I’ve wanted to talk about sport for some time. Sport and politics have historically been very closely connected, but because sport has always been part of a larger movement many often ignore its important role. In the UK sport usually drives social change, not defiance. Across the world sport sometimes means so much more.
Cricket is the easiest British example. A sport originally
took up by working people then infiltrated by the upper classes, where a
nobleman could partner a peasant or be bowled by a shepherd.
In fact it was Lamborn, a shepherd, who invented off-break
bowling. In one game it’s said he beat the Duke of Dorset and addressed the
duke as ‘sir’ rather than ‘your grace’ causing the only awkwardness to be him addressing
the duke by the wrong term, and not from the fact a simple shepherd had beaten a
duke at honest sport.
Had this force bonding the peasantry with the upper class
through sport not helped stabilise and rationalise the British social system,
the late 18th century would have been the era of violent change it
was in France. GM Trevelyan famously said that "if the French nobility had
been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never
have been burnt".
But sport isn’t just a subtle factor is uniting society. In
some cases sport has been the only way people have to express themselves or
their freedom.
The Spanish civil war was a bloody struggle of ideology
often portrayed as being between the left and the right. It was a lot more
complicated than that, especially in the Basque and Catalan regions. Catalan
nationalists especially sided with the democratically elected republican
government and, after they lost the war in 1939, they were marginalised by
Franco and their culture belittled.
Until Franco’s death in 1975, Barcelona FC actually did
become ‘more than just a club’. The club not only became a symbol of defiance
for the oppressed Catalan people, but through events such as a 1951 boycott of
the trams at an away game in Santander by Barcelona fans in solidarity with
striking tram workers back in Barcelona, the club became a more general symbol
of standing up for freedom.
Their image became so strong that when Johan Cruyff moved to
Barcelona in 1974, he famously said that he could never have moved to Real
Madrid because he could not move to a club associated with Franco. As though
any moral man at the time would be forced to shun Real Madrid and join
Barcelona.
It would be foolish to ignore the power of sport in politics
and in shaping larger cultural phenomenon. Sport might well be part of the
answer to many of the world’s major political problems in the same way cricket
was arguably part of the answer to many British problems during the late 18th
century.
