Cricket & Class Struggle?

The wombats, having grown up in the thick of rural Australian cricket, have long been considering a foray into the question of cricket and class struggle. However, having neither the time nor total dedication (nor, perhaps, the skill) of C.L.R. James, we have failed to produce such a piece.

The game is afoot, however. John Passant has written a small piece post-Ashes, declaring England's defeat of Australia victory for the class struggle, and a defeat of "cricket's imperialist masters" (ie Australia), and the right-wing troglodyte Andrew Bolt has picked up on John Passant's piece, applying the usual finesse (equvialent to passing a nuclear weapon through a key-hole) that passes for "analysis" in his work. So, perhaps now is the time...

Firstly, the wombats disagree with John Passant's proposition, and we believe it to be a fundamentally flawed approach to the question of class and cricket (although we assume John's eye was primarily on the ball of racism in cricket, and there are valuable points to be made there).

In fact, however, cricket and class struggle, cricket and national liberation (sometimes called "liberation cricket"), cricket and racism, and cricket and the development of capitalism, its grave-diggers and its silly-mid-off have a far more interesting connectivity.

While we are no James, the wombats have decided that - after the disaster of the recent Ashes tour - we'll have a go, over a number of posts, at sketching a brief "People's History of Cricket".