Ancient & modern
The MP John Redwood has hired a London PR firm to raise his profile. The firm is keen for him to feature in lifestyle articles, when he will talk about his great love of windsurfing, films and theatre. 'John is happy to talk about a wide range of subjects.' we are told, including 'his favourite restaurant/food and his passion for motoring.' It sounds an exciting prospect — how one longs to hear about why he loves going vroom — and all too horribly typical of Plato's democratic man.
In his Republic, Plato analyses the way in which societies degenerate over time and mutate from one type of political system to another. Oligarchies, he argues, tend to become democracies (the fourth lowest system in Plato's ranking, only one above the worst, tyranny), and democratic man is characterised by his poor upbringing and lack of values and sound habits. Refusing to allow older and wiser minds to guide him, he 'spends as much time, money and effort on unnecessary pleasures as on necessary'. All pleasures come alike to him, and he moves restlessly from one to the other — 'one day he gets drunk at a party, the next he's sipping water and losing weight; then he takes some exercise, then he takes things easy, and sometimes he's apparently a philosophy student'. Then he gets involved in community affairs and public speaking, then joins the army, then goes into business. 'His lifestyle has no rhyme or reason, but he thinks it enjoyable, free and enviable and he never dispenses with it . . . he becomes multihued and multi-faceted, a gorgeous and varied patchwork. . . his way of life can be admired by many men and women because it contains so much variety in it.'
Not the sort of person Plato would have liked to see in politics. As he points out elsewhere, communal happiness depends crucially on everyone doing their part. He agrees one could make farmers and potters very happy by allowing them to lounge around all day talking about their exciting lifestyle (as it were) or going vroom, but that would not induce communal happiness. True, Plato continues, if a cobbler pretends to be what he is not, it is no disaster for the community. 'But if people who guard a community and its laws forget about who they really are and start to pose, they are destroying the very community whose management and happiness are in their hands and theirs alone.'
On top of all this, Redwood also insists that he has 'no political ambitions'. What the hell is he doing in Parliament, then — or does he have ambitions to become Cherie Blair's new lifestyle guru? Since only the weather saved England from an ignominious defeat in the Edgbaston Test that finished three days before Lord's, it is hard to conceive of what the team had to be complacent about.
One of the few serious sports in which England does lead the world — rugby union — exemplifies the point even more sharply. A high proportion of England rugger players have been to independent schools, then turned professional to make serious money. If cricket paid better, perhaps more of the excellent schoolboy cricketers who turn out each season, or more of those who play for university sides, would take up the game professionally. Instead, they head off to the city or to other lucrative callings, and the first-class game has to make do with people who have in many cases had much less of a grounding in cricket. The other problem — as the erudite former editor of Wisden, Graeme Wright, pointed out some years ago in a thundering editorial — is that cricket simply has too many restrictive practices. The all-professional structure means that gifted players with lives outside the game cannot come and go, in the way that, say, Ted Dexter or David Sheppard (who ended up as Bishop of Liverpool) did 40 years ago. Cricket thought that when in 1962 it abolished the distinction between amateurs and professionals — Gentlemen and Players — it was striking an early blow for the classless society. Instead, by insisting that firstclass players all had professional terms, it cut off a huge pool of talent who had, as they saw it, bigger fish to fry.
So the first task for those who would rescue the game is to deregulate first-class cricket. Since the insistence on professionalism would be literally unaffordable by many first-class counties without big subsidies from the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), the return of the amateur, or at least of the non-full-time player, would have other benefits. The ECB hands out cash from Test match receipts, television fees and sponsorship deals to keep counties afloat. It also thereby severs the link between effort and reward which ought to be essential to the creation of genuinely good county teams and genuinely good Test players. A little less subsidy, and a little more effort to find talented players with the right attitude, such as is commonplace among some of our cricketing rivals, would be no bad thing.
The second task has to be to ensure that more children have the opportunity to play cricket at an early age — as in Australia, South Africa or on the subcontinent, or in English prep schools — thereby acquiring some of the athleticism and ball skills that other nations take for granted in their youth but which are becoming increasingly rare here. To be fair to the ECB, it has pumped money into local grass-root,, initiatives: but it is still not enough. It is prticularly unfortunate that so little is done to take black youths off inner-city streets and on to the cricket field, where their considerable natural talent and athleticism could be exploited to their and the nation's advantage.
The third task has to be to try to create the mental toughness that pursues victory and learns from defeat. Again, there was much in the old public and grammar school systems that did this for an earlier generation of cricketers, and, indeed, in the school-of-hard-knocks system at the other end of the scale, under which fast bowlers were whistled up from the bottom of coal mines. Now the whingeing cricketer has become a caricature: whingeing about his pay, about all the travelling he has to do, about the strains on family life, about having to play too much cricket. Earlier generations performed infinitely better, by and large, despite having been less well-paid, away from home for far longer periods, with no wives flown out to tour with them, and playing far more firstclass cricket than is the case today. Cricketers may be paid worse than footballers, but they still get better rewards than they could earn in any other trade for which most of them might be qualified: manual labour or junior office jobs. It is time some were acquainted with this reality and saw how lucky they are.
Mr Blair's touchy-feely society — with what Peter Lilley called 'the something for nothing society' thrown in for good measure — appears to be undermining cricket by reconciling it to mediocrity, just as it is doing in so many other walks of life. Cricketers do not just find excuses for failure; they also expect — rather like some FTSE 100 bosses — to be rewarded for it. If the government cares about competitive sport for children and young people, it must not only endorse it, but also make funding of the facilities for it a priority, or we shall simply never be able to compete with other countries. It must be as enthusiastic in this regard about cricket as it is about soccer. And the ECB must show goodwill by restructuring the game and providing the financial incentives for cricketers to improve. Otherwise, at this rate of decline, it will not be long before an England side takes the field in a Test match and looks around the stands to find that hardly anyone is watching.
Simon Heifer is a Daily Mail columnist.
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