Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Saturday 16 September 1922, page 9


"THE GRIM GAME.

AUSTRALIANS IN SPORT.

By DONALD MACDONALD.

Are we playing games in too grim a mood playing them with the same dear determination with which we went to war-playing then with the one purpose of winning while allowing almost every consideration in sport to take care of itself The charge has been quite recently levelled against the \_>tr_ran tennis team, jet is only the repetition of earlier comment upon the needs and methods of Armstrongs victorious cricket team In tennis Patterson is the stem iconoclast who would smash his way to victory regardless of finesse or art In cricket Englishmen had area Iv taken Armstrong as the remorseless type When ever the discovery of a fault is made by or on behalf of a beaten side we may suspect pique But the charge is worth notice now because it comes from one of the most interesting writers on cricket of this or perhaps any other generation Mr Neville Cardus, of the ' Manchester Guardian " whose ' Cricketer 3 Book " dealing largely with the last Australian team and its exploits has just been published He seems to be altogether too thoughtful and broad minded a miner to permit himself to become petulant or is just To a thorough knowledge of the technique of the game he brings a scholarly style, a breadth of outlook, and generally a sense of sportsmanship which commands respect Yet he seems to be very serious indeed upon this subject of the Australians making cricket a war game, approaching it always with the fighting face, with an intensity of purpose too deadly for a mere game One might fill a column with quotations from his book all emphasising this MOW-it occurs too often to be merely a passing fancy, and I should not imagine Mr Cardus to be a man who permitted his emotions to run away with him

A fair summary of a few only of his observations may help to emphasise his point Australian cricket is incarnate in Armstrong The bespeaks vigilance, suspicion, determination Your Australian is a Spartan every inch to achieve conquest he will scourge himself if needs be for him it is victory or nothing No savour in cricket for an Arinsltong if Australia lose This submission of self to the will to conquer is not always a mark of the English game We have inclined in recent years to seek for something more in cricket than the spoils of battle-some thing more than a combat which, if it bring not victim, turns all in the mouth to dust Vta have made an art out of cricket in this country We like to see the unfolding of personality, and, in deed, we fall now and again so entranced under the sway of art for art's sake in other words batsmanship for its pure loveliness-that we forget for a while which way the battle goes This must seem to a man life Armstrong a philosophy of vanity The clannish Australian conception of a game has no room in it for a spreading of peacock feathers for Armstrong the team, and not any man in it, is the cue to action The motive power of a great Australian eleven is collective effort It is a machine functioning to wards victory, and there is small room in its grinding renvorselciisness for the man prone to fall in love with a mere aesthetic contemplation of cricket None of your amenities for Armstrong-on the field, at least He flint hath no stomach to this fight let him depart is his doctrine What pitiless acts of self abnegation the man will suffer that Australia might win

or not be beaten '

I hardly follow this subordination of the individual to the team as a fault, and what is conceived as a flaw seems to be phrased as a compliment, because team work-the unity and community of effort seems to me altogether the finest phase of sport It appears to be the measure of a plan, a mood or a policy without suggestion of either bad form or bad sportsmanship Yet it occurs so often in his book this challenge to the Australian conception of cricket as sheer combat, that we cannot afford to disregard it. It is comment applied in the main, yet not wholly to Armstrongs team because he remembers that we too find our cricket artists and wizards m Trumper still have them in Macartney, the heretic reckless of the unities flashing an audacious but in his own way in the spirit of a great adventure ' But with the exception of Bardsley and Macartney, described as dignity and impudence orthodoxy and heresy-the charge is laid against Armstrong's side

And while one rather admires that up to the handle' spirit in which Australians play Test matches especially, it would rather be a sad thing for the meadow game with the beautiful name ' if it were always played in just that mood It seems to me however-and this may be the point which Mr Cardus has overlooked-that intensity is inseparable from lest matches which are and always must be a law unto themselves and occur too seldom to seriously influence the general welfare of the game one way or the other they are what their name indicates the greatest, the last, the generally accepted test whether they run into six days at Adelaide or are limited to three days at Lords In every series of test matches one half of the cricketing world-that half which is not at the moment looking on-is much more concerned about results than methods Should the cricket be dull, even to the limit of deadliness or at least catalepsy, they have no complaint, if for their side it is a winning game In a sense, half the batsmen engaged in it are playing with one eye on the bull and the other upon a spot of earth thousands of miles away In such circumstances effort even if devoted to a negative end - such efforts as that of Collins at Manchester, when he held an end for five hours and 40 runs or in bowling with an effort as that of Armstrong at Nottingham in 1905 when with the same motive, the saving of a game morally lost, he bowled through the day on one spotbowled 14 overs for li" runs are not by their grimness a disfigurement of cricket On this side of the world we can stand that sort of thing well enough, when is always happen to be the ease-the contingency of the wire never arriving hereit is done away from home So i test match becomes not just what the people looking at it wish it to be but something played very trimly for the lion our of the land and the absentee

there is yet another point in the case which may have escaped notice lines (run remorseless attitude of Armstrong, s term when translated into cricket brought the suits which would have 12 en 61 fairly satisfactory to Englishmen had they come from the other side the very conditions under which rnnlisliineii leaving the e, i are de-velop or should develop, great resourceful ness in batting In AubtiuJut with our finer light finer weather and wickets certain fixed methods when coupled with grim patience, are to most huntsmen the only royal road to results Yet in these test matches it was the Australians who illustrated resourcefulness and the Lug bushmen uninspired method At Nottingham one may aptly quote Mr Cardus s over a words in the morning 1 English batsmanship was rubbed in the mire by Gregory) and Macdonald in the afternoon Bardsley and Macartney played with Englands bowling for all the world as though it were schoolboy stuff

At Lord s England devoted the latter put of a batsman's d it to the making of a methodical IS" rum, in the bag and of the afternoon The Australians made their first 50 in 25 minutes and got a winning, position right away with a score of 10 for three wick els In the circumstances one

might reasonably claim that the grain side

wind takes asks to what has established the right to be grimly inactive-the right not to take risks where it cannot win In brief, the test match played without a certain grim intensity seems the almost in conceivable thing

While insisting upon the reservation as inseparable from test matches one may agree with Mr yards that it would be a pity indeed if the same spirit dominated such n g ime as Victoria against New South Wales of a match between the Players and the CUntlemon Once the test matches became the accepted test in cricket, and consequently the greatest of all games, anything less is in the very nature of things more of a spectacle of an exhibition it with a means to an end rather than the great end itself and while we may desire in such an earnest races to HCC OUR own side win we would be only half satis- fied if victory were not coupled with attractive

cricket for the fine after all is and always has been just a little far greater than the greatest of those who I Play it

| In test matches alone perin ps the great ness of those who play against us is ever quite fully and freely recognised without

some suspicion of hostility and resentment

That is because the greatness of the issue

stands above every thing else, and without subordinating the spirit of sport, excusing I anything in the form of a win, tie, or wrangle policy, the Bait will have lost its savour in test matches only when they are played without the grim resolve and in

I saw happy-go-lucky aged 23 holiday