THE VILLAGE GREEN

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 34, 10 February 1937, Page 10

THE VILLAGE GREEN

While some lovers of cricket as a game and'a sport are shouting "back to the village green," a British runner of Olympic fame is wondering "where the race in athletic armaments will end." He suggests that the complete organisation 'of running and athletics—complete organisation including the runner's, or player's, whole time and concentration, highlypaid coaches, expensive training environment, and a battery of medical and psychological aids—is not compatible with a real amateur status, and is consistent only with professionalism. If all this money is spent openly on the material accompaniments of Olympic victories, why not spend it openly on the men themselves, and make the Olympic Games "out-and-out professional"—a testing ' ground for years of expensive preparation of human machines who must be trained to the Olympic minute? - Let us send people who are virtually the best-trained robots Britain can produce.

These robots would live for their athletic exercise in much the same way as, according to Perry, a tennis champion must live for tennis. For many years now, those contests that draw huge revenues from the public, or on which international issues hang, have wavered between amateurism and professionalism. It is now argued that the games or exercises they affect must either march right on to the professional status or back to the village green. If they go back to the village green, the crowds and the financiers will not go with them. In this matter, cricket is tolerant. Cricket tolerates, in the skilled grades, both professionalism and amateurism. Cricket has its Homeric Tests, and also those wonderful little picnic matches in which some McDougall tops the score. Cricket also can exhibit a super-cricketer built up out of natural genius, such as Bradman. It is probable that Bradman owes little or nothing to expensive preliminary training—probably he owes everything to Bradman, and represents that super-excellence which amateurism can produce, without artificial aids, once or twice in a century. But suppose that some mathe-matician-mechanic made minute calculations and invented a machine that would teach an ordinary batsman perfect stroke-production (such an invention seems to be no more wonderful than firing through the path of a revolving aeroplane-pro-peller without hitting it) and suppose that by this means teams of Bradmans could be turned out on the robot principle. Such a calamity would at once make Bradmans an industrial product instead of a freak of Nature, and even tolerant Cricket —a game that has survived many schisms and scandals—would be faced with a new problem. The gap between the village green batsman and a robot batsman would not be much greater than the gap between a village green runner of the "Tom Brown's Schooldays" type, and the modern runner with his modern aids and specialised life. The Olympic Games authorities may find increasing difficulty in "having it both ways"—in having a real amateurism to compete with a sham amateurism. But people themselves can have it both ways. They can still play picnic cricket—and pay for Test match seats. It will be their own fault if they do not preserve the i village green, j