It's Not Cricket
By J. P. W. MALLALIEU, M.P.
T should have been the Oval, or the village green or, best of all, Bramall Lane, for the sky was almost cloudless and the grass was green. Tom Whittaker had endured agony for ' that grass. He had watched his ground under the plough and, as the drill , blade turned each furrow, he had felt a dentist's dri ' touching the nerve. Now the sun shone on it, making the re-seeded grass look like Wimbledon, and Tom's nerves, no -'-doubt, were soothed.
But mine were not ; for this was Highbury, where Tom is the ' famous manager of the famous Arsenal club, and I felt that at this time of the year and in this weather all civilised men should have been at the Oval, or Bramall Lane or on the village green. This was the afternoon of summer, and we were being _plunged, in boiling heat, into a winter game.
• August 18th! I remember playing cricket in May when snow capped the surrounding hills or when we watched through streaming windows while rain spattered on a sloshy pitch. In those shivering, miserable hours we said to ourselves: " Never -mind! There's always June, July and August. Maybe there's a bit of September," and at the thought even the rain began to sparkle and the snow looked warm. But here we were, on ' August 18th, summer only just past its meridian, the final Test Match at its turning-point—and football driving us from-the field. Really, the people who run professional football nowadays are • a curious lot ! They try to put a ban on football broadcasting, with the result that the disabled, the blind and the old may be -done out of a Saturday afternoon's pleasure. They try to play cat-and-mouse with the Players' Union. And now, with all the vulgarity of nouveau-riches, they barge, loud-voiced, into the ' cricket season. So I grumbled as I went for my ticket. Well, if I felt like this, why on earth was I not at the Oval ? I was not at the Oval for two reasons. One was that I could not get into the Oval. The other will be divulged later. In the meantime, why on earth cannot sensible people in cricket and football get together and say that the cricket season will begin about the glorious first of June and the football season will begin when the harvest is gathered in ? Or are the kings of football, particularly Sir Stanley Rous, the Football Association's Secretary, thinking ' only of another harvest, the harvest of money and prestige which can be gathered from the insertion of International Matches into an extended season ?
• I went up to my seat in the stand and looked at the silken turf, looked at the fifty thousand crowd, aglow with colour and eagerness, felt in myself the surge of neighbourliness that comes when everyone's team has the world before it. I almost forgot my grouses. Not so far away, I knew, England and South Africa were locked in a struggle that really deserved the name of Test, 'but I had almost ceased to care. Even if I had known that at that very moment, just as the clock ticked round to three in the afternbon,' • that struggle had twisted unpredictably against England,,I might still not have cared ; for there I was, on one of the finest football grounds in the country, and there I was going to watch not merely' Arsenal but my beloved Huddersfield as well. At that moment; cricket with its flashes of white coming - through the pavilion door, with its cries of match-card, with its '. droning sounds of summer hardly disturbed by the gentle stroking of bat against ball, with its pinti of bitter leisurely tasted in the morning air and suddenly abandoned to flatness— all that seemed in another world, and the kings of football seemed enlightened philanthropists, giving us out of their bounty an exhilaration that less generous and more prudent men would have withheld for at least three weeks more.
-Then I looked at the turf again. It was green all right. But underneath it, in spite of the Friday evening's rain, there was soil baked hard by summer heat. I looked at the sky. A few clouds were drifting to the north on a breeze. That breeze was cooling as I sat in the stand. But would it be cooling, under that August sun, to men who were running in it bareheaded for ninety minutes on end? And what would the breeze avail sore feet pounding upon the baked soil ? Twenty years ago, Sir .
Stanley Rous could have told you something about this, for he was then a top-line referee. But he may have forgotten what it is like to play football in cricket conditions ; and those who are directly responsible for fixing the start of the football season in mid-August probably never had serious experience of a football field in any condition. So perhaps they don't bother about the men who really do play.
Why should they ? One of the most experienced and respected of football journalists' wrote the other day that football players were getting a great deal of money—some £680 a year—for very little,---_ what he called a 40-weeks working year of only 101 hours each week. Ten and a half hours! Two and a half of those hours spent on Monday when a player reports at the ground to clean and repair his boots and to go through a post mortem of Saturday's game. Another four and a quarter hours on Tuesday are spent in training—sprinting, ball practice and the like. There's another two hours' training on Wednesday, another four hours' training on Thursday, two hours more on Friday morning. If it's an away match, there's the travel on Friday afternoon—but travel never counts as work to journalists, football officials or commercial travellers. On Saturday there is the match—and the forty minutes or so before a match can cause more nervous exhaustion to a player than a full day's work 'can cause a journalist. , On the Sunday every man injured, however slightly, must report to the ground for treatment. Ten and a half hours indeed!
By now I felt so angry and disgusted that I was about to rise from my, seat and leave the ground, but at that moment the crowd, which had been rippling gently in the sun, suddenly heaved like a turbulent sea. The players were coming out—first the Arsenal in their bright red and then the team which I may have mentioned to you before in their blue and white. The blue-and-whites trotted a few yards on to the field, then sat down on a bench to be photographed. At that an Arsenal fan behind me roared: " That's right ! Get your photos taken while you are still recognisable! ' That shout, epitomising as it did both the aggtessive partisanship and the humorous goodfellowship of a football crowd, drove cricket once again into the record books.
I felt again that those who rule football both knew and cared about the game. I was convinced of this three minutes later when that team in blue and white, with a movement that could not have been bettered in the copy books, scored the very first goal, by any team, this season.
You see I am only a fan. I 'do not know, the game on the inside. I do not have to play it. I merely lose myself in it as a spectator, and when, at last the final whistle blew on Saturday with the score 2—; I was content. But Tom Whittaker was not content. He said he thought Arsenal had suffered in the second half from a touch of the sun. In any later month, if he had said thit, - I would have challenged him to a duel for insulting Huddersfield. But on Saturday he was speaking literally. 1 suggest that, in future seasons, football in August should be confined to matches between the F.A. Council and the League Management Committee. No one would want to watch them—so 'cricket would not suffer. And after one go the leaders of football Would postpone the season to September—so real football players would not suffer either.
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