Sport & Fitness

Imagine turning up for a friendly Sunday afternoon cricket match and finding among your opponents a guy who’s played 36 one-day internationals for South Africa – and whose last victims for his country were Adam Gilchrist and Ricky Ponting. That was the extraordinary situation facing Belmont & Edgware Third XI earlier this month when they travelled round the North Circular to Hornchurch. Roger Telemachus was the Essex outfit’s new ‘overseas pro’ – and the explanation for his appearance was that ‘he required match practice’.

What could have been an awkward situation was defused when Telemachus proved to be an obliging individual. He bowled only a couple of overs at gentle pace and instead opened Hornchurch’s batting. Despite being a genuine number 11, he blasted 74 before being caught – then later signed the match ball and the shirt of the Belmont & Edgware player who’d claimed his wicket.

That there is a level of recreational sport where the quality of the tea and post-match pint are as important as the game itself hardly needs stating. It’s the sport most of us know – and which we might proudly proclaim as amateur in spirit and practice. That there is also a level at which a club like Hornchurch, with an ambitious benefactor, can sign a current international player is also increasingly common. What is now rare, though, is a meeting between the two. It still happens, in charity cricket matches and pro-am golf tournaments, but it requires the pro to ‘play the game’ and be neither patronising nor effortlessly superior to the self-confessed rank amateur.

A century ago, though, it was the amateur whose natural talent, temperament and refinement would triumph over those whose success was the result of coaching, practice and payment. As DJ Taylor explains in his sharp, spry essay, ‘On the Corinthian Spirit’, the term ‘amateur’ was once a compliment, but is now a synonym for incompetence. In contrast, if Old Fartonians Sixth XI win a game in the Hackney Marshes Hackers League, the victors will no doubt describe it as a ‘thoroughly professional performance’.

The idea that the division between amateur and professional was clearer in Victorian and Edwardian England persists. Yet CB Fry, often acclaimed as the ultimate amateur, was a mass of contradictions. In his biography of the England cricket captain, FA Cup finalist, world long-jump record holder and rugby star, not to mention politician, poet, journalist, academic, novelist and very nearly the King of Albania, Iain Wilton showed that Fry made large sums from articles, adverts and endorsements, plus fees from writing about the matches he was actually playing in.

Fry was saved by his social and educational background – no one dared question his status as a gentleman. He wasn’t the only one. As Taylor puts it, ‘The Victorian amateur who looked down his nose at a professional sportsman for not regarding games-playing as an end in itself could hardly have failed to notice that his own attitude to sport was deeply compromised.’

Taylor’s entertaining and gently provocative book will prick the interest of anyone interested in cultural history, sending them to more academic but no less readable tomes such as Richard Holt’s ‘Sport and the British’ or any of Tony Mason’s works. Though he doesn’t reveal his own attitude to the Corinthian spirit, Taylor, one suspects, will be pleased that it still lingers. Any foreboding felt by the players of Belmont & Edgware will have been allayed by Roger Telemachus’s good nature – though they would have known instinctively that playing against a side with an international in their midst was just not cricket.