Category Archives: confrontations on field

Alex Massie, courtesy of The Nightwatchman … http://www.theguardian.com/sport/the-nightwatchman/2015/may/29/douglas-jardine-scotland-england-cricket-captain-ashes

Late October 1932 and England’s cricketers are travelling from Perth to Adelaide. The journey across the red, desolate, vast expanse of the Nullarbor plain is long and tiring. Three times the party has to change trains. Boredom is an ever-present danger. No wonder discussion turns – as it so often does when cricket-minded folk are cloistered together – to the favoured parlour game of selecting mythical all-time XIs to take on visitors from other lands or even other worlds.

 Jardine batting for England–Pic from Getty

A Greatest Englishmen squad is agreed upon – after much argument – captained by Horatio Nelson. The great hero of Trafalgar will lead a team chosen from the Duke of Wellington, Cecil Rhodes, William Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Kelvin, Charles Dickens, Joseph Lister, James Simpson, James Watt and George Bernard Shaw. An impressive selection even if picking Shaw ahead of, say, William Shakespeare remains a hard-to-defend wildcard.

It is a selection notable, too, for what it tells us about Englishness. Because many of those chosen are not English at all. Watt and Simpson are Scots, Kelvin was a Belfast-born Glaswegian and Shaw was a Dubliner. Even the Iron Duke was born in Ireland. No fewer than five of the 12 selected were born beyond England’s borders and two of the remaining seven (Rhodes and Lister) made their mark outside England (in Africa and at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow). Continue reading →