Today sees the start of the latest round of the Ashes, a test cricket series played over five matches which has taken place between England and Australia every two years or so since the late nineteenth century. Anticipation amongst English supporters has been feverish in the run-up to this latest instalment of what is often called ‘sport’s oldest rivalry’, with mounting speculation that the current team might be capable of winning in Australia for what would be only the sixth time since the Second World War.

In the build-up every possible permutation of team and tactics has been analysed and re-analysed, as have the implications of the different venues, of the type of ball being used, and of the scheduling of the games. The relative strengths and weakness of the squads and of the individual players have been dissected in forensic detail. Looked at with a sociological eye, that painstaking technical analysis of the game in its own terms, and the time and emotion that such analysis commands, are a reminder that Pierre Bourdieu was surely right to call sport a ‘specific reality irreducible to any other’.

Yet that interpretation of the game, like any interpretation intrinsic to a given cultural field, tends to drown out other, more political or more sociological questions. Questions, for example, about the ways in which cricket reflects and reproduces wider forms of social domination, both in England and more widely. This is, of course, precisely the kind of thing that we are not supposed to worry about. Hence the constant refrain of those who control sport that it is ‘no place for politics’.

In fact, looking at the England squad which was selected for this Ashes tour reveals a stark truth. High-level cricket in England, at least in the men’s game, has become largely a preserve of the social elite.

Compare, for instance, the seventeen-man squad that embarked on the steamers for the equivalent series in 1924-25. That squad included four players who had attended one of England’s public schools. Inevitably, one of those was the captain. Arthur Gilligan was a former pupil of Dulwich College (and a current member of the British Fascists). The rest of the squad was comprised of what were called ‘professionals’: working-class men who had made their way into the game through local leagues, often also serving time as ground-staff of the English counties. The designation ‘professional’ had a sniffy connotation indicating, as it did, that these were men with no choice but to be paid to play. That condition was contrasted with that of the ‘gentleman’ amateur who, supposedly, played for nothing other than the love of the game. That classed distinction was inscribed deeply into the English game and was demarcated in all kinds of concrete and symbolic ways. Yet, despite that, the fact remains that players of working-class background made up three-quarters of the touring side which left for Australia.

A hundred years later, the sixteen-man squad arriving in Australia contains ten players who attended fee-paying schools in England or, in one case, in South Africa. About seven percent of the English population are enrolled in these elite schools. On that basis we might expect a single player from such a background to have made the squad. In fact, they account for more than sixty percent. England could, in theory, field a side in Australia in which only one player attended a state school.

Those raw numbers do conceal some complexities. There are a couple of players who attended fee-paying schools as a result of securing sporting scholarships. And it is true that two of the side’s talismanic figures – the captain: Ben Stokes; and their most successful batter: Joe Root – were not public schoolboys. It is also notable that the proportion of state-to public-school educated players is much more balanced amongst those who have been selected as bowlers, rather than batters. This, in itself, echoes a long-standing, classed division of labour in cricket, whereby bowling has been seen as a repetitive, manual activity – eminently suited to the brute body of the worker – whereas batting is seen as akin to an art-form, something properly left in the assured hands of the gentleman. And it certainly has been left to them in this case. Aside from Root, every out-and-out batter in the squad is public-school educated.

In short: upper-class domination of the highest echelons of English cricket has been entrenched to a quite extraordinary degree. In class terms, the current side is far less representative of the population that it purportedly ‘represents’ than was the equivalent side a century ago. The factors that have facilitated this elite capturing of cricket are complex but they certainly include: the decimation of support for sports in state schools; the sale, by cash-starved local councils, of the fields and pitches on which such sports can be played; and the decision of English cricket’s governing body to sell broadcast rights to pay-to-view providers with the consequence that only once, in the last twenty years, has a test cricket series been free to watch by whomsoever wanted to do so.

In all of this there is also an important reminder for us, as sociologists, about the causes of social inequality. Significant recent studies of classed exclusion in the UK, such as Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison’s 'The Class Ceiling', have emphasised what the authors call ‘the misrecognition of merit’. In other words: the fact that certain ways of speaking, dressing or comporting oneself, associated with an elite habitus, tend to be read as tacit indicators of the capability or potential of the person in question. The consequence is that candidates from working-class backgrounds are often excluded from opportunities or from promotions and, in a more general sense, are made to feel unwelcome in elite professional settings.

No doubt that process plays its part in the reproduction of classed exclusions within the field of cricket as well. Yet because cricket is, as C.L.R. James called it, ‘a game of high and difficult technique’, it serves to demonstrate that (mis)perception is not necessarily the most significant causal factor in the reproduction of these exclusions. Bourdieu’s account asks us to reckon with a more uncomfortable truth. The classed inequalities that structure access to, and the opportunity to become practiced in, particular kinds of cultural activity, mean that those from privileged backgrounds will often be more proficient or more adept at those activities. It is not that they are (mis)perceived to be so; it is that they really are so. Inequalities are reproduced, under the skin, at the level of embodied competencies. In a such a way, even if unconscious bias and the misrecognition of merit were entirely eliminated, the fields of culture would continue to reflect and entrench class privilege.

Cricket scorecards no longer distinguish between the gentleman and the professional by according the former an honorific ‘Mr’. Players from different classes are no longer required to use different dressing rooms or to enter the field of play through different gates. Those symbolic ascriptions of merit have been eliminated. Yet the game, at its highest level, is more starkly unequal now than it was in the past. And this is because that inequality is reproduced many stages ‘back’, in the ways in which young people are enabled to, or prevented from, acquiring a familiarity with, and a practiced embodiment of, the skills required to succeed in the game. In that sense the crucial question is not a perceptual one. It is not about who is or is not perceived to have merit within a particular cultural field. It is, rather, a material one. It is a matter of who is, or is not, able to acquire and embody whatever skills are considered meritorious within the field of play.

First published: 20 November 2025

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