Empire Cricket Booklet

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THE GOOGLY, GOLD AND THE EMPIRE

Moreover some critics, E. H. D. Sewell in particular, noted after the First Test that, Jessop aside, amateurs had fared particularly badly against the googly. 4 8 Those pillars upon which the amateur game was built - confidence, decisiveness, enthusiastic footwork, bat speed, no fear of failure - were precisely the features that made them most vulnerable. The googly's effect was practically Copernican: no longer could a bats man rely on the naYve empiricism that equated appearance and reality, what a man sees with what a man knows. Singularly a product of the Golden Age, the googly was yet the first clink of its death knell. Though it took the Great War to confirm the new paradigm, henceforth amateurs would succeed because they batted like professionals, not because they did not. Amateurs had lost the battle, however, but not the war: Sewell's explanation for their vulnerability was that 'the more vivid imagination of the majority of amateurs [was] likely to conjure up difficulties which would never suggest themselves in the same light to the professional brain'. 4 9 Assembling all the elements of a perfect contradiction, he contended therefore that the only defence against the new bowling was Jessop style 'hitting', which would fail in the long run. V. F. S. Crawford, who when young had played with Schwarz for Surrey Oub and Ground agreed, stating that 'no one ever tackled [the googly bowlers] properly, and I doubt whether anybody will'. 50 Fry's response was more measured, holding out hope for those batsmen who were able to keep their heads: For my part I do not see much sense in endowing the South African bowlers with a species of magic or talking our own batsmen into a state of perpetual what will happen next. There is no doubt that this bowling requires some watching and some wits. Rule o' thumb play is hopelessly at sea with it; but whatever its strange merits, we have, I hope, batsmen who can cope with it successfully. A cricket ball is a cricket ball, and can be watched and played, no matter how deceptive the fingers that spin it. Fine and new this bowling is; but, like all bowling, it is playable by class batsmen. 51 R. E. Foster meanwhile, though gracious in his praise for the ability of the South African bowlers, and Vogler in particular, believed that the googly would

Vogler, was not simply the element of deceit, but the ability to impart considerable spin to the ball in comparison to the finger spinners while (for the most part) retaining control of length, as well as the crucial ability to bowl top-spinners which hurried on to the batsmen. But it was the element of deceit which caught the public imagination. On the Sunday after the First Test, at St Mary-at-Hill Church, Monument, one Prebend ary Carlisle gave a sermon entitled 'The Googly Bowlers' 45 and C. B. Fry, in the course of a laudatory article on the South African team, referred to them as 'double-dealers'. 46 The whole question of the acceptability of deceit in a game so loaded with ideological pretensions was problematic. It is a truism that cricket was the pre-eminent vehicle for transmitting the ideology of empire, couched in terms of particular standards of behaviour. But of course ideology seldom intruded into real cricket, as the career of W. G. Grace forcibly demonstrates. And what was generally amusing (except to opposing batsmen) when used by Bosanquet, and considered to be a positive and innovative development when it was deceiving the likes of Victor Trumper, became less popular when it was used against England. At the heart of the googly lay a particular contempt for batsmen. The googly not only exploited, but actively subverted, the presuppositions of the batsman. As he played one way for turn and the ball moved the other, schadenfreude hung heavily in the air. There was a fundamental truth to the 'it's not cricket' claim by disappointed batsmen who were facing a generous helping of mockery from crowd and possibly team-mates along with the loss of their wicket. And Bosanquet noted that the strong feelings engendered by the googly tended to mean any deficiencies in cricket at the present day were attributed to the influence of the googly - if the standard of bowling had fallen, it was because bowlers were spending their time trying to master it. If the batsmen showed an inability to hit the ball, it was because the googly had made it impossible for them to continue their old aggressive attitude and play shots. 47