberal internationalist triumph is at its zenith.  As things presently stand no one with contrary views can get a fair public hearing or most of the time any public hearing at all because the mainstream media censors such views severely.  The British people, and especially the English, are left with no means to control their own country in their own interests.  They are simply spectators of their own destruction.

Is modern fielding really superior to what it was in the past?

Robert Henderson

The idea that fielding in first class cricket is vastly superior to what it was even a generation ago has attained the status of a truism amongst sporting journalists and the idea is probably shared by the overwhelming majority of cricket followers today.  It is not hard to see why as fielders  throw themselves about the field and even statuesque fast bowlers are expected to perform the sliding manoeuvre to stop a ball.   This ostentatious athleticism overshadows other aspects of fielding and is increasingly the touchstone by which fielding is judged.  But more athletic does not mean necessarily mean better because it begs the questions of the accuracy of bowlers and expertise in field-setting . It could be that all this throwing around of bodies  counts for little in terms of restricting overall run-getting.  It would be interesting to see some serious research on where runs are scored today compared with the 1950s and 1960s. It could be that modern field settings are more conducive to run scoring, for example, the modern common failure to set a Third Man to pace bowlers  results in  inordinate amounts of boundaries which would otherwise be singles.

In the absence of such statistics I shall give my impressions of the difference between fielding now and in the past based   on my watching of first class cricket since the 1950s. Bowlers  today I judge to be  much less accurate both in length and direction  than they were forty or fifty  years ago.  In particular bowlers used to bowl much straighter.  Some idea of this can be g gleaned from recordings of bowlers which give an extended  passage of play with particular bowlers.  A lack of control over length and direction  makes it difficult to set a  field to which the bowler can bowl . If fielders in the past were not so generally mobile they did not have to be because the ball came more directly to them because bowlers could bowl to their fields.

Then there is the ability of captains and bowlers to set fields   which stifle runs.  I have already mentioned the runs leaked in the modern game through an unattended Third Man.  To that can be added the  much commoner  use today of deep-set defensive fielders , even to fast bowlers, for example, the sweeper on the cover boundary.   In the past it would be rare to see pace bowlers with such fielders. A pace bowler in the 1950s and 1960s would have a Third Man and a long leg  or square leg out and that would be it for deep fielders.   Having more deep fielders makes run scoring easier because a bowler can be milked for ones and twos with little risk. Why  do modern pace bowlers have more deep fielders? Probably because of their inferior control of line and length, although once something becomes a fielding fashion it tends to be copied by captains and bowlers without regard to the ability of a bowler to bowl to his field.

It is true that the ground fielding away from the wicket  is not merely more spectacular today than it once was and the stops which are made are, when  considered in isolation,  frequently  superior to what would have been seen.  But the key phrase here is “considered in isolation”.  If the bowlers today are less accurate and the fields less efficiently set, the need for many  of the spectacular saves may  occur only because of the deficiencies of the modern bowler and field setter compared with what obtained in the past.

It is also important to understand that fielders in  the past were not all laughably immobile. There  are there no   fielders  in county cricket today as hilariously immobile as the late lamented Bomber Wells , a man  who was the nearest thing to a beachball in human form when he plied his offbreaks for Gloucestershire  and then Notts  in the 1950s and Sixties.  But Bomber was amusing to watch simply because he was abnormal. Most fielders in first class cricket in his time were  at least competent  and many such as Tony Lock and Micky Stewart were outstanding fielders virtually anywhere; many more were top class specialists in important positions such as  slip (Cowdrey, Phil Sharpe)  or  the covers (Neil Harvey, Norman O’Neill , Ken Taylor).  It is worth adding that although modern field in on average much more athletic, there are still quite a few mediocre fielders, especially in first class cricket.

The part of fielding which I am sure has deteriorated substantially  is close catching.  This is probably largely  down to the fact that fielders have become generalists rather than specialists.  It is not an easy thing to be fielding in radically different positions and  attain or maintain the same level of expertise in them all.  The importance of having a specialist position was vividly shown when the fine Sussex opening John Langridge took 69 catches fielding at slip in 1955 at the age of 45, one of the most astonishing achievements in cricket.

Surrey built their seven successive Championships on ferociously efficient close catching, with Stewart Surridge, Barrington, Mickey Stewart and Lock all exceeding 50 catches in a season at least once.  They did this on uncovered pitches which could be prepared as a county choose – the Oval pitches of the 1950s were a batsman’s nightmare – and with vicious spinners of the ball in Laker and Lock and a master seamer in Alec Bedser  whose leg cutters reared nastily.  Modern English pitches by comparison are tame and the close catches which come are on average much less spiteful or unpredictable than they were when pitches were uncovered and prepared without fear of points being deducted by pitch inspectors.

Then there are  the effect of changes in equipment. Has  modern batting been changed by protective equipment in the sense that batsmen play shots differentially today than they did before helmets, bumper bras, arm shields and thigh pads on both legs?  The playing of the hook or pull  against quick bowlers has become routine today because of helmets.  Before helmets arrived it was very much a shot which was only played by those expert at it. Now  every Tom, Dick and Harry of a batsman, including tailenders will have a go. That probably means a greater use of  deep fielders  on the leg side.  Modern bats with their much greater power and often greater weight than those used in the past favour the drive over subtler shots such as the late cut.  However, I doubt whether that has had much effect on  field settings, although the greater power may be partly responsible for the use of more deep fielders in the modern game.  Nor can I see that the reverse sweep has caused a fundamental shift in field settings.

There is also the intriguing question of whether the considerable encumbrances donned by modern cricketers makes some shots easier than others simply because  batsmen are restricted in their movement by the load of protective armour they carry. Someone with the full monty of helmet, bumper bra, arm shield, double thigh pads as well as gloves and pads, may find it difficult to the more subtle shots.  The existence of such protection may also produce a sense of invulnerability  which could lead to the favouring of big shots.

Finally, there is the effect of limited overs cricket.  The defensive fields which have evolved for limited overs cricket may be partially responsible for the greater  use of deeper field settings  now.  Captains and bowlers use them routinely  in limited overs and T20 and it is easy to see the temptation to carry the practice into first class cricket.  It has also encouraged batsmen to attack, especially with big hitting which will have changed the general shape of run getting.

The other side of the fielding coin is the effect that batting and fielding changes  plus limited overs cricket have had on the bowlers.  Limited overs cricket has  taught them to vary their bowling massively, something which was not a feature of early times.  The limited overs mentality has been to a degree carried in first class cricket which is part of the reason for the decline in accuracy seen in present day bowlers.

Is modern fielding superior?   Probably not taken overall and judged not merely by the abilities of individual  fieldsmen but  the team as a unit with bowling accuracy and field setting thrown into the judgement mix.

Where have all the express bowlers gone?

Robert Henderson

The relative speeds of fast bowlers today and in the past is a perennial subject to which England batsman Alastair Cook recently gave fresh legs.  He claimed that pace bowlers playing now every bit as fearsome as those in the  early 1990s when the likes of Waqur Younis, Wazim Akram,   Walsh and Ambrose, Bishop and Donald  were around (http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/cricket/test-matches/england-v-west-indies-england-845223).  Cook also contends that the bowlers of today must be quicker because in all other sports athletes have become fitter and faster  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/england/9306922/England-v-West-Indies-Jonny-Bairstow-is-not-alone-in-the-pace-battle.html)

As someone who has been watching first class cricket since the mid 1950s I would profoundly disagree with the contention  that modern bowlers are bowlers are faster than those in the past and would go further and say that there is no Test bowler today who is of extreme pace. That is arguably a unique situation because until now every decade of Test cricket has been able to furnish examples of such bowlers.

The improvement of athletic disciplines argument does not stand scrutiny. It may be true that in pure athletic activities such as running and jumping improvements occur simply through more efficient training routines, although even there the qualification of improved tracks and running equipment is responsible for a significant part of it. There is also the shadow of performance  enhancing drugs which probably were and are widely used. Moreover, athletics was amateur until a generation ago. It would be expected that full-time professionals would substantially improve on their amateur predecessors. The British Olympic  sprinter Peter Radford , who won a bronze medal in the 1960 100 metres,   has written interestingly on the standard of  athletic performance before organised amateur athletics arose in the 19th century.  He makes a persuasive case that the athletic feats  of the 18th century –  invariably achieved by professional athletes – may well  have exceeded the performances of the organised amateur era  until well into the twentieth century (http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2004/may/02/athletics.comment1). It is also debatable whether faster is always better in the case of ball games.  For example, Premier League football is very fast but is it better football than the slower football of the past when there was more dribbling and the ball was given away far less?

It is also debatable whether faster is always better in the case of ball games.  For example, Premier League football is very fast but is it better football than the slower football of the past when there was more dribbling and the ball was given away far less?

Where bowling is concerned there is no improved equipment involved and  full-time professionalism  in cricket has been established for  over a century and a half.   Despite extensive testing in recent years drugs have rarely been discovered amongst first class cricketers. Nor is it easy to see how drugs would enhance a bowler’s speed. It is true that a steroids might build muscle, but bowling  fast is not a matter of strength. Fast bowlers come in all shapes and sizes from the pint-sized Aborigine  Eddie Gilbert  in the 1930s – probably the man who bowled genuinely fast with the least physical resources – to giants such as Ambrose.   Not only that but fast bowling methods  vary enormously. Fast bowlers fall into two broad categories, the sprinters who get their pace from a fast, often long  runup  such as, Larwood or Hall and the strength bowlers such as Sylvester Clarke or Wayne Daniel.  Actions can be divided into the side-on and the chest-on but there is far more variation than that. Get on YouTube and compare the difference between two side-on bowlers such as Jeff Thompson and Fred Trueman or two front-on bowlers,  for example Bob Willis and Brian Statham. In short, fast bowling is such an individual matter that it cannot be meaningfully taught and attempts to “improve” actions can easily ruin a bowler vide James Anderson’s travails after the England coaching staff changed his action.

As for my personal witness of many bowlers over more than half a century, the obvious objection is that until the past twenty years or so there was little attempt to objectively  measure the pace of bowlers.   The advent of systems such as the radar gun and Hawk-eye then made measurement routine in international matches.  Interestingly,   the measurement of fast bowling over the past twenty years supports the idea that fast bowlers of today are certainly no  faster than they were twenty years ago – which supports the idea that pace has not improved over  a generation – and may suggest that present day fast bowlers have gone back on the pace scale because there is no one as today recorded as  fast, either on individual balls or generally  as Shoaib Akhtar  or Allan Donald.

There are really two classes of fast bowler, fast and express.  The fast bowler is someone like Finn or Statham: the express bowler  a Tyson or  a Holding.  There are no bowlers currently playing whom I would class as express,  but quite  a few who would fall into the classification of fast.   It is of course important to remember that fast bowlers  do not maintain their pace throughout their careers or even  for much of their careers.  A good example is Dennis Lillee who was a genuine express when he visited England in 1972 but significantly slower afterwards as injury took its toll.

Before I was 15 I had seen Tyson, Trueman, Statham, Adcock,  Lindwall, Miller, Davidson,  Gilchrist,  in action.   I will not offer a certain judgement on their pace because a child, even in  his early teens, is not a reliable witness to a bowler’s  speed.  However, I can offer an impressionistic memory of these players.  Trueman, Adcock and Gilchrist struck me as magically  quick,  but Tyson was something else. I saw him bowl often and he  invariably  produced a response from the crowd I have heard no other bowler ever do: a  regular shocked astonished gasp.  I suspect he was the fastest bowler I have ever seen. Lindwall and Miller were of course near the end of their careers.

By 15 someone is in a position to make an adult judgement. I reached that age in 1963. Since then  I would place these Test  bowlers as  fast at some time in their careers:

Trueman (bear in mind he was past 30 then), David Larter, Jeff Jones, John Snow, Statham (he maintained his pace well into his thirties) Ken Shuttleworth,  Peter Lever,  Bob Willis, Graham Dilley, David Lawrence,  Darren Gough, Andrew Flintoff,   Steve Harmison,   Alan Pascoe, Rodney Hogg, Alan Hurst, Geoff Lawson, Craig McDermot,  Merv Hughes, Jason Gillespie,  Mike Procter, Dale Stein,  Joel Garner, Colin Croft,  Curtley Ambrose,  Courtney Walsh, Kemar Roach, Dick Motz, Richard Hadlee,  Wazim Akram.

and these as express in at least part of their careers:

Alan Ward, Devon Malcolm,  Jeff Thompson, Dennis Lillee, Brett Lee, Wes Hall,  Charlie Griffith,  Andy Roberts, Wayne Daniel, Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding, Marshall, Patrick Paterson,  Ian Bishop, Peter Pollock,  Allan Donald, Shane Bond, Imran Khan, Waqar Younis,  Shoaib Akhtar.

One other thing needs  to be taken into account. Until the reform of the no-ball law in the 1960s which replaced the back-foot law with the front-foot law, pace bowlers could quite legitimately bowl from significantly closer to the batsman. Any pace bowler  could easily gain 18 inches beyond what is permitted today and some bowlers by the practice of dragging gained three feet.   A yard closer to the batsman makes a significant difference to the reaction time available to the batsman.

Genuine  fast bowlers like elephants are difficult to describe but you know when you have seen one. Perhaps the most telling sign is a top class batsman playing much more deliberately than usual. I am constantly reading or hearing that X or Y bowls at 90+ yet when I see them in the flesh they do not strike me as express.  I have not seen a bowler new to first class cricket who struck me as extreme in pace in the past  ten years. Finn is the  probably the fastest bowler regularly playing county cricket, but his pace at best  is no more than that of David Larter of Northants and England from the 1960s, a bowler Finn  much resembles in physique and method.

As for the claim that the average pace of bowling is faster today because players are fitter and can sustain their pace for longer I have my doubts on that score.     Of those modern bowlers who are claimed to be fast such as Stuart Meaker, when I have seen them they bowl the odd fast ball but for the most part are fast medium. The modern pace bowler’s proneness to injury also argues against a higher average speed because they so often  carry an injury.

Johnny Bairstow displayed some uncertainty against Kemar Roach’s fast bowling in the recent Tests against the West Indies.  This has been ascribed to a lack of genuine fast – and the extinction of express –  bowling in county cricket these days.   There may be something in this because there are few bowlers in county cricket even of Finn’s pace.  This was not so in the past. For example, in the 1960s there were many bowlers who  played little or no Test cricket who were at least as fast  as Finn.  In 1965 county batsmen Harold Rhodes, Jeff Jones, Butch White, Bob Cottam (fast when he first appeared), Alan Brown, David Sayer,  Ken Shuttleworth, Peter Lever, John Price,   David Larter, John Cotton, Fred Rumsey and  Geoff Hall They were in addition to Snow, Statham and  Trueman, the latter two being still able to bowl a fast opening spell – I saw Trueman knock Mickey Stewart’s bat out of his hands twice in an opening spell very late in Trueman’s career – if unable to sustain their pace throughout the day.

Steve James writing in the Telegraph lists the current bowlers who have clocked 90 mph or better  “at the  National Cricket Performance Centre in Loughborough, using their own testing equipment, there is a list of current fast bowlers who have been clocked at 90mph (not that Roach was bowling at that pace; he was only at about 87mph at best). It includes those who have been picked by England, such as Broad, James Anderson, Graham Onions, Stuart Meaker, Steven Finn, Chris Tremlett, Jade Dernbach, Ajmal Shahzad, Liam Plunkett, Sajid Mahmood, Steve Harmison, Simon Jones and Amjad Khan, as well as others such as Mills, James Anyon (Sussex), Mark Footitt (Derbyshire), Boyd Rankin, Chris Wright (both Warwickshire), David Griffiths (Hampshire) and Matthew Dunn (Surrey). Another Surrey youngster, George Edwards, is close, as is Kent’s Matt Coles.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/england/9306922/England-v-West-Indies-Jonny-Bairstow-is-not-alone-in-the-pace-battle.html). It is one thing to achieve such a pace occasionally in practice, quite another to do it in match conditions and do it consistently.  I would also question 90 mph as the benchmark for fast bowlers and the measurement of pace by modern methods. If the likes of Meaker and Finn  are bowling at 92 04 93 mph, the likes of Hall, Holding and Marshall must have regularly bowled at  97-100 mph  because the difference in their speed compared with Meaker and Finn is the difference between a regulation fast medium bowler delivering at around 80 mph and Meaker and Finn at their fastest.

Why have fast bowlers largely gone out of fashion and genuine expresses giving a good impression of an extinct species? A case might  be made for modern pitches, especially Test pitches, being  on average  much slower and less bouncy than those of yesteryear,   the ever increasing protective equipment and the tighter restrictions on short pitched bowling. But probably the most likely explanation is the introduction of central contracts and the ever swelling international calendar.  In terms of overs, bowlers  do not play more than they did fifty years ago and in most cases less even if all the limited overs cricket is added to the first class cricket, but they do have a travel burden much greater than previous generations of professional cricketers.    The increasingly harum scarum fixture list has the effect of fast bowlers being not overbowled  but underbowled . This, together with injuries resulting from fast bowlers being asked to throw themselves around in the field in a manner which would have been deemed unseemly by earlier generations of quick bowlers,  makes them generally less fit to bowl than previous generations.  Note that I don’t say  less fit in the athletic sense but fit to bowl. There is a difference. Bowlers get fit to bowl by bowling not running for miles or lifting weights.

Can it ever be shown objectively what the speeds of bowlers in the past were? It might be possible to calculate speeds from pre-Hawkeye era footage (from 1990 onwards) and then use the same technique for footage from the Hawyeye-era where a speed has been calculated using modern methods. That would both serve as a check on the accuracy
of modern methods and give a reference point for bowlers from all
periods for which film  exists of sufficient speed to give a realistic
representation of the action.  All that needs to be done to be done is
to measure the time of the ball in the air  from, say, leaving the
hand to pitching and the distance covered – its line of  trajectory not the distance down the pitch –  to the ball pitching. Taking the measurement at pitching might remove biases from short and fuller length balls and short and taller bowlers.