The Philly Fling: How the American Game took over the world by Agnew Johnson. Harper Collins, 317 pp, £12, July 2014, ISBN 978 0 19 964654 8
The Sotomayor Commission Report PublicAffairs, 535 pp, $35.00, January 2014 ISBN 978 1 61 039041 5
Phil Neville: My story Penguin, 222 pp, £8, March 2014, Hodder, ISBN 978 0 21 734287 6
It's worth remembering, in the build up to Germany 2014, that the host nation owes its dominance of international cricket to its fiercest rival. Hard though it may be for the likes of Germany's captain and opening batsman Robert Harting, or fast bowlers Dirk Nowitzki and Miroslav Klose to admit, they may never have been in the position of defending the George Parr trophy without the intervention of an American.
The name John Newhall is unfamiliar to most cricket fans, except those few who take an interest in the sport's history, and Klose, Harting and Nowitzki are almost certainly equally ignorant of his role in popularising the game. Newhall was, for a time, as wildly popular a player as any who graces the fields of Lord's, the Wankhede or St George's. At the age of 18 he was the central attraction of the Germantown Cricket Club on its hugely commercially successful tour of America in 1860. Crowds of thousands came to watch Newhall bowl at all-comers with his "Philly Fling".
It could have been so different. Newhall was a last-minute invitee to play against George Parr's XI as part of a combined Canada and United States team the previous year. Parr had led the first touring team from England after an invitation from the New York Cricket Club, who had raised £1,200 in gold to pay his team of professionals. They included names such as John Wisden, John Lillywhite and Parr himself, the cream of the English game. The Englishmen easily defeated teams from New York, Philadelphia and Canada, and seemed sure to defeat the North Americans. Newhall, as a 17-year-old member of the Young America Cricket Club, had been excluded from previous games but an illness to one of the Canadian bowlers meant the team was short by one player. Newhall took his opportunity.
The reason the YACC had been excluded was because of the young men's unorthodox approach to the game. Until 1835, bowlers had delivered the ball using only underarm throws, but the round-arm method became popular after John Lillywhite championed its use in England. But the English custodians of the game, the Marylebone Cricket Club, insisted that a bowler was not allowed to raise the ball above the shoulder. Doing so would be penalised by the umpire calling "no ball". Newhall and his team paid no heed to the laws of Englishmen. They had been bowling overarm for some time - for a season and a half, according to Agnew Johnson - and had perfected the technique.
When Newhall came on to bowl against the English side, they had scored 60 runs for the loss of three wickets. When he had finished, the team was all out for 68. The English professionals had no answer to the faster, bouncier bowling - they had never faced anything like it. Naturally, Parr complained to the umpire, William Wister, but to no avail - Wister was from Philadelphia himself. The Americans went in to bat and were bowled out for 59, but in the second English innings, Newhall took eight wickets and the side was bowled out for just 23. The Americans managed to win with two wickets remaining, and history was made. An American victory over the English - and not just a few random Englishmen but the best players in the country - was greeted with delight by American newspapers. Newhall was acclaimed as a hero for inventing the "Philly Fling" which had flummoxed the men of the empire. He was invited to meet the president, James Buchanan, who gave his famous speech hailing the "American game".
The phrase stuck. MPs in London raised questions in Parliament about the tour, and the MCC reiterated the laws of the game that overarm bowling was illegal. The professional players took a different view, and by 1863 the laws had changed to allow overarm bowling. By this time the American Civil War was in full swing but the leaders of both the Union and the Confederacy encouraged their soldiers to play cricket to maintain their fitness levels. Both appealed to their army's sense of patriotism by using Newhall as a symbol, curiously, as Johnson points out in his excellent book, a symbol of how the underdog can win against the odds.
Newhall himself fought on the Union side and received a leg injury during the First Battle of Bull Run. Johnson tells of a newspaper report that the only thing that moved General Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson after the battle was the news of Newhall's death. "Would that I could have changed that young man's fate," he said, "so that this victory does not have the smell of defeat."
Newhall was not dead, of course, and he made enough of a recovery to feature in the team that faced the next English onslaught in 1869. By then, cricket had become part of the healing process for Americans. Newhall and the Germantown CC side had toured America several times and new clubs were springing up all over the country, aided by the development of a more cohesive transport network and the telegraph system. Clubs like St George's CC in New York were forced to abandon their rule that no American-born player could be a member, and the National Cricketers' Association was formed. So by the time the English had arrived, American cricket was in the midst of a renaissance. The English won several games on the second tour, including a game against the combined United States players but lost against the New York team which provoked even greater celebrations in the local press than Newhall's unlikely victory.
By the time the famous Philadelphian team of 1898 visited England and beat all-comers, a pattern was set and the growing professionalism of the game, the improving facilities and the history of rivalry between England and America made the sport a significant success. When the Imperial Cricket Conference was held in 1909 to attempt to formalise the relationship between the cricket-playing nations, an attempt to exclude America and countries from outside the British Empire was roundly condemned by the English newspapers and the decision was quickly reversed.
American cricket's crisis came at the same time that the game began to reach significantly beyond the reach of the colonial masters in London, and it might have been instructive for Sonia Sotomayor to read Johnson's book during her inquiry into match fixing. The former supreme court justice, whose nephew Javier Hernandez is captain of Boca CC (no laughing please, Internacionale fans), has repeated many of the mistakes made in 1919 after the Chicago Sweepers CC were banned for throwing games for gambling rings. The split between the National Cricketers' Association and many of the teams' owners grew bigger when the NCA imposed the ban on ten Sweepers players. The Sweepers' owner, Mike Gallagher, took the NCA to court and the ban was overturned, but none of the NCA players would take the field against the ten men. Gallagher joined forces with baseball owner Charles Comiskey and both men eventually went bankrupt. Cricket was in a huge decline - crowds were waning and many players felt the game had lost its place in Americans' hearts.
Cricket was saved by Karl Hilfenberg, a German immigrant known better by his nickname Curly Berg. Standing 6ft 4in and with muscles 'like iron girders' as Johnson describes him, Curly did what no other batsman could do other than Australia's talisman Don Bradman. The two men had a fierce rivalry, but while Bradman accumulated runs through skill and an extraordinary eye, Curly Berg used brute force. Nowadays when batsmen use slabs of willow with six-inch edges, crowds have become used to the sight of sixes crashing around the ground. Curly Berg did it all with a "slice of balsa wood", as Johnson puts it. When Bradman's Australians played and defeated Murphy's Americans in 1926, the Australian batsman Bill Ponsford said of Berg, "He hits it harder than a barn door in a gale." The return series in the United States in 1928 is rightly remembered as one of the greatest test series of all time, with Bradman scoring 694 runs in the four match series and Berg making 702, albeit having batted one more time than his counterpart.
Sotomayor would do well to have remembered how the Sweepers scandal played out. Surely the solution is to ban players from speaking to gamblers at all, and to make it an offence punishable by a lifetime's ban from the game for players to associate with the syndicates.
Phil Neville's explosive account of how he was put under pressure to throw a game for Manchester CC demonstrates the difficulties that come for the people involved in the world's most popular sport. The revelations which led to the trial of two Austrians and one Russian for match-fixing in 2011 should make it clear that while the players in larger tournaments are paid well enough to avoid the bookmakers, those in smaller competitions like the English second league are vulnerable. Neville, as most readers will know, represented England on several occasions with his brother Gary. The restrictions on player transfers meant that both Neville brothers were forced to remain with the Manchester team for two years in spite of its relegation in 2008. (England fans still blame the ECB for losing the 2010 World Cup, although how they would have beaten Germany is anyone's guess.) Sotomayor lost an opportunity to scrap this restrictive regulation and allow players to go to clubs that can reflect their abilities. Imagine if Curly Berg had not been allowed to go back to Germany in 1933. Cricket remained in second place to football, but the excitement around Berg's transformed the game. His presence is even credited with disrupting the rise of the far right at the time, whose leaders objected to the American Game. When attempts were made to ban Berg from playing in Munich, the city of his birth, the revolt toppled the government. One hopes that Neville's autobiography might find a similar reaction in Britain, for all those cricket fans still waiting to see a first world cup win. Even if we didn't invent the game.
The Sotomayor Commission Report PublicAffairs, 535 pp, $35.00, January 2014 ISBN 978 1 61 039041 5
Phil Neville: My story Penguin, 222 pp, £8, March 2014, Hodder, ISBN 978 0 21 734287 6
It's worth remembering, in the build up to Germany 2014, that the host nation owes its dominance of international cricket to its fiercest rival. Hard though it may be for the likes of Germany's captain and opening batsman Robert Harting, or fast bowlers Dirk Nowitzki and Miroslav Klose to admit, they may never have been in the position of defending the George Parr trophy without the intervention of an American.
The name John Newhall is unfamiliar to most cricket fans, except those few who take an interest in the sport's history, and Klose, Harting and Nowitzki are almost certainly equally ignorant of his role in popularising the game. Newhall was, for a time, as wildly popular a player as any who graces the fields of Lord's, the Wankhede or St George's. At the age of 18 he was the central attraction of the Germantown Cricket Club on its hugely commercially successful tour of America in 1860. Crowds of thousands came to watch Newhall bowl at all-comers with his "Philly Fling".
It could have been so different. Newhall was a last-minute invitee to play against George Parr's XI as part of a combined Canada and United States team the previous year. Parr had led the first touring team from England after an invitation from the New York Cricket Club, who had raised £1,200 in gold to pay his team of professionals. They included names such as John Wisden, John Lillywhite and Parr himself, the cream of the English game. The Englishmen easily defeated teams from New York, Philadelphia and Canada, and seemed sure to defeat the North Americans. Newhall, as a 17-year-old member of the Young America Cricket Club, had been excluded from previous games but an illness to one of the Canadian bowlers meant the team was short by one player. Newhall took his opportunity.
The reason the YACC had been excluded was because of the young men's unorthodox approach to the game. Until 1835, bowlers had delivered the ball using only underarm throws, but the round-arm method became popular after John Lillywhite championed its use in England. But the English custodians of the game, the Marylebone Cricket Club, insisted that a bowler was not allowed to raise the ball above the shoulder. Doing so would be penalised by the umpire calling "no ball". Newhall and his team paid no heed to the laws of Englishmen. They had been bowling overarm for some time - for a season and a half, according to Agnew Johnson - and had perfected the technique.
When Newhall came on to bowl against the English side, they had scored 60 runs for the loss of three wickets. When he had finished, the team was all out for 68. The English professionals had no answer to the faster, bouncier bowling - they had never faced anything like it. Naturally, Parr complained to the umpire, William Wister, but to no avail - Wister was from Philadelphia himself. The Americans went in to bat and were bowled out for 59, but in the second English innings, Newhall took eight wickets and the side was bowled out for just 23. The Americans managed to win with two wickets remaining, and history was made. An American victory over the English - and not just a few random Englishmen but the best players in the country - was greeted with delight by American newspapers. Newhall was acclaimed as a hero for inventing the "Philly Fling" which had flummoxed the men of the empire. He was invited to meet the president, James Buchanan, who gave his famous speech hailing the "American game".
The phrase stuck. MPs in London raised questions in Parliament about the tour, and the MCC reiterated the laws of the game that overarm bowling was illegal. The professional players took a different view, and by 1863 the laws had changed to allow overarm bowling. By this time the American Civil War was in full swing but the leaders of both the Union and the Confederacy encouraged their soldiers to play cricket to maintain their fitness levels. Both appealed to their army's sense of patriotism by using Newhall as a symbol, curiously, as Johnson points out in his excellent book, a symbol of how the underdog can win against the odds.
Newhall himself fought on the Union side and received a leg injury during the First Battle of Bull Run. Johnson tells of a newspaper report that the only thing that moved General Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson after the battle was the news of Newhall's death. "Would that I could have changed that young man's fate," he said, "so that this victory does not have the smell of defeat."
Newhall was not dead, of course, and he made enough of a recovery to feature in the team that faced the next English onslaught in 1869. By then, cricket had become part of the healing process for Americans. Newhall and the Germantown CC side had toured America several times and new clubs were springing up all over the country, aided by the development of a more cohesive transport network and the telegraph system. Clubs like St George's CC in New York were forced to abandon their rule that no American-born player could be a member, and the National Cricketers' Association was formed. So by the time the English had arrived, American cricket was in the midst of a renaissance. The English won several games on the second tour, including a game against the combined United States players but lost against the New York team which provoked even greater celebrations in the local press than Newhall's unlikely victory.
By the time the famous Philadelphian team of 1898 visited England and beat all-comers, a pattern was set and the growing professionalism of the game, the improving facilities and the history of rivalry between England and America made the sport a significant success. When the Imperial Cricket Conference was held in 1909 to attempt to formalise the relationship between the cricket-playing nations, an attempt to exclude America and countries from outside the British Empire was roundly condemned by the English newspapers and the decision was quickly reversed.
American cricket's crisis came at the same time that the game began to reach significantly beyond the reach of the colonial masters in London, and it might have been instructive for Sonia Sotomayor to read Johnson's book during her inquiry into match fixing. The former supreme court justice, whose nephew Javier Hernandez is captain of Boca CC (no laughing please, Internacionale fans), has repeated many of the mistakes made in 1919 after the Chicago Sweepers CC were banned for throwing games for gambling rings. The split between the National Cricketers' Association and many of the teams' owners grew bigger when the NCA imposed the ban on ten Sweepers players. The Sweepers' owner, Mike Gallagher, took the NCA to court and the ban was overturned, but none of the NCA players would take the field against the ten men. Gallagher joined forces with baseball owner Charles Comiskey and both men eventually went bankrupt. Cricket was in a huge decline - crowds were waning and many players felt the game had lost its place in Americans' hearts.
Cricket was saved by Karl Hilfenberg, a German immigrant known better by his nickname Curly Berg. Standing 6ft 4in and with muscles 'like iron girders' as Johnson describes him, Curly did what no other batsman could do other than Australia's talisman Don Bradman. The two men had a fierce rivalry, but while Bradman accumulated runs through skill and an extraordinary eye, Curly Berg used brute force. Nowadays when batsmen use slabs of willow with six-inch edges, crowds have become used to the sight of sixes crashing around the ground. Curly Berg did it all with a "slice of balsa wood", as Johnson puts it. When Bradman's Australians played and defeated Murphy's Americans in 1926, the Australian batsman Bill Ponsford said of Berg, "He hits it harder than a barn door in a gale." The return series in the United States in 1928 is rightly remembered as one of the greatest test series of all time, with Bradman scoring 694 runs in the four match series and Berg making 702, albeit having batted one more time than his counterpart.
Sotomayor would do well to have remembered how the Sweepers scandal played out. Surely the solution is to ban players from speaking to gamblers at all, and to make it an offence punishable by a lifetime's ban from the game for players to associate with the syndicates.
Phil Neville's explosive account of how he was put under pressure to throw a game for Manchester CC demonstrates the difficulties that come for the people involved in the world's most popular sport. The revelations which led to the trial of two Austrians and one Russian for match-fixing in 2011 should make it clear that while the players in larger tournaments are paid well enough to avoid the bookmakers, those in smaller competitions like the English second league are vulnerable. Neville, as most readers will know, represented England on several occasions with his brother Gary. The restrictions on player transfers meant that both Neville brothers were forced to remain with the Manchester team for two years in spite of its relegation in 2008. (England fans still blame the ECB for losing the 2010 World Cup, although how they would have beaten Germany is anyone's guess.) Sotomayor lost an opportunity to scrap this restrictive regulation and allow players to go to clubs that can reflect their abilities. Imagine if Curly Berg had not been allowed to go back to Germany in 1933. Cricket remained in second place to football, but the excitement around Berg's transformed the game. His presence is even credited with disrupting the rise of the far right at the time, whose leaders objected to the American Game. When attempts were made to ban Berg from playing in Munich, the city of his birth, the revolt toppled the government. One hopes that Neville's autobiography might find a similar reaction in Britain, for all those cricket fans still waiting to see a first world cup win. Even if we didn't invent the game.
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