Just not cricket

The International Cricket Council is once again discussing how the game can be reformed and expanded , beyond the ten Test-playing nations which are its heartlands, especially those on the Indian sub-continent where it's a mass sport.

It's interesting to see that rugby union is being held up as an example of a sport that has expanded beyond the former British Empire, but there are important differences between them which mean that its successes are unlikely to be repeated by cricket.

Except in South Wales, and to a lesser extent the neighbouring areas of South-west England, rugby union is a sport of the upper and middle classes. That means that in both former colonies of the British Empire (Australia, Ireland) and those countries that are not (Argentina, Italy) the game has a social prestige and is thus the chosen sport of private schools and universities rather than the football codes which are the mass, working-class sports in those places.

Although privately-educated players have featured quite heavily in the England cricket team, usually as batsmen, unlike in rugby union they're balanced out by a group of more working-class players from the North and Midlands who often make up the bowling attack (that mix was also present in nineteenth century England rugby teams, before the split between rugby union and rugby league, with Oxbridge backs and forwards from the pit villages and mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire). And when it comes to race and national identity, pretty much any match England plays is against a team descended from colonial subjects, convicts or slaves.

Attempts by rugby league to expand beyond its heartlands (Northern England and the urban east coast of Australia) are also instructive: whereas they have failed repeatedly in London and Wales, where the game has no real roots, and more importantly no social significance beyond the pitch, they have flourished in the politcally and religiously dissident working-class and small-peasant areas of South-west France where, to quote the author  Tony Collins, "rugby league symbolised much more than an alternative set of rules for rugby",

Death in the ring

The death of the twenty-five year old Scottish boxer Mike Towell after a bout in Glasgow last week has re-opened the debate about the safety of professional boxing and whether it should be banned.

Whenever a boxer is killed in the ring, the same arguments are put forward to justify the so-called "fight game".

1. People should be free to do what they want, as long as no else is harmed

If you're a libertarian, there's some logic to this, but it also means having to argue for the legalisation of bare-knuckle boxing and fights outside pubs and football grounds (boxing is one of the exemptions to the legal rule that you can't consent to being assaulted, and if Dale Evans, the boxer who killed Towell, had struck the fatal blow outside the ring he'd now be looking at a manslaughter charge and many years in prison).

It's also not true that no else is harmed by boxing: apart from the fighters killed or maimed in the ring, women are widowed, or left with a paralysed partner for the rest of their life, children orphaned, and ambulance and hospital staff affected by deaths and serious injuries in the ring.

2. There are risks associated with all sports

It's true that people have been killed or seriously injured in other sports - athletes who die from undiagnosed heart defects, rugby players from concussive head impacts or broken spines, jockeys thrown from horses, drivers in motor racing crashes and collisions - but those are accidents, which can be minimised by better safety regulations, not the aim of the activity as it is in professional boxing where winning often means battering your opponent into unconsciousness.

3. Millions of people enjoy watching boxing matches

And back in the day, cock-fighting and bear-baiting were very popular too...

4. Boxing keeps kids off the streets and teaches them discipline

If anything, that's an argument for amateur/Olympic boxing with headguards and fewer, shorter rounds, not the more brutal bouts you get in professional boxing.

5. Boxing is a way out of poverty

For kids from deprived backgrounds with few educational or employment opportunities, that might well be true, but is still an indictment of the inequality and lack of social provision in the areas where boxing flourishes.

6. If boxing were banned, it would go underground, and there'd be more deaths in the ring

Undoubtedly true, and the only argument I can think of for opposing a ban and calling for even stricter regulation of professional boxing.

Beyond A Boundary

I went to a rugby league match between Swinton and Workington at Heywood Road, Sale, yesterday afternoon.

Since leaving their Station Road home in 1992, Swinton have played at a few grounds, including Gigg Lane, Bury, and Park Lane, Whitefield. Their new home at Sale is shared with the amateur rugby union club of that name whose professional offshoot, Sale Sharks, left for Edgeley Park, Stockport, in 2003 before moving into the AJ Bell Stadium in Barton-on-Irwell with Salford Red Devils rugby league club in 2012.

Sale is quite a distance from Swinton, as is Barton from Sale. In relocating to Barton from their home at The Willows, the Red Devils moved within the City, but outside the traditional boundaries, of Salford. Manchester United's ground at Old Trafford is just outside the boundaries of the City of Manchester, having moved there from Newton Heath in 1910, and Arsenal began life in Woolwich, south London, before moving north of the river in 1913. So how far can a club move before the connection between its name and history and geographical location is severed?

Most people would, I think, regard AFC Wimbledon as the continuation of Wimbledon FC rather than Buckinghamshire outfit Milton Keynes Dons, although neither side now claim the honours of the historic club. The real difference seems to be between moving outside a conurbation (London, Greater Manchester) and relocating within it, especially if, as with Swinton and AFC Wimbledon, you're still looking to build a ground back in the place you originally came from.

Of course, in the United States, not only would such moves within cities not even register with all but the most diehard of fans, nor seemingly do the multiple moves franchises in the four major sports (American football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey) make, so baseball's Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants can relocate from the East Coast to the West without dropping their nicknames or records and in the NFL the Cleveland Browns can become the Baltimore Ravens while the Oakland Raiders leave for Los Angeles before moving back to Northern California and resuming play under their original name.

Lottery winners

I was amused to see that the Conservative former Prime Minister John Major is being credited by some for Britain's medal haul at the Rio Olympics because it was  his Government which introduced the National Lottery in 1994, and ensured that a large portion of the revenue from it was spent on improving facilities and coaching for elite sports, especially in multi-medal events such as cycling and swimming, a policy others have somewhat outlandishly compared to the State sponsoring of Eastern bloc athletes in the 70's and 80's.

There are three basic arguments against the National Lottery.

The first is that it's a tax on the poor, because poorer people will spend more on tickets in the hope of becoming a millionaire, a sort of low cost, no risk get rich quick scheme, albeit one with little chance of paying off. I'm not sure however that many people, if any, become addicted to buying lottery tickets, as opposed to gambling in high street bookmaking shops or online.

The second is that by generating not just cash for its operators but a sense of excitement around the draw amongst players, it serves as a distraction from the social ills that people would otherwise focus on (the same argument has also been made about mass spectator sports like football). George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four even predicted it when he wrote, "The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention." The problem with this argument is that people can play and be excited about the Lottery and be aware of and angry about the cracks which the cash from it helps to paper over (in the case of sport, it can even generate a sense of solidarity and become a focus for opposition). It also assumes that if such "distractions" were somehow abolished, people would almost automatically switch their attention to resisting our rulers' latest dastardly plans.

The third, and strongest, argument is that Lottery cash substitutes for public spending and lets the Government off the hook in its social responsibilities. If Lottery funding ceased, it's doubtful that public spending would increase to match the shortfall, but while it's clearly a problem if schools, hospitals or homelessness charities become dependent on grants, it's much less of one if the British Olympic track cycling team does. And, unlike your taxes, if you don't agree with what Lottery money is spent on, there's a simple solution: don't buy a ticket.

Rio, by the sea-o

The Rio Olympics, whose opening ceremony takes place later today, starts amongst the now almost obligatory scandals and tensions: Russian athletes already banned for doping, the Brazilian president suspended for alleged financial misdemeanours, sporting facilities and accommodation only just built or sub-standard, working-class communities displaced and protests violently dispersed by riot police.

It's not quite up there with Mexico City in 1968, where the games opened just ten days after the army had shot dead hundreds of protesting students, but as ever there's a dissonance between watching and enjoying the sporting events which individual athletes have trained hard for in the last four years and the violence, kickbacks and corporate control you know is going on in the background, all overseen of course by the aristocratic IOC which only just comes behind football's world governing body FIFA in the number of corruption allegations levelled against it.

Young man's game

At Scarborough yesterday, Yorkshire seam bowler Matthew Fisher became only the third fifteen year old to have played first class cricket.

In 2008, fifteen year old Barnsley winger Reuben Noble-Lazarus became the youngest player to turn out for a Football League team and left-hander Joe Nuxhall was also that age when he first pitched for the Cincinnati Reds in 1944, still a Major League Baseball record. In contact sports like rugby and American football, the youngest ever players are, as you'd expect, a bit older, in the 18-20 age range.

Twelve seems to be the youngest age anyone has competed at the top level of a sport - in golf and chess - and there have also been one or two fourteen year old tennis players. At the other end of the scale, I doubt we'll ever again see a fifty year old professional footballer like Stanley Matthews or a fifty-two year old Test cricketer like Wilfred Rhodes.

Bar billiards

Having time to kill after a match at the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield finished earlier than expected yesterday, the BBC put on a short piece presented by Steve Davis about the legendary player Joe Davis.

Joe Davis grew up in the Queen's Hotel in Chesterfield, a long-demolished pub his ex-miner father was landlord of, which is where he honed his cue skills on its full size snooker table. The pub according to the  photo of it in the piece was owned by the Mansfield Brewery which was taken over and shut down by Marstons with production of its beers being moved to Wolverhampton.

Pubs and games such as billiards, snooker and darts have of course a long association. I'm trying to remember a pub scene in a novel set in 1930's England - by Graham Greene or Patrick Hamilton possibly - in which a character demonstrates how to play endless cannons in billiards.

Batting with the boys

The wicketkeeper of the England women's cricket team is set to play for a county side, the first time a woman has played in the professional men's game. Sarah Taylor is in talks with Sussex CCC to become the back-up wicketkeeper for the county's Second XI this summer.

Cricket is one of those games where the division between men and women has never made much sense. Apart from adjusting to the faster bowling, there shouldn't really be any problem as far as I can see.  In fact, apart from full contact sports such as rugby and American football and others like swimming and athletics where body size is a factor, it's hard to see women not being able to compete alongside men at top level given the right coaching and support. Someone once told me that any male tennis player in the top 100 could easily beat the top woman but I'm not sure how true that is.

Olympic ballroom dancing?

The sight of horses dancing to music being awarded marks for artistic impression at the Olympics yesterday reminded me of Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge pitching monkey tennis to a BBC executive.

It also got me thinking about what other events should be added to the Olympic programme.

1. Cricket: played at top level by a couple of dozen countries and watched by up to two billion people worldwide, its exclusion since the 1900 Paris Games is a scandal.

2. Darts: another sport with mass appeal overlooked by the aristocratic IOC.

3. Ballroom dancing: if gymnastics, diving and horse dressage are allowed as Olympic events, why not ballroom dancing? The success of Strictly Come Dancing shows how popular it would be.

4. Sheepdog trials: as above, One Man and his Dog demonstrates the public appeal of a dog rounding up sheep. I'd watch it.

Jamaica at fifty

Fifty years ago today, on 6th August 1962, Jamaica became an independent country.

Although Jamaica has had problems with its economy, crime and political violence, the period since independence has also seen some remarkable achievements for an island of just over two and a half million people.

Usain Bolt winning the Olympic 100m gold medal last night is the latest in a long line of track successes. Jamaica has also contributed players to the legendary West Indian Test cricket team, including fearsome fast bowlers Michael Holding and Courtney Walsh. Jamaican music is enormously popular internationally with Bob Marley a global icon and ska and reggae influencing styles as diverse as punk, Two Tone and hip hop.

What is now Guinness Foreign Extra Stout has been exported to the Carribbean since the early nineteenth century and brewed in Jamaica since the 1970's. I'll be raising a glass of it to Jamaica on its anniversary.

Just not cricket

I'm glad that the Chinese and South Korean badminton players who tried to lose because they'd already qualified for the quarter-finals and wanted an easier draw have been thrown out of the Olympics. The organisers of the London Games should also refund the tickets of the spectators who had to witness it.

The incident reminded me of the one-day cricket match in the late 70's between Somerset and Worcestershire when Somerset declared on 1 for no wicket in order to lose by a lesser margin than Glamorgan and thus qualify for the next round of the competition. The Test and County Cricket Board rightly expelled them for having breached the spirit if not the laws of the game.

I've heard some people compare what happened in the Olympic badminton with football clubs putting out weakened teams in Cup competitions or athletes not giving it their all in heats because they want to save their energy for the final. I think the difference is that at least there spectators get to see what they've paid for. The Chinese and South Korean badminton players might like to think about on the plane back home, although the South Korean coach's retort that "The Chinese started this. They did it first." doesn't give you any hope that they actually will.

Dreyfus, de Dion and the Tour de France

I watched the final stage of the Tour de France yesterday afternoon.

I don't really follow cycling and haven't watched any of the other stages.  I watched mainly because it promised to be a bit of sports history, an Englishman winning the world's most famous cycling race for the first time.  Bradley Wiggins is also a Mod and indie fan who lives in the North West and trains in the hills of Lancashire and at Manchester velodrome.

Reading up on the history of the Tour de France, I found this article about how it began in 1903 as a result of the Dreyfus Affair, the imprisonment of a Jewish army officer for espionage that divided France and increased anti-semitism and nationalism on one side and radicalism and anti-clericalism on the other. The car manufacturer Jules-Albert de Dion, an anti-Dreyfusard, joined other industrialists outraged at the pro-Dreyfus stance of France's leading sports newspaper Le Vélo in setting up a rival publication, now L'Équipe, which sponsored the first race.

The final stage of the Tour goes through some rather pretty countryside. I've been to France but not Paris. If the aerial shots of the gardens at Versailles are anything to go by, they'd be top of my list of places to see if I'm ever there.

I went for a walk after the race had ended. Maybe it was my imagination but there seemed to be a lot of middle-aged men on bikes out on the roads...

Another ban on booze

A report by the House of Commons Health Select Committee argues that "serious consideration" should be given to banning alcohol advertising and the sponsorship of sporting events by drinks companies who it accuses of claiming "that advertising messages have no effect on public attitudes to alcohol or on consumption."

This is the same flawed logic that led to the ban on tobacco advertising. No one starts smoking or drinking because of an advert on TV or because a football team or Test side is sponsored by a brewery. The point of advertising is to create brand awareness/loyalty among people already buying or about to start buying your product rather than to stimulate consumption across the industry. The idea that banning the advertising of alcohol or the sponsorship of sport by alcohol companies will stop people drinking is as ludicrous as the idea that the ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorship has had any impact on the number of people who smoke.

Carrying a torch for the Olympic flame

The Olympic flame was in the North West again this weekend, passing through Manchester, Salford and Stockport.

A lot of the things that are wrong with the Olympics - corporate control, social cleansing, restrictions on protest - also apply to the torch relay but there's one criticism I find it hard to get my head round. I've heard people argue that as the Olympic torch relay was invented by the Nazis for the 1936 Berlin Olympics it should therefore be boycotted. The Nazis also invented the Volkswagen, the autobahn and the ballistic missile technology that led to the Apollo programme but not many people refuse to travel down the motorway in a Golf or deny the Moon landing is one of humanity's greatest achievements.

I was thinking of going to see the torch in Manchester on Saturday afternoon but being June it was lashing down outside and one of my favourite actors, Rod Steiger, was losing the Battle of Waterloo to Wellington again as Napoleon on BBC2. I could also have gone to Stockport on Sunday morning but that would have meant getting up ridiculously early even by my early rising standards.

Flaming Olympics

The Olympic torch is travelling through Cheshire and Lancashire today. It will be back in the North West at the end of next month, passing through Salford and Manchester.

You can draw up a pretty lengthy charge sheet against the Olympics. The International Olympic Committee has long been associated with corruption and was led for many years by a Spanish fascist, Juan Antonio Samaranch. The 1936 Berlin Olympics - the first with a torch relay - became a propaganda event for the Nazis. The 1968 Games in Mexico City went ahead after the army had massacred hundreds of students protesting against them.

The build up to the London Olympics has already seen the "social cleansing" of working-class tenants, homeless people and sex workers from surrounding boroughs, restrictions on protesting near the stadium and the now standard corporate control of ticket allocation, merchandise and refreshments.

In itself, though, there is nothing wrong with the idea of an international event bringing together athletes and other sportsmen and women from across the world to compete. The participants themselves are not responsible for the actions of the IOC or host countries - indeed, many of them may oppose them and, in one inspiring example, used the medal podium to signal their opposition to racism and poverty.

It's for charity

There's been some adverse comment following the news that people chosen to carry the Olympic flame around Britain have sold their torches on eBay.  Those who have spoken to the media have defended their actions by saying that they only did so in order to raise money for charity.

It seems that not only does doing something for charity let you off the hook but that doing something not for charity is now seen as suspect. Take the London marathon.  It started thirty or so years ago as a sports event. It is now a fundraising event. TV reporters stopping runners now routinely ask them "who are you running for?" At this year's event, one guy replied "for myself, just for fun" and was swiftly dismissed.

It reminds me of the story Doc tells in Cannery Row by John Steinbeck about how as a student he walked from Chicago to Florida just to see the country. Along the way, he told people what he was doing. They were suspicious and unwelcoming until he lied and said he was doing it for a bet at which point they invited him in for a meal.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't do things for charity if they want, just that they shouldn't feel that they have to either.