27.06.1996

First modern sport

Phil Rudge reviews Anyone but England - cricket and the national malaise by Mike Marqusee, (Verso Press 1995, pp273)

In this excellent book Mike Marqusee (political correspondent of Labour Briefing) tears apart the cosy, village green myths that have grown up around cricket. In their place he reveals a game born with the pre-industrial landowning elite, but which came to be the world’s first modern sport at the dawn of the industrial revolution:

“Cricket retains more features from the age of folk games than any of its modern rivals, forged in later eras. These underdeveloped features are a key to understanding the game’s angst-ridden struggle to adapt to the modern world” (p48).

Thus cricket has a pre-capitalist sense of non-standardisation (witness recent furores over ball tampering), specialisation and open-endedness of time and space. It allows a fuller creative interplay between the individual and the collective than modern sports formed under the competitive drive of industrial society. The cult of sentimental ruralism that surrounds the sport conceals the trauma felt from the 18th century mass movement from the country to the city.

Because of its transitional historical nature cricket has always reflected the struggles going on in English society - property versus community rights, market and nation, amateur and professional, insularity versus expansion. At one time they reflected an active dynamic culture, but with the collapse of empire and influence these struggles have been resolved negatively.

Mike Marqusee proves conclusively that England, because of its racist and moribund power structure, is no longer the home of cricket.

Phil Rudge