Introduction

The list is indeed long, and while Tuck recognises the issues involved are central to historical research, their relation to sport, and sport’s ability to inform these histories, has not been fully acknowledged by the so-called historical ‘mainstream’. Yet the contribution sport may make to broader historical research has been increasingly recognised in recent years,2 and groups, such as the Voluntary Action History Society, have recently advanced recreation and leisure as ‘A New Frontier in the History of Voluntary Action?’3 In their introduction to Uniting the United Kingdom?: the Making of British History, Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer state that ‘the world of sport offers a good way of introducing the complexities and anomalies of the relationship between the UK as a unitary state on one hand, and England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland on the other’.4 In doing this, they identify sport as a key point of reference for the study and interpretation of national, intra-national, regional and local identities. Moreover, in referring to Norman Tebbit’s ‘cricket test’, the authors highlight the serious issues that can lie behind questions of sport in political, cultural, economic and racial contexts. However, there still remains a good deal of contemptuous neglect of the field as a subject – or even outright ignorance that such a body of work exists – within other branches of the academy.