Reflections on attending the Cricket World Cup

Juggling with stumps and cricket bats at Chester-le-Street
- the blue van in the background is a CWC2019
mobile toilet support van!

Soccer-mad Boffin Kevin follows up his earlier post on the Cricket World Cup: Commiserations to England's lionesses on their loss to the USA in the FIFA Women's World Cup semi-final!  Today another England team in a different sport have a must-win match to ensure their qualification for the semi-final stage - in the Cricket World Cup, being held in England and Wales at the moment.

Your correspondent, a seasoned cricket watcher, attended two matches - West Indies v New Zealand at Old Trafford in Manchester (normally home of Lancashire), and West Indies v Sri Lanka at the Riverside, Chester-Le-Street (normally home of Durham).  Both seemed extremely well organized with the ground at Manchester being especially easy to get into, with almost no queue.  There was more queuing at Durham, but the tournament volunteers (or 'cricketeers') kept the queue entertained by announcing facts about the two teams playing.  Temporary stands were erected at both grounds to provide cheaper seating, the view from both being excellent, and plenty of catering, bar and toilet capacity was provided, especially at Durham where an army of temporary toilets was deployed alongside the already large existing facilities in the ground. A broad range of catering was provided and the area behind the stands at both matches used to set up a carnival atmosphere with a range of stalls selling merchandise and cricket equipment, as well as entertainers such as Carribean dancers and jugglers.  Beer fans will also be interested in the Indian craft keg beer that was sold, Bira 91 - the IPA was pleasant.  The on-field action was of high quality too, though the resurgent Windies team were unable to win on either occasion despite their valiant second innings performances. This despite the surprise presence of the Barbadian singer Rhianna at Chester-le-Street!

Panoramic view of the action at Old Trafford

Despite the fact that attendances at domestic cricket can be small, both grounds are already experienced at holding international cricket when England play at the venues and so this meant that existing capabilities could be rolled over by the counties and ECB to deliver a flawless spectator experience. By playing matches in one group of ten and rolling the host grounds from the south-west, with early matches held at Taunton, Cardiff and Bristol to the north-east as the tournament progressed, equipment such as portable toilets and catering as well as in-ground entertainers could be moved around the country. The Indian beer reflects the sponsorship direction of world cricket today, which sees brands that are targeting South Asian and especially affluent Indian consumers partnering with the ICC instead of western brands - the main western brands present were Uber and Coca-Cola, both of which are known for attempting to penetrate Asian markets.  The presence of existing capabilities in a single sport makes hosting the event easier than a multi-sport event such as the Olympics or Commonwealth games where events often happen on greenfield sites with no heritage of holding the sports in question.  The flaw may be the limited impact on local economies - your correspondent spotted many shirt wearing Sri Lankans heading south on the A1 after the Durham game, suggesting a repeat of 1966 finding that many visiting fans preferred to stay in one place centrally, rather than staying near host grounds.  One pleasant impact has been that domestic cricket has continued due to the limitations of the playing season, and so during the tournament the counties have moved out to play more at secondary venues, known as 'outgrounds', with Lancashire and Durham playing each other at Sedbergh School this week.

The ECB, who are much more powerful in their sport than their soccer equivalents, are frequently criticised for their management of the English game, while the ICC has often been criticised for their overt focus on the South Asian market while failing to invest in the growth of the game in non-Test playing nations. But on this occasion, the tournament seems to have engaged visiting fans from around the world together with broadening the fan base in England, and so the ECB and ICC have scored a century and taken five wickets each - howzat!

Railways and 'the beautiful game' before 1914: football, fans and formalisation

The following article is 'reprinted' (with minor updates) from an original post by Dr David Turner on the website 'Turniprail' back in 2014. We thought it would be of interest to readers of Soccer Mad Boffins too:  

Recently I have been doing some work on how the railways of Britain influence the development of organised sport  before 1914 and most of my investigations have focussed on the ‘beautiful game’: football. Early forms of football, which used rules that may have borne only a passing similarity to those in the current game, was being played in public schools from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.^[1] However, by the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries going to a football match was on the nation’s favourite pastimes. The question I have therefore been asking is to what extent to were the railways a factor in transforming football (and while we are thinking about it rugby) from a ramshackle game into the popular spectator sport it is today? Were the railways a key factor because of the improved transportation they provided, or did other, non-railway factors play a role, for example urbanisation or increasing incomes and leisure time amongst working class individuals? This issue can be split into two parts. Firstly, to what degree did the railways augment the number of spectators going to matches? And, secondly, how did it change participation in the game? 

I’ll start by talking about how attendance at football matches was augmented by the railways. The traditional view was that the railways played a big role, and some have argued that the improved transport communications they brought widened the population’s access to sporting events generally. L. H. Curzon was a proponent of this idea. In 1892 he wrote ‘today the railways convey the masses in large numbers to the different seats of sport’.^[2] Years later this view was echoed by scholars. Vamplew argued that that ‘railways revolutionised sport by widening the catchment area for spectators,’^[3] while Simmons concurred, stating that they ‘contributed to the growth of spectator sports.’^[4] While not directly mentioning football, these statements heavily imply that these academics believed that that the railways were a major factor in its development as a popular spectator sport after the 1870s.

Recently, however, this view fallen out of favour. Huggins and Tilson argue that the role of the railways in the growth of football spectatorship from the 1870s onwards has been overstated. Most supporters rarely ventured to away matches, except in the case of a local derby or an important cup tie. Indeed, the vast majority of fans travelled to local matches by foot and, from the 1890s, by electric tram.^[5]David Goldblatt, a noted football historian, agreed, arguing that ‘apart from local derbies away fans were almost absent [from matches] during the’ whole of the period between 1880 and 1914.^[6]  Exemplifying this, even when a special train accommodation was put on for away fans by the railway companies it was not well used. In 1886 Middlesbrough F.C. was to play Lincoln in an early round of the F.A. Cup. The railway provided a special saloon carriage for away fans, but only 200 excursionists travelled by it, which included the team and officials.^[7] 

So why did football fans not travel to away matches that often? Primarily, it was because of economic and time constraints. Most did not have the money to travel to away matches, while in an era when many employed individuals worked on Saturday morning, they also lacked the time to traverse the hundreds of miles to an away fixture.^[8] As such, there is a good case for saying that growth of football spectatorship after the 1870s, particularly amongst the working classes, was not because of the improved transportation the railways provided. Rather, other factors played a role, for example working individuals' increased disposable income. 

But what about participation in football? Here academics are broadly in agreement that the railways played a much bigger role in its development, mainly through allowing teams to play games outside their locality, as Mason has argued.^[9] McDowell has suggested the growth of Cumnock in Scotland as a football centre has ‘as much to do with access to railways as to mere corporate acumen.’^[10] Lastly, Golblatt similarly argued that by the 1880s trains allowed the bigger teams to conduct Easter and Christmas tours.^[11] For example, in December 1902 Dundee conducted its Christmas tour, visiting Derby and Newcastle. A journalist reported that ‘Whilst I write we are en route for Newcastle where the United are met on St James’ Park. It is a seven hours’ journey from Derby to Newcastle – 19 hours in a railway train out of 36 hours is not at all pleasant.’^[12]

Alongside this, the railways were also important in the growth of formal football associations and leagues. The Football League, for example, recruited teams to it on the basis of their distance from a station. The result was that Sunderland was not elected to it initially because the Midland clubs felt that transportation costs to play games in the city were excessive.^[13] But it is important, as Huggins and Tolson suggest, not to see the railways as a ‘panacea’ for team sports, as many football clubs had to shorten postpone and cancel games in the 1880s and 1890s because of the railway network’s failures.^[14] In 1874 (when presumably players could still handle the ball) a football match between Durham School and Stockton was shortened from four twenty-minute quarters to fifty minutes owing to the ‘usual unpunctuality of the North Eastern Railway, the train reaching Durham fully half an hour late.’^[15] 

Overall, there is good evidence that the railways played a mixed role in the development of football as the nation’s most popular sport. On the one hand it was instrumental in establishing the organisational structures within the game. However, the growth in the popularity of the sport and the number of spectators that saw matches was down to other influences. 

[1] Richard William Cox, Dave Russell and Wray Vamplew, Encyclopaedia of British Football, (London, 2002), p.234 
[2] L. H. Curzon, A Mirror of the Turf, (London 1892), p. 32 cited in Mike Huggins and John Tolson, ‘The Railways and Sport in Victorian Britain: A critical reassessment’, Journal of Transport History, 22 (2001), p.100 
[3] W. Vamplew, Pay up and Play the Game, (Cambridge 1988), p.47  

[4] Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway, (London, 1991), p.300  
[5] Huggins and Tolson, ‘The Railways and Sport’, p.108-109 

[6] David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football, (London, 2007), p.53
[7] Huggins and Tolson, ‘The Railways and Sport’, p.108
[8] Huggins and Tolson, ‘The Railways and Sport’, p.108-109 

[9] T. Mason, Association Football and English Society, 1863–1915, (Brighton, 1980), p. 146–7 

[10] Matthew Lynn McDowell, ‘,Football, Migration and Industrial Patronage in the West of Scotland, c.1870–1900’, Sport In History, 32 (2012), p.408 
[11] Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, p.53  
[12] Evening Telegraph, Friday 26 December 1902  
[13] Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, p.53  
[14] Huggins and Tolson, ‘The Railways and Sport’, p.109-110  
[15] York Herald, Saturday 21 November 1874

Dr David Turner is a railway and brewing historian.  In July 2016 David was awarded funding by the  Business Archives Council’s bursary for research into business archives, which he is using to look at the relationship between the railways and the brewers of Whitbread of London and Bass of Burton-on-Trent.  You can follow David's work at his website: https://davidturnerrailway.wordpress.com

Dr David Turner, yesterday