Date-stamped : 27 May94 - 18:24 A NATION STUMPED TO ITS VERY SOUL England's cricketing collapse is no longer simply the empire striking back. It mirrors the country's conviction that it's go- ing to the dogs, says Mike Marqusee. Nearly a year ago, on St George's Day, John Major sought to reas- sure Tory Eurosceptics by invoking "the long shadows falling across the county ground, the warm beer, the invincible green suburbs . . ." Echoing George Orwell, but with radically dif- ferent intent, Major offered his beleaguered party shelter in the traditions of English cricket and the lost world of stability they evoke. Ever since Tom Brown's Schooldays, cricket has been seen as a re- pository of national values, as "English" as the unwritten con- stitution and the code of "fair play". Pitching the stumps in a foreign land became a way of claiming it for England, and, for the governed peoples, playing cricket became a means of securing acceptance within the empire. This is why failure at Test cricket is so resonant in England. It's not just the pain of being "beaten at our own game"; it is the realisation that cricket is no longer "our game". It belongs to a new world in which England stands very much on the margins. Indeed, the cricket-loving Major chose an inopportune moment to celebrate the continuity of England via English cricket. The Test side had just lost series to Pakistan, India and even Sri Lanka. In the coming months it would be thrashed by Australia. Changes in captaincy and the selection of younger players raised hopes. But these were dashed over the last month in Jamaica, Guyana, and especially last week in Trinidad, even as Major's latest attempt to demonstrate his patriotic credentials to the anti-European Right came a cropper. That extraordinary 15-over, 80-minute pas- sage of play at Port of Spain displayed the collective neurosis of a nation disorientated by a global market oblivious to the old prerogatives of empire. In wrestling with this latest debacle, English cricket's army of Jeremiahs will have plenty of targets to aim at. Already there have been calls to streamline the county championship, which, like the coal, rail and other nationalised industries, is decried as uncompetitive, shielding mediocrity from the disciplines of an unregulated market where winning is all. Whatever the merits of four-day county games or fewer overseas players, neither is like- ly to reverse the decline of English cricket. This, like the de- cline of the economy, is long-term and deep-seated. The old adage about Test cricket being played in the head was rarely more apposite than in Port of Spain last week. England produced their most uniformly abysmal performance at precisely the moment when a great victory was in their grasp. The edgy body language and the nervous glancing eyes said it all. This is to take nothing away from the achievement of the West Indies' Curtly Ambrose, which owed as much to intelligence and artistry as swir- ling arms and a point of delivery nine feet above the ground. After the match, Ambrose explained: "I understand how important it is to play my cricket hard. I do it for the people. They ex- pect nothing less and we're very conscious of them whenever we go out on to the field. Their love is very strong. It is demanding on you, but it also makes you feel strong." It is impossible to imagine English cricketers talking like that. Where the West Indies Test side embodies the aspirations of West Indian people, the England Test side, it seems, embodies only the frustrations of English people. You only have to watch any England side in recent years to see that national representation is for them a burden, not an in- spiration. It weighs them down as it so clearly does the West In- dies. England and the West Indies are the only two Test-playing countries which are not also nation states. The "West Indies" represents a potential unity yet to be real- ised, a power and presence the islands cannot command in the economic or political spheres. In contrast, "England" seems to represent little more than a vanished dominance over others. In their stumbling hesitation and panic-stricken misjudgments, the current England side is all too representative of a nation which seems bound together only by a shared conviction that it is going to the dogs. The West Indies Test side is drawn from 11 million dispirited, largely impoverished people with cricket facilities and a domestic infrastructure far inferior to Britain's, yet they have beaten England in every series since 1974. Just as Margaret Thatcher, for all her ruthless "radicalism", was unable finally to stem the country's long-term economic decline, so the market- orientated Test and County Cricket Board, gorged with sponsors' cash, has been unable to revive the fortunes of English cricket. We had last year the collapse of cricket's "Essex men", Graham Gooch and Keith Fletcher, against India and Sri Lanka abroad and Australia at home. At the end of last season, the bright stars of eighties' English cricket - Gooch, Botham, Gower, Gatting - departed from the Test scene, leaving the bare reality of histor- ic decline. England has been steadily sinking in the hierarchy of world cricket for several decades. Since 1980 England have won only 20 per cent of their Test matches, lost 39 per cent and drawn the rest. Only Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe have a worse record. It will take more than a change of personnel or technical fix to deal with this crisis. The Daily Express made precisely this point in its half-hearted defence of John Major this week, arguing that, like Mike Ather- ton, the Prime Minister should be given the benefit of the doubt, not least because there was no reason to think the available al- ternatives would perform any better. The politics of national sporting failure are complex. In 1966 it was widely felt that England's triumph in the World Cup had bene- fited Harold Wilson at the polls. In the run-up to the 1992 gen- eral election a number of Labour campaigners feared an English victory in the cricket World Cup would favour Major, especially as he was known as a cricket fan. As it turned out, England lost to Pakistan and the Tories won the election anyway. Major's trump card proved to be fear of change, the very lack of national self-confidence so visible in today's England Test side. English cricket is now embroiled in one of its periodic bouts of self-castigation. The problem is not merely losing Tests to countries England once dominated. It is that, in the current context of economic and political decay, national cricket failure is so pregnant with meaning. As so often in the past, English cricket today provides an uncannily precise reflection of the nation's wider malaise. Cricket's prospects of revival are nonetheless better than Major's. His efforts to reconcile the Tories' commitment to the global free market with their defence of old national preroga- tives are likely to prove as irrelevant to the country's real problems as the TCCB's protests against third-country neutral um- pires - when English ones were by definition fair - have been to English cricket's decline. Mike Marqusee is the author of Any But England: Cricket and the National Malaise, to be published by Verso on July 1 (Thanks : The Guardian) Contributed by Vicky (VIGNESWA@*umass.edu)