Degenerate days: colonial sports tours and British manliness 1900–1910

The 1900s saw a crisis in English manliness that played out in the commentary on sport in the national press. At a time when the theory of social Darwinism was becoming more influential among intellectuals and politicians, the British Army put in a catastrophic performance against the Boers in the South African War. In the aftermath of the war some of the blame for the bad performance of the Army had been placed upon the poor physical and mental quality of recruits to the armed forces. This articles argues that the success of colonial teams caused a crisis of middle-class British masculinity that was played out in the national press as progressives and conservatives debated the future direction of cricket and rugby. A debate, it is argued, that was won by those who wished to demarcate their games from the masses, and who rejected class and ethnic inclusivity as a threat to their future leadership of the nation's sports.     

The Controversial Cec Pepper and the Australian Services Cricket Team: The Test Career That Never Was

The Australian Services cricket teams of both WWI and WWII played an important role in the immediate post-war period. A number of the players involved went on to forge successful Test cricket careers. This paper mentions the exploits of some of the players involved in these matches with particular focus on Cecil (Cec) Pepper. Cec Pepper represented the WWII Australian Services Team with distinction during the exhausting schedule of matches played in England, India and Australia from June 1945. However, in the match between the Australian Services Team and South Australia played at the Adelaide Oval over the Christmas–New Year period of 1945/1946, Pepper was involved in a controversial incident with the South Australian captain Donald Bradman and umpire Jack Scott. The incident and its subsequent ramifications were to have a huge impact on Pepper's cricket career. Pepper should have been in contention as a future Australian Test player. Instead, his career took another direction completely. This paper discusses Pepper's career and traces further links between the three Adelaide protagonists, Bradman, Scott and Pepper. A comparison is also made between Cec Pepper and other Australian spin bowlers of the era.     

"Neither cricketers nor ladies": towards a history of women and cricket in South Africa, 1860s-2000s

There is a dearth of research and writing on women's cricket in South Africa. In an attempt to enhance understanding of the nature and effects of women's involvement in the game of cricket over the past 200 years, this essay offers a chronological account of the sport and the role women played in it. It draws on readings from the international scholarship on women's early involvement in sport, the fragments that have existed to date about women's cricket in South Africa and some newly discovered primary material from the 1950s onwards. The essay aims to provide a historical context and open a window for historians and social analysts into an area few knew existed before. There is now a distinctive history and subculture of cricket with multiple social dimensions for scholars to explore; here I offer some preliminary insights.     

Bowling Maidens Over: 1931 and the Beginnings of Women's Cricket in a Yorkshire Town

This article focuses on the development of women's cricket in a West Yorkshire town – Brighouse – in the 1930s. It situates this subject within the context of the growth of women's cricket more generally, and goes on to explore the personality and uniqueness of women's cricket in the town. The article identifies key issues in the way that women's cricket was perceived at the time, particularly in the pages of the Brighouse & Elland Echo, the local newspaper. As such, it considers the novelty of the sport, the gender stereotyping that was an important aspect of newspaper coverage, the relationship between women's and men's cricket, and also the marketing of key fixtures.     

An investigation of home advantage and other factors affecting outcomes in English one-day cricket matches

We examined the factors affecting the outcome of cricket matches played in the English one-day county cricket league. In particular, we focused on the home-field effect and the importance of winning the pre-match toss of a coin to determine a team's strategic decision to bat first or second. A home-field effect appeared to be confirmed in that home teams won 57% of all matches with a win/loss result. A logistical regression model was used, with the outcome variable defined in terms of a home team win/loss. We found that while winning the toss is an important aspect of a one-day cricket match, other factors tend to dominate in determining the result, especially team quality and match importance for the home and away teams in the overall league context. Our results also indicate, not surprisingly given the nature of cricket attendance and spectating, that the crowd effect is largely insignificant. The results of our study do not support any rule changes requiring the abandonment of the coin toss to determine batting order.     

Gender,photography and women’s football in England: the Portsmouth Ladies FC, 1916–1918

ABSTRACT

Founded in 1916, the Portsmouth Ladies FC were one of many women’s football teams active during the First World War. Building upon the work of Jean Williams, Patrick Brennan and Ian Nannestad, this article seeks to broaden our knowledge of the development of women’s wartime football. Its principal sources are images held by National Football Museum, the Pompey History Society, along with newly digitised newspapers. This article explores two aspects of the club’s history. Firstly, it presents an overview detailing the team’s origins, playing record, the types of games they played, including games against male teams, and the role of Councillor Tom Langdon in organising and promoting their activities. Secondly, it will explore the significant photographic coverage afforded to the team, in particular by the Portsmouth Evening News photographer Joseph Stephen Cribb. It will be argued that the club’s history helps develop the chronological development of women’s football in World War On. It will also be argued that visual depictions of the team show both an increasing interest in the women’s game, and also the limits and gendered nature of that interest.     

Corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability: Why professional sport is greening the playing field

In this study, we explore institutional forces affecting environmental sustainability in professional sport teams and leagues in North America. Interviews with sport executives and executives from partner groups, 122 websites and organizational documents, and 56 media reports were examined. Data revealed how environmental management practices are being diffused in professional sport organizations. Evidence indicated associative behavior among sport organizations with respect to environmental management. Data also illustrated that media played a role in driving and defining the type and extent of involvement in professional sport teams’ environmental sustainability efforts. We discuss environmental sustainability as it affects a team's or league's CSR related initiatives (i.e., averting legal recourse, saving money, as well as building stronger relationships with stakeholders (e.g., customers, fans, local communities, federal governments and corporate partners)), and speculate how these efforts might evolve and inform the development of environmental sustainability in organizations in the sport, service and entertainment sectors.     

Elite cricket coach education: a Bourdieusian analysis

The social structures within coach education have been largely unexplored, undiscussed, and treated as unproblematic in contributing to coach learning, both in research and practice. The study used semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 11 elite cricket coaches to gather their perceptions of an elite coach education programme. In particular, this research attempted a more nuanced critical inquiry into the impact of culture on coach learning, habitus on knowledge production and the extent to which capital structures practice within the field of cricket coach education. Data analysis followed abductive reasoning, combining inductive thematic analyses of the data, with a deductive abstraction of these themes within a Bourdieusian framework to provide a level of explanation to the data. The findings present coach education as a complex social field in which coaches were active social beings in the (re)production of coaching knowledge. The culture of cricket was found to perpetuate a powerful doxic system that highlighted the tensions and conflict between an accepted model of coach education with a singular and prescribed body of knowledge and a strong underlying sporting culture and individuals hierarchically placed within it. This data further highlighted how coach education contributes to the (re)production of power within the field of cricket coaching.     

New Worlds and Old Prejudices: Australia,Cricket and the Subcontinent: 1880–1960

Until recently, Australia's cricketing past has been coloured by an anglocentric bias. Australian cricket writers, players and administrators mainly have deemed Australian series with subcontinental countries of much lesser importance than Ashes contests. In surveying Australia's cricketing relations with the subcontinent from the 1880s until Australia's first fully fledged official tour of the region in 1959–1960, this paper seeks to redress this imbalance. The paper explores how initial cricketing relations were viewed within the prism of Australia's traditional cricketing ties with England. This did not alter with India's attaining official Test match status in the 1930s. Australian tours of India were confined to unofficial teams, and it was not until 1947–1948 that the first official exchange occurred. As this paper documents, the importance of subcontinental cricket tours increased after the war, as both Labor and Liberal Coalition governments encouraged the use of cricket to foster diplomatic ties at a time of increasing decolonisation and when Indian and Australian external relations were ideologically opposed. The governments' efforts were not fully supported by many Australian cricketers and administrators. While some, such as the Australian captain Ian Johnson, embraced cricketing diplomacy, many of his colleagues coloured these new cricketing worlds with old Australian prejudices.     

板球运动的变革与入奥成功的挑战

板球这项古老的运动一个世纪后重新进入奥运会。为什么能快速成长,并成为一项全球化的运动？本文着眼于板球运动的历史渊源和全球化发展,分析板球运动的传统文化传播和演变历程,从板球竞赛的变革解读测试赛、世界杯、亚运会和奥运会,从国际板球组织的全世界发展分析世界板球运动快速成长及中国板球运动的举步维艰,探讨板球运动的变革成长道路及入奥后板球传统国家和新兴国家所面临的机遇与挑战。     

Reading cricket fiction in the times of hindu nationalism and farmer suicides: Fallacies of textual interpretation

This paper will critique postcolonial theory's attempt to read the cricket nationalism portrayed in the Oscar-nominated Bollywood film Lagaan as one that subverts the civilizing mission of British colonialism and also restores the agency of the subaltern classes. Instead, it will argue that this cricket nationalism replicates Indian bourgeois nationalism, which has no place for the subaltern in its imaginary. It will also argue that the postcolonial thesis of decolonization and indigenization of cricket supposedly achieved by Lagaan is marked by a culturalism that does not take into account structural factors such as capital, class and caste that dominate the institution of cricket in India. Finally, against postcolonial theory's tendency to read a text in isolation from the context, it will be contended that the cricket nationalism of the film can only be understood by locating it in relation to the present socio-historic conjuncture wherein forces of capital and nationalism are hegemonic.     

‘A Different Kind of Test Match’: Cricket,English Society and the First World War

This paper uses cricket as an analytical tool for investigating developments in English society at the time of the First World War. It firstly explores contemporary attitudes to how cricket responded to the outbreak of war, making comparison with the experiences of other sports. It is shown that the fact cricketers enlisted in their thousands, allied to conspicuous attempts by the cricket authorities to support the war effort, largely deflected the kind of criticism that was heaped upon other sports. This paper then considers the role played by cricket in shaping the wartime experiences of both civilians in England and members of the armed forces serving in areas of conflict. It is demonstrated that contemporaries believed that cricket provided respite from the war and boosted morale. This study lastly considers the insights that cricket reveals about the impact of the war upon society, demonstrating that the evidence offered up by the game suggests that rather than breaking down social divisions of Edwardian-era England, the war in fact reinforced societal stratification as the anxieties imposed by the conflict led people to seek comfort from established structures.     

Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai'i

Whereas earlier research has shown that (traditional) cricket was invented in Flanders (i.e. the Southern Low Countries), this article focuses on the introduction of modern cricket in the Netherlands (i.e. the Northern Low Countries). The result is a broad textual study, based on large-scale digital analysis. We show that the integration of this sport textually took place in three phases: first in small groups via billingual translation dictionaries (starting in 1724), translated literature and ego documents, then through educational leisure books and manuals, and finally by means of articles in periodicals and news papers (with information about cricket matches). With regard to the practice and propagation of cricket, pupils and former pupils of Noorthey, a Protestant-Christian boarding school for boys, played a very important role. Clubs were founded all over the Netherlands, and in 1883 the Dutch cricket federation was established. In the end, however, cricket did not become a popular national sport in the Netherlands.     

South African Cricket,Imperial Cricketers and Imperial Expansion, 1850–1910

‘It has become an accepted fact,’ declared one South African observer in 1915, ‘that where Englishmen are banded together, either by reason of duty, self-advancement or force of circumstances, there cricket will be played.’[1 [1]‘Cover Point’, ‘Eastern Province Cricket’, 27. ] Indeed, throughout the British Empire cricket had followed on the heels of exploration, military might and political intervention in establishing a British code of civilization in foreign territories. This article will explore the early development of cricket in southern Africa and investigate its symbiotic link to British imperialism and colonialism. The origins of the game in South Africa will be examined as well as its development up to 1910 (the date of Union in South Africa) as a site of a burgeoning imperial ‘brotherhood’ between Britain and its most contested colony.     

The great Indian Willow Trick: Cricket,nationalism and India's TV news revolution, 1998–2005

The emergence of India as the financial and spiritual heart of world cricket in the 1990s is intrinsically linked to India's satellite TV revolution in the same period. The 1990s began with just one Indian television channel – the state owned Doordarshan – but by 2006, Indian viewers were remote-controlling their way through more than 300 private satellite television channels. While the reasons for this phenomenal growth of the television industry are varied and complex, cricket has played a central role in the story. This paper will outline Indian satellite television's linkages with cricket and what they mean for notions of identity and expressions of Indian nationhood. In particular, it focuses on India's 24-hour television news networks – there are more than 50 in 14 languages. Unlike any other country in the world, the Indian television news industry has consciously ridden on cricket's shoulders to such an extent that by 2006, cricket-oriented programming accounted for the greatest expenditure in news gathering and the greatest visibility across most news channels. Television producers looked towards cricket because of its indelible link with what might be called Indian-ness, but their focus on the game, in turn, substantially redefined and reinforced these linkages.     

加强高校高水平运动队的思想教育

高等学校创办高水平运动队,是我国体坛土的“新生事物”,故有许多问题需要进一步认识与探索。本文就如何加强高校高水平运动队的思想教育这一问题进行论述:(一)必须重视思想教育;(二)思想教育的内容和要求;(三)搞好高校高水平运动队思想教育需要加强的几个方面。     

‘They are able to play football in South Africa’: Austria’s ‘little Wunderteam’ on tour in 1936

From the end of the nineteenth century South Africa had become a popular touring destination for British and colonial sports teams. Tours in the popular sport of cricket, football and rugby were very popular. These tours tested local opposition against foreign competition, brought in revenue to local and national sports associations and contributed to the development of a white South African identity. Austrian football teams were extensive travellers and popular attractions around the world. Prior to the Second World War Austrian football was highly regarded and was able to compete and hold its own against English and Scottish clubs and representative teams. This article considers an unusual tour by a combined Viennese football team to South Africa in 1936. We consider the preparations for the tour, the different playing styles and the way in which the visitors were received around the country. At the broader political level, the tour was important as leading South African politicians and Austrian diplomats attended matches and functions while on tour. This can be understood in the context of both countries attempting to flex their political identity and muscle in light of more dominant neighbours and colonial masters.     

The Fictions of (English) Cricket: From Nation to Diaspora

This paper examines the fictional representations of cricket and argues that they contribute to a definition of the game. It examines the fictions of cricket, showing that they construct the game into a most distinct English fiction. Literary treatment of cricket must further be read in the context of the transformations of the game in the nineteenth century, with the rise of athleticism as an ideology, and its role in the training of the colonial administration. The argument then concentrates on the decolonzsation, and perhaps the ‘defictionalization’, of cricket through the writings of C. L. R. James and Ashis Nandy. Finally, it turns to recent fictional perceptions of cricket, in particular to Romesh Gunesekera's The Match as well as Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, and argues that they emphasize the diasporic nature of the game.     

科学建设高水平运动队对高校发展影响力的研究

通过对高校高水平运动队对学校发展的社会影响力的分析,探索并建立符合我国基本国情、校情的高校高水平运动队,科学发展高校高水平运动队,从而为推动高校体教结合的教育改革的不断深入、大学生体育运动的发展以及高水平运动队竞技体育人才培养和运动队运行的可持续和谐发展起到添砖加瓦的作用.