ABSTRACT
The chief ideological artifact of the mythological and historical representation of ‘true’ cricket is the image of the game as one for ‘gentlemen’. Besides the obvious appeal to the values of ‘the spirit of the game’ and ‘good sportsmanship’, there is in all this an underlying message (and received wisdom) that cricket is, and always has been, an aristocratic or upper-class game. Of course, there is ‘truth’ to this assertion as can be seen in the origins of the game and its players, where ‘professional’ cricketers were in fact employed as domestics for the aristocracy when not playing cricket. Indeed, a strong argument can be made that the class-based nature of the sport persisted long after the rest of (English) society had moved forward, not by eliminating class structure, but by making society more complex than the simple gentleman/player dichotomy would indicate. In that sense, at one level, cricket remained an ahistorical relic, a lived experience of the past which ignored the lessons of current society and offered a counternarrative to the values of the present day. Of course, this does not mean that the counternarrative was a popular or progressive one. Speaking of the MCC, Ric Sissons paints the following picture of a group which did not differ much from the popular understanding of the make-up of the British judiciary: ‘Despite the fundamental changes occurring within the British ruling class and society at large, the MCC Committee remained a bastion of the Conservative, imperialist, landed gentry throughout the inter-war years.’1
