UQ Business School PhD student April Wright was stumped when she first started investigating the relatively recent English county cricket practice of importing overseas players.
While she had planned to analyse the practice as a strategy for generating spectator interest and skills transfer in internationalised sports, when she began conducting interviews at county cricket clubs she soon realised it was more complicated than that.
“I was struck by the paradox inherent between county cricket’s traditions and the modern demands of sport as commercial entertainment,” she said.
Her research took her deep into the archives of Marylebone Cricket Club at the legendary Lord’s Cricket Ground – where she combed minutes of meetings and original documentary records from 1937 to the late 1960’s.
Ms Wright said she found a complex relationship between cricket’s traditional ideology and the economic rationalism necessary for the financial sustainability of county clubs in the modern game.
“In Victorian England, first-class county cricket became an institutional carrier for English moral character,” she said.
“The expression ‘it’s not cricket’ as a way of describing unacceptable behaviour in daily life is a classic illustration of the moral authority of the cricketing code at that time.”
“However, the structures and practices adopted by the county clubs changed substantially in the post-war period.
“New practices like importing foreign players – which contradicted the ideology of cricket as a game for ‘English gentlemen’ and ‘amateurs’ – somehow became incorporated into the institution of first-class county cricket.”
As well as scouring the documents, Wright also conducted interviews and observations at three county clubs to understand contemporary practices.
Wright said she found that the modern market logic of sport as business continues to challenge English cricket’s traditional moral ideology.
“It’s an ongoing struggle between cultural capital and economic capital in defining what county cricket should be.”
For more information contact Cathy Stacey on (07) 3365 6179 or 0434 074 372.
