W G Grace

"Yes, this is an amazing biography. W G Grace is also a very interesting figure in the cricketing world. When we talk about sportsmanship cricket is one game that comes to the fore. You only have to think about the expression ‘it’s not quite cricket’, which puts the game on a different pedestal from other sports. For example you can contrast it with a fairly working-class game such as football where in general there seems to be more toleration of cheating, if you will, in terms of hand balls, etc! W G Grace dominated the cricket world for a long time and he had a very ambivalent attitude towards the notion of sportsmanship, and that is what Simon Rae’s biography is looking at. The public perception of him is of an archetypal gentleman player. He was playing in the second half of the 19th century and the start of the 20th and that was the time when there was a big difference between the amateur players and the professionals. Rae unpacks this idea of him being the gentleman amateur player and he uses this term called ‘shamateur’ when it comes to Grace. The idea being that he made a lot of money from cricket and all the while he was pretending to be an amateur gentleman player when he easily could have gone professional. There are many instances of him taking enormous liberties with the rules of the game. The best example, probably apocryphal, is when an umpire gave him out with an LBW and he simply walked up to the umpire and said, ‘People have come to watch me bat and not you officiate the game’! Absolutely and this throws up very interesting questions about the framing of the rules because the rules of cricket were framed in England with some cursory consultation with Australia. If you look at what happened in the 1970s and early 80s – when the West Indian pace bowlers started dominating the game quite brutally and ruthlessly – suddenly the ICC changed its rules around fast bowling. All sorts of rules were introduced to hamper the fast bowlers! Similar controversy erupted with Muralidharan when he had Australians and the English batsmen under his spell and umpires – always, incidentally, white men! – started no-bowling him for chucking! The coincidence is too much and I think the colour prejudice is alive and kicking in cricket, as in other sports. Yes, I do, which is why I think this whole business of sportsmanship and imperialism goes hand in hand. I see it as an imperial value at heart invented to serve the rule-makers but not necessarily the rest of the Empire. Let’s not forget that ICC stood for Imperial Cricket Conference right up to the 1960s. I think it has done that well. There is this whole conflict within the ICC with Australia and England banding together and then the other block led by India with Pakistan and Sri Lanka and South Africa and the West Indies. I see it as colonial history playing itself out and the Empire is fighting back. I don’t think this reverse swing is the right thing to do. This international game should be governed in a more impartial way. But, if it comes down to a choice between England and India, I would happily vote for India because the game is so big here like football is in England. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"