All to play for | 4 February 2012

There was a time when sportsmen fretted about the morality of being paid to play. Now the question is whether you are taking money to win, or taking money to lose. Mervyn Westfield, the Essex fast bowler, was only 20 when he accepted £6,000 to bowl deliberately badly in a county match. Three Pakistani cricketers, of course, are in prison for the same offence. How quaint the old distinction between the amateur who plays for love and the pro who toils to make ends meet now appears.

How did sport become so morally complicated? It was the Victorians, as Mihir Bose explores in The Spirit of the Game, who decided that sport had to be good for you. The Georgians, in contrast, had been content with sport’s more obvious pleasures of gambling, blood-letting and licentiousness. The Victorians, with an empire to run, wanted sport to educate the officer class. No matter that Thomas Arnold, allegedly the founder of ‘muscular Christianity’, didn’t even like organised games. With Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the idea that Britain became great by playing sport hardened into folklore.

Baron de Coubertin added a few embellishments of his own, cementing the idea that sport was a vital part of a healthy education. Sport’s advocates, as Bose puts it, ‘had spelt out the purpose of games long before most sports had drawn up their rule or codes of conduct. Sport had acquired a philosophy before it had been properly organised.’ The legacy of that tension — between the idea of sport as a moral enterprise, and the reality of sport as a pastime and increasingly a business — is still evident today.

Bose, once BBC sports editor, has spent his life in the corridors of sporting power, and his book is strongest when he is an eye-witness rather than just a chronicler.