September is the saddest month. As the sun goes down on the cricket season I shudder that it may not rise again. There is something doomed about cricket. Each year Prospero breaks his stumps and buries them “certain fathoms deep”, albeit this year with a fine Oval farewell. He leaves the stage to Caliban, to wretched football.
At that point sport loses its stately summer measure. County and Commonwealth retreat and the spotlight turns on a hysterical urban mob racing towards some foul-mouthed Euro-climax the following spring. I dread the soccer season. It is always Britain in disgrace. Football may be a beautiful game, but it is also a stupid one. It makes men mad.
Most of the world’s great sports — football, cricket, golf, boxing, tennis — were invented or systematised in Britain. Sport was the pastime of Empire. Britons were duly best at it. Yet we have ceded pre-eminence to such an extent that sporting failure is a national psychosis. We still enter four teams for football tournaments, ensuring three defeats for every victory. We have won just two cricket tours out of the last nine. We are 26th in world athletics, weak at golf and hopeless at tennis.
When it comes to global league tables I am not worried. I would rather be good at wars, novels or trade negotiations than at kicking balls round parks, but that is not a view shared by most British males. (Most British females, greatly to their credit, could not care less.) It irks British masculinity to be humiliated on any world stage, to “struggle to beat” Croatia or Liechtenstein or to be “ranked below” Belarus, Macedonia and Lithuania. And how dare pathetic Belgium be so good at tennis?
The classic response is to demand government action. Certainly many communist dictators extended their life span by a few years through the nationalism of sporting prowess. Gulf states are now buying athletes from Third World countries, such is the value that sport plays in their self-image.
Yet for all the millions that Whitehall throws at sport, the British tend to excel where government spends least. We do well in unsubsidised motor racing, snooker or anything to do with horses. Rugby is one team sport at which Britain is currently No 1, and it has long been starved of public money. Government sponsorship is not the issue, except in schools. The discouragement of school sport by the Major and Blair governments, by omitting it from the national curriculum, has devastated sporting participation by young people.
Instead I would rather the Government encourage sports authorities to resume their historic role in refashioning rules and updating the public appeal of sport. No profession is currently so conservative as gamesmanship. Others change their rules as technology and human achievement improves. Not so sport. It may be fiercely competitive and profitable, but its conservatism is fanatical. Since most rules were devised in Britain in the 19th century — yielding Britons a full century of success — Britain should now dare to champion their revision.
Britain’s historical dominance is astonishing. The boxing mafiosi of Las Vegas must still adhere to the Queensberry rules, drawn up in 1867. “Rings” are the same size, rounds are still three minutes and a knock-out is ten seconds. Football may be a global, multibillion-pound industry but it is still at the mercy of rules drawn up by a bunch of Hooray Henries in the Freemasons Arms in Holborn in 1863. The goals are still 8ft by 8 yards, determined by a man’s reach at the time.
These dimensions bear no relation to the conditions or size of players of today. Yet suggest to the Football Association that goals might be widened to allow scorelines better to reflect the flow of play and apoplexy would break out. The very word “soccer” derives from the association’s name. One reason for the violence that is the curse of soccer must be the paucity of scoring chances and the often unfair results. Most games turn on a single goal or penalty, on which millions of pounds can rest. Small wonder that Harvard University opted instead for Canadian rugby, and American Football was born. Yet soccer’s rules are as immutable as the tablets of Moses.
The present game of tennis developed in the 1870s after the rolled lawn was perfected for playing croquet. The rules and eccentric “clock-face” scoring system were invented either by a Major Wingfield or by Sir William Hart Dyke, of Lullingstone Castle. The court size, net height and rhythm of play were intended for a Victorian garden party. They still governed last Sunday’s tedious shooting contest of aces between Andy Roddick and Juan Carlos Ferrero in the final of the US Open. The game has patently become too fast. Yet it remains blasphemy to suggest that tennis might be more enjoyable if slowed by softer balls or altered court dimensions.
The rules of golf now run to 176 pages but are still Victorian in nature. They led to such absurdities as Mark Roe’s ejection from this year’s Open for a trivial scorecard mishap. More powerful golf clubs (and shoulders) have made championships ever more a putting competition. As Churchill once commented, the curious decision of the Royal and Ancient to make the holes smaller than the balls puts a premium on luck. It has turned a modern leader-board into a lottery.
And cricket? The size of the wicket (based on a sheep gate), the shape of the bat, the length of the pitch, the cut of the grass were ordained in the Book of Genesis. Since the founding of MCC at Lord’s in 1788 — and a killjoy decision to stop batsmen from impeding fielders — only one serious change has been made, to allow overarm bowling. One theory is that this originated in women bowlers being obstructed by their dresses (see the celebrated picture of a girl cricketer at Antony House in Cornwall).
When the great Lillywhite began bowling overarm in the 1820s, MCC was persuaded only to allow “Test matches” to see if it would work. Sports writers, always the most fanatical anti-reformers, protested. They cried that the “singular, novel and unfair style of bowling by the overcast” would doom the game to extinction. Cricket is still reeling from the move, continuing with Test matches and resisting any change to pitch or equipment.
Last month, the cricket administrator, Lord MacLaurin of Knebworth, suggested that if the game did not improve it would go the way of croquet. He might have cited the near-unwatchable sports of rowing or swimming. Any sensible person can see that cricket would be more enjoyable to watch, and perhaps play, if the number of stumps were increased to four, if the pitch were lengthened and no batsman would be out leg before wicket if he played a stroke. A properly flat pitch might help. But forget it. The reaction would be deafening. Cricket would rather go the way of skittles than change its rules.
The grim reaper now looming over the sporting horizon is, of course, the Health and Safety Executive. It goes where sportsmen fear to tread. Its risk-averse ethos is killing school diving (broken necks) and school cricket (broken heads). Gymnasiums offer such rich pickings for litigation that teachers give them a wide berth. This week schools were warned that they might be liable for allowing games on hard surfaces. The essence of sport, physical risk, is anathema to modern bureaucracy.
The great test will be the fate of rugby. This dangerous pastime is still allowed by the Government despite an injury rate twice as high as the next most dangerous, skiing, and despite regular prosecution of referees for “allowing” injuries. As a result, rugby is one sport that regularly alters its rules. These are now so tough that the outcome of a close match is usually decided on penalties awarded by the referee, to the bafflement of players and spectators alike. Yet here is one sport where Britain leads the world in rulereform — and boasts the best team in the world.
Why sport should be so reactionary is a mystery. Olympic athletes still compete with weapons used at the battle of Marathon. A goal is what it was in a Victorian pub. Communism has come and gone while sane men still vault with poles. The tennis net has seen out the British Empire. Perhaps these activities will survive for ever. Perhaps Britain has outgrown them. But how much more enjoyable they could be if changed.
