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.     

Determining optimal trial size using sequential analysis

When characterising typical human movement profiles, the optimal number of trials analysed for each participant should ensure a stable mean. Sequential analysis is one method able to establish the number of trials to stability by assessing a moving point mean against a set bandwidth. As the total trial number determining this bandwidth is selected arbitrarily, the effect of applying different total trial numbers on the results of sequential analysis was investigated. Twenty participants performed 30 trials of overarm throwing, and sequential analyses were applied to three dimensional (3-D) kinematic data over 10, 20 and 30 trial numbers. We found a total of 20 to be the preferred trial number for sequential analyses. Erroneous results were produced consistently by 10 trial number groups, while moving point means were statistically unchanged after the 10th trial. Subsequently, sequential analyses were applied to 20 trials to establish trials to stability in discrete and time series elements of the 3-D kinematic data. The results suggest that a trial size between 13 and 17 provides stable means for overarm throwing kinematics.