Foreword, 25.10.2024
May the 9th 2024, The Upper Mound Stand, Lord’s
“This is my son William; he opens the bowling for the Authentics and has made the occasional appearance for the blues.” my father said, introducing me to Mark Nicolas, president of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) for 2024.
“A pleasure.” I confirmed, before taking a seat amidst cricket’s great and good to take in the annual Varsity Match. Talk swiftly moved to the ever-prevalent question of whether there may be anything in our world which might be beyond the capabilities of Oxford University’s opening bowler Justin Clarke, a former Australian rules football professional, coach of the Argentine rugby team, and NASA scientist seeking a PhD in aerospace engineering at Magdalen. With this topic exhausted though, discussion returned to the day’s most pertinent ponderance; what place does the Lord’s Varsity Match have in the modern game? How can the ‘battle of the blues’, no longer a highlight of the English social summer and burdened with the entitlement of elitist ages past, be justifiably hosted at Lord’s, the self-anointed epicentre of the modern game?
Gazing at the burgundy pomp of the Victorian pavillion, I cast my mind back to a journey I had made the previous summer, a pilgrimage across the continent I had made saddled on my beloved bicycle Brynnhilde, when I had stumbled across a cricket match in the former German capital, Bonn. Whilst ruminating on this stoppage to witness this unexpected snippet of my motherland, I became more conscious than ever of the fact that that encounter between Bonn and Koblenz in Cricket’s Bundesliga (yes, there is indeed one of those), bore scant resemblance to the blazers, ties, dress codes, bells, honours’ boards, real tennis rackets, and humming public school chatter which seemed so at home at Varsity. If Lord’s were the epicentre of the game, I thought initially, then the devolution it granted to its dominions must be extreme…
But cricket is no empire, and Lord’s is no Byzantium.
It quickly dawned on me that this was hardly a snippet of my home but rather a snippet of the players’ home, a home of which I and all the other varsity types knew little; it was truly an unfamiliar dialect of a familiar game. The men I saw playing, of whom a great many were refugees as I would come to discover, played with the kind of ferocious passion of which I had heard being regnant in the Indian subcontinent despite their evident lack of formal training. Each fall of a wicket was greeted with ludicrous exclamations of wild triumph, each boundary was serenaded with jubilant choruses from the batting side: the English tradition of handshakes, applauding incoming players to the crease, and respecting even the worst decisions from geriatric umpires appeared to have long vanished from the grammar of this foreign kind of cricket – grammar which was still writ large in those illusive unwritten cricketing manuals to which commenters so often refer when presented with a Root back-foot punch or Ponting pull.
That evening, I conducted a few minutes’ research into German cricket and discovered that cricket is not at all new to the Rhine; the British soldiers stationed here until 1990 had left over 100 cricket grounds in the area after the post-Cold War withdrawal. Most were abandoned and redeveloped; nobody could have expected that such facilities would once again find themselves in high demand a mere 20 years later as the horror drove millions from their homes in the game’s subcontinental heartland to Europe’s safer shores – and especially to Germany, now home to some 500 clubs.
A year later I find myself once more in Bonn, this time as an Erasmus student at its renowned university; an institution without which it would likely never have become the capital of Germany. On my first day in the city, I walked to the same park where I had first experienced German cricket and decided to join Bonn CC.
With comparable eagerness, I went to the Bonn Opera House on the day of German Unity for the premiere of a new staging of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg and concluded that the comedy’s irritating but inept antagonist, Sixtus Beckmesser, would certainly have been a member of the MCC.
Assuming their own supremacy, the virtue signalling gammons of the Long Room call ‘cricket is bigger than Varsity!’. ‘This fixture is not representative of our sport’s diversity…’ – no, it isn’t, but neither is Lord’s, nor are the jungles of Guyana, and nor are the streets of Kabul. It would do the MCC’s members good to realise that the MCC is not, in fact, some cricketing parliament which must renew and reform to suite cricket’s demographic.
To suggest that cricket’s diversity demands the abolition of the game’s institutions therefore follows a false logic which stems from the MCC’s misapprehension of its own position within a game which, through rich in tradition, is too broad to consider in terms of hierarchy. This debate of standing proves MCC’s unwillingness to accept its role as a strand in the tapestry of the world’s second favourite game rather than as the loom which wove it. Cricket has outgrown its lawmakers; its myriad voices have outsung the masters. To assume that the former pinnacle of a long-toppled pecking order should reform according to the evolution of the sport presumes that it still remains the crux of cricket’s constitution.
What these refugees do prove is that cricket, regardless of what the Long Room thinks and wants, is adored. The German game proves that, when alone and faced with hardship we yearn ever more to attach ourselves to a piece of lost home. Europe’s migrant cricketers have as much right to play their game as they do to receive shelter in times of destitution and need. Lord’s is not world cricket, so it should stop trying and focus on being Lord’s instead. That, of course, is how cricket flourished in the first place.
On a wider scale, the mistake of the Long Room is also the mistake of so many wokist-mainstream governments across Europe who have spent ten years trying and failing to sell mass-immigration to an increasingly irate populace. The assumption that helping our less fortunate neighbours necessitates the abandonment, at least alteration, of our own ways of life – conservative media points to examples like the quotes from the Quran that blazed on the noticeboards of London’s rail termini earlier this year – is an essential paradox. The surge of right-wing political parties (which claim to be able to transport people into their own nostalgia) comes from the very same human instinct – the desire to hold onto something in life – that lies behind Germany’s cricket boom. European cricket remedies its players’ nostalgia for home. Tradition and custom are part of our very nature as humans; it is as cruel to withhold them from others as it is to starve ourselves of them – “verachtet mir die Meister nicht… ehrt euren Deutschen Meister! Dann bannt ihr gute Geister!” – “do not scorn the masters in front of me… give them honour! Be bound in merriness!”. The Conservatives and the CDU have themselves to blame for making an error which has fostered Reform UK and the AfD. If the MCC can come to its senses, it may evade a sporting manifestation of this peril.
Hans Sachs brings Wagner’s mammoth opera to a close with the lines “Zerging in Dunst das Heil’ge Roemsche Reich, uns bliebe gleich die heil’ge deutsche Kunst” – “and were the Holy Roman Empire to vanish in the haze of the past, holy German art would remain for us”. This logic applies too to cricket and, indeed, to life; even without our institutions, we’ll have our game. In the opera’s final turn of wit, the self-embellishing ‘holy’ of the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ is used for the universal concept of art itself. Elites may think themselves important and relevant, but they are undermined by their true dispensability and the falseness of their illusionary hierarchy. What is transcendent, what is truly ‘holy’, is that about which we should build our lives – be that song, cricket, May Day dances, blazers, or the Bayreuth Festival.
PS: watching Bonn’s players delight in their game may well make me realise just how lucky I am not to be as out of place here as they feel here. Perhaps some of their joy in cricket will make me appreciate my own home all the more.
Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
was der Mode Schwert geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.