Sporting Life

Simon Schama was talking about baseball on Radio Four this morning. I expect that most readers of this blog already know that the game was invented in England. But what really got me thinking, even though I already knew it, was that it was quite popular among the English working classes around the turn of the twentieth century.

Cricket had become a toffs' game, though not everywhere, particularly in the North to this day. Football still was; it was only beginning to be introduced to working-class areas by public school curates who felt that the young men of the parishes needed something to do. Rugby was then as it is now (in England, at least), since the Union/League split was only just taking shape. And the void was filled, for a time, by baseball.

It may be filled by baseball, or it may be filled by something else, but that void will undoubtedly have to filled again soon enough. The pricing of the working classes out of football, its legendarily bad treatment of its staff, and its use as a sort of circus of performing chavs as there might be performing seals or performing monkeys, cannot be tolerated for ever. Or, indeed, for very much longer at all.