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It’s just not football

By Matt | April 1, 2009

Why is English cricket organised around counties, not cities? Why do Yorkshire play Lancashire rather than Leeds United taking on Manchester United? And how can they play for four days, while everyone’s at work, and still finish in a draw?

These are just a few of the questions answered by A Social History of English Cricketby Derek Birley. The answer usually given by this book, the winner of the 1999 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award, is simply that cricket organised itself so as to be “not football”.

Cricket: it’s not football
If football did it, cricket’s ruling body decreed that it was probably urban (and hence bad), almost certainly working class (and hence bad), possibly popular (and hence bad) and potentially profitable (and hence tantamount to devil worship).

From its very beginnings, where gambling-mad gentry folk paid big-hitting farmers to turn out for the cricket teams they and their friends played in as amateurs, cricket defined itself as a rural, genteel and elitist game that would have no truck with the vulgarities of money.

Thus cricket emerged as a social and financial basket case: it refused to succumb to the professionalism that had sullied the northern rugby and association football codes; its leagues were made up of county (ie, rural) teams, and its games were played during the week and, even in the age of floodlights, during the day.

Nobody watched it, which proved to the MCC – the game’s ruling body for most of its history – that things were going well: no fans meant no football fans. Result.

MCC: delusional
Their obsession with doing whatever football seems simply delusional at times: the MCC refused to organise the County Championship on league lines until well into the twentieth century and clubs could organise their own fixtures.

Counties could just arrange to play as weak opposition as possible all season, and the club with the best record won the Championship. Even winning was discouraged (the taking part being the thing that counted). And so the fact – incomprehensible to non-cricketers – that a game could be played for longer than a week (in the days before Tests were limited to five days) and still end up as a draw.

Other book reviews of Birley’s Social History have complained that it offers a “lefty” view that criticises the sport’s gloriously genteel heritage.

But I’d ask those reviewers to point to a time when county cricket ever got big crowds, or was financially viable. It never has and never did, and romanticising rural cricket is based purely on a fictional myth.

The MCC couldn’t maintain the myth, of course. In the urban centres of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and London – still home to the principle Test venues today - thriving leagues emerged with professional players, Saturday one-day games and, hence, good crowds and profitable businesses.

And ultimately the hated market forces won. Amateurism is long gone and cricket is now dominated by one-day games, 20Twenty and tournaments like the IPL. The top players aren’t even employed by county sides, but centrally contracted to international boards or independent bodies like the IPL.

Some might say thank God – had Cricket stuck to being everything football wasn’t, it might not exist today.

Birley is a bit sketchy on details – I couldn’t tell you exactly when the County Championship became a proper league, because he doesn’t say, and it’s often difficult to follow events chronologically – but A Social History of English Cricketis a decent attempt to explode English cricket’s defining – and entirely fictional – myth.

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