Cricket's long history provides an insight into the present

PAUL EDWARDS: I reckon it is useful to know how any game or pursuit has evolved and what it was like to play it in decades when society was very different and the rewards for playing sport were radically different from those received today

Some years ago a friend of mine asked me which county Herbert Sutcliffe played for.

"Really?" I replied, not troubling to conceal my surprise.

Some context is needed. Cricket was one of my friend's greatest interests although, thankfully, it did not obsess him. He played as often as possible, organised matches when needed and followed Test matches with a devotion that did not prevent him from paying very close attention to club matches.

I knew he was not particularly fascinated by the history of the game but I assumed he would know where Sutcliffe's domestic loyalties lay. This, after all, is the opening batsman whose Test average, 60.73, is the highest of any England cricketer who has played 20 or more innings.

Sutcliffe's partnerships with his county colleague, Percy Holmes – they put on 555 against Essex at Leyton in 1932 - and with Jack Hobbs in Test matches are still quoted and revisited by statisticians.

Moreover, he scored 50,670 runs in his first-class career and made 151 centuries; only five cricketers have made more runs and only four have hit more hundreds. Although those rankings will never change because such figures belong to a different era, Sutcliffe's name still remains well known to anyone whose fascination with cricket extends beyond the white-ball, here-and-now stuff. Well, I thought so, anyway.

"Yorkshire," I said, after a pause.

^{Percy Holmes and Berbert Sutcliffe were an imperious partnership (A.Hudson/Getty Images)}

Should I have been so surprised? In his book, The Art of Captaincy Mike Brearley paraphrases Sir Donald Bradman's belief that any good captain should read a lot about the game and know not only its laws but also a "fair degree" about its history. "I find this far-fetched," Brearley comments, "every captain I have known would have been found lacking in this respect."

Such deficiencies are not confined to skippers. A few years ago, a Lancashire cricketer bowled very well in a limited-overs game and matched the achievement of David Hughes in a particular respect. We informed him of this and were greeted with a blank look. Hughes's place in the county's relatively recent past and his role in several one-day triumphs had passed him by, a phrase which probably suggests a misleading proximity in the first place.

But that word "deficiencies" betrays my own leanings. The player in question is currently enjoying an excellent career and it would be absurd to think he is suffering because he has hardly any knowledge of the game's history.

Likewise, recreational cricketers at my own club, Southport and Birkdale, enjoy their sport and play it to a high level most summer Saturdays while remaining oblivious to S&B's history or anything to do with the game except the past few seasons. They do not appear any the poorer for it.

Yet along with many others – consider the appeal of popular history programmes – I reckon it is useful to know how any game or pursuit has evolved and what it was like to play it in decades when society was very different and the rewards for playing sport were radically different from those received today.

"Awareness of cricket's history will show you that outlandish innovation, match-fixing and extraordinarily rich players are not the preserves of the late 20th and early 21st centuries"

An image that has always stayed with me from a recent Test match is that of Stuart Broad engrossed in Duncan Hamilton's biography of Harold Larwood, a fast bowler who went down the mines in Nottinghamshire at the age of 14 and earned his last wage working as a stock controller for a soft drinks firm in Sydney.

Between those two careers, Larwood was the fastest bowler in the world and the central character is perhaps the most famous, certainly the most notorious, Test series of all time. But then everybody knows about Bodyline. Don't they? Well, Broad does and he is an intelligent bloke; it's easy to think he does now values his own lifestyle all the more because he knows how Larwood had to struggle.

My point is that while knowledge of any game's past is nothing like essential to one's enjoyment, it is enormously enriching to understand how a sport began, how it developed and what it was like to earn one's living from it in increasingly distant ages.

We all know about the reverse sweep but where did the sweep itself originate? Until I did some research for this column in W J Lewis' The Language of Cricket (Oxford 1934) I didn't know that it was once called the George Parr sweep, a reference to the 19th century Nottinghamshire cricketer who was famous for playing it. As R H Lyttleton reported in Cricket (Badminton Library 1888): "George Parr's leg hit, for which he was unrivalled, was the sweep to long leg off a shortish ball."

Mike Brearley strongly believed an understanding of cricket history could inform the present (Evening Standard/Getty Images)

Would the modern franchise cricketer profit from knowing the origin of a shot which has been popularised to such an extent that it has become almost a trademark of the T20 game? Probably not. After all, the reverse-sweep is a much more recent creation, isn't it?

Actually, we'd better think again about that one, our considerations informed by Michael Rundell's invaluable The Wisden Dictionary of Cricket. For example: "Though popularised in the 1980s by players such as Javed Miandad and Ian Botham, this hazardous shot is believed to date back at least as far as E. M Grace, [born 1841, died 1911] and it has figured in the repertoire of a number of well-known players, including Percy Fender and more recently Mushtaq Mohammed."

It is, of course, fatuous to use such evidence to argue there is nothing new in the game. But awareness of cricket's history will show you that outlandish innovation, match-fixing and extraordinarily rich players are not the preserves of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

And you do not need to agree with every conclusion in Tim Wigmore and Stefan Szymanski's recently published Criconomics to find it a fascinating and necessary read. Wigmore and Szymanski's perspective on the game is rather different from my own yet I suspect the three of us gaze at the team photographs lining pavilion walls and wonder what life was like for those remote and not so remote figures who lived life just as intensely and just as fearfully and just as joyfully as we do.

Of course, it's fine if the game's history doesn't float your boat but maybe one day you should give it a try