Commercialism

For British readers of a certain age, wrestling occupies a very particular place in the collective memory. Long before the triumph of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), long before the pyrotechnics and the Trump-adjacent billionaire promoters, there were those long-lost innocent Saturday afternoons watching World of Sport with your nan, as men with cauliflower ears, wearing improbable hand-stitched trunks, wrestled in grim, determined, municipal fashion in local leisure centres and town halls up and down the land. If your last points of wrestling reference are those great monoliths Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks lumbering around like coal-fired power stations, today’s wrestling world is almost unrecognisable.

There’s a fascinating thought that the authors of Full Circle pursue for just a couple of pages, then leave hanging: ‘Association football offers an alternative history by which to consider the course cricket might have taken.’ In fact, the book demonstrates that cricket has followed football’s course, albeit about a century late. In cricket, too, professionals ousted amateurs, embraced the market, saw economic power shift east and chose a short format that allowed games to be played in an evening. Like it or loathe it, cricket has effectively become football. Reading this serious and competent work, you wonder at times why the journalists Richard Heller and Peter Oborne bothered to write it. There are already countless cricket histories.