LEVEL PLAYING FIELD The Hindu, 1 July
It's rare that a fashion item makes the slightest impression on me, but I have to confess to being childishly delighted by a purchase I recently made over the internet. It's a tee-shirt emblazoned with CLR James's ever-pertinent rhetorical question: What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?
The tee-shirt is the latest product from PhilosophyFootball.com, "sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction", a do-it-yourself enterprise offering a line of handsomely designed sportswear bedecked with pearls of wisdom from Marx, Galileo, Pele, Bakunin, Bobby Moore (captain of England's 1966 World Cup winning team), Jean-Paul Sartre ("In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team"), Albert Camus ("All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football"), Manchester United manager Matt Busby ("Winning isn't everything. There should be no conceit in victory and no despair in defeat") and George Best ("I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered").
The whole point of PhilosophyFootball is the unlikely mingling of thinkers and doers, observers and performers. CLR James fits precisely in that nexus. James brought to the study of cricket the same high-energy intellectual engagement, wide range of reference and fertile imagination with which he also tackled organising share croppers in Missouri, analysing ancient Athenian democracy or debating black self-organisation with Trotsky.
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