It’s a wonderfully English expression. We use it lightly, perhaps half-smiling, to suggest that something isn’t quite fair, quite decent, or quite in keeping with the better parts of our nature. Everyone knows what it means, even if we don’t stop to analyse it too closely. Yet, like many idioms, there’s a hidden weight being carried that perhaps does in fact bear a little analysis.  

At its heart, the phrase assumes that cricket stands for something more than a game. That it embodies a set of expectations about fairness, behaviour, and how you carry yourself when things are tense, disputed, or not going your way. In other words: this is how we do things properly. 

As we come into the Summer Term, cricket returns to its familiar place at the centre of school life for most of the prep boys. Whites appear again (some whiter than others). The cricket squares begin to look purposeful. There’s that particular summer soundscape too: leather on willow, polite applause, the odd frustrated sigh. If you’re really lucky, the sound of Pimm’s being poured… (Though perhaps not at school; apologies.) All of it feels reassuringly ‘right’. 

Cricket, perhaps uniquely among school sports, has always been a theatre that can provide a stage for character as much as for competition. It asks boys to manage long stretches of waiting, to accept decisions - sometimes ones that might feel baffling – to stand in the field concentrating on each ball for the one that will occasionally come their way, and to keep going when the game isn’t giving much back. It also has that curious moral dimension: the idea that you might “walk”, relinquishing your wicket, even if you could get away with not doing so. The distinction between what is allowed and what is admirable matters. 

There’s a line from Sir Henry Newbolt’s famous poem Vitaï Lampada - written in 1892 - that many of us may half-remember from our own schooldays: “Play up! play up! and play the game!”… It can sound a bit ‘square-shouldered’ and upright to modern ears - but at its best it’s not about blind stoicism or hollow heroics. It’s about courage and steadiness under pressure, about doing the right thing when it would be easier not to. And crucially, about doing so alongside others. 

This feels especially relevant for boys today. Not because they lack character but because the world offers relatively few obvious chances to practise it in small, low-stakes ways. Sport, and cricket in particular, still provides a testing ground where disappointment is real but temporary, where emotions can flare but pass, and where learning to lose well is every bit as important as learning to win. Significantly, cricket offers these things under a spotlight that shines on each individual’s contribution more than in most other team sports: the number of runs or wickets by each and every team member being rather starkly marked in the scorer’s book. 

Cricket isn’t a magic wand to turn boys into model citizens. But it does provide some profitable hunting grounds in which to pursue that particular quarry. It offers a subtle framework in which values are expected to be lived rather than lectured. A boy learns that patience is sometimes required. That not every outcome feels fair. That keeping one’s temper and showing respect cost nothing and earn quite a lot. 

So when we say something ‘just isn’t cricket’, we’re not really talking about a game at all. We’re discreetly pointing to an idea of decency. As we begin the Summer Term, that seems a good note on which to start: sleeves rolled up, the sun (occasionally) shining, and another chance to practise playing the game - properly.  

Tim Butcher
Headmaster