George Orwell was many things—an anti-totalitarianism, a master of plain prose, a chronicler of his age. But as I discovered while reading his 1944 essay "Raffles and Miss Blandish," he was decidedly not a cricket enthusiast. In fact, he dismissed it as "not a twentieth-century game," predicting its decline alongside the gentlemanly traditions it represented.
Eighty years later, from the vantage point of 2025, I can say with confidence: Orwell got this one spectacularly wrong.
"Cricket is not in reality a very popular game in England—it is nowhere so popular as football, for instance—but it gives expression to a well-marked trait in the English character, the tendency to value ‘form’ or ‘style’ more highly than success. In the eye of any true cricket-lover it is possible for an innings of ten runs to be ‘better’ (i.e. more elegant) than an innings of a hundred runs: cricket is also one of the very few games in which the amateur can excel the professional. It is a game full of forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune, and its rules are so defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business. When Larwood, for instance, practised body-line bowling in Australia he was not actually breaking any rule: he was merely doing something that was ‘not cricket’. Since cricket takes up a lot of time and is rather an expensive game to play, it is predominantly an upper-class game, but for the nation it is bound up with such concepts as ‘good form’, ‘playing the game’, etc., and it has declined in popularity just as the tradition of ‘don’t hit a man when he’s down’ has declined. It is not a twentieth-century game, and nearly all modern-minded people dislike it. The Nazis, for instance, were at pains to discourage cricket, which had gained a certain footing in Germany before and after the last war."
Excerpt from George Orwell’s 1944 essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” collected in Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays.
Orwell's central thesis was clear enough. Cricket, he argued, embodied a particularly English trait—the preference for style over substance, form over victory. It was, in his view, an upper-class anachronism destined to fade as modern sensibilities took hold. He noted that "nearly all modern-minded people dislike it" and pointed to the Nazis' efforts to suppress the game in Germany as evidence of its incompatibility with the contemporary world.
Yet here we are in the twenty-first century, and cricket hasn't just survived—it has thrived and transformed in ways Orwell could never have imagined.
Orwell Was Right (Partially)
To be fair, Orwell wasn't entirely off the mark. Cricket remains less popular than football in England, just as it was in 1944. The emphasis on "form" and "style" he identified hasn't disappeared either—there's still something deeply aesthetic about watching a perfectly executed cover drive or a graceful leg glance. I could watch Sachin Tendulkar play his trademark straight drive on loop the whole day and never tire of it, or breathe easy in the comfort watching Rahul Dravid's unshakeable composure at the crease. The spirit of the game, with its notions of "fair play" and "not cricket," continues to resonate.
But that's where the accuracy ends.
Transformation Orwell Couldn't Foresee
Consider Orwell's claim about cricket being predominantly an upper-class pursuit. He couldn't have anticipated that the game would become a global phenomenon, democratized across continents and cultures. He certainly couldn't have foreseen women's cricket rising to prominence—"gentleladies," now competing at the highest levels with skill and dedication.
Most significantly, Orwell's assertion that "in the eye of any true cricket-lover it is possible for an innings of ten runs to be 'better' than an innings of hundred runs" would make today's IPL players laugh. Try telling a franchise owner that elegance matters more than runs or wickets. Virat Kohli’s 8,000-plus T20 runs are compiled with a strike rate of 138; elegance is a bonus, not the currency. The IPL auction room does not reward technical merits divorced from runs. In the modern game, results matter—and they matter spectacularly.
The Professional Revolution
When Orwell wrote that cricket was "one of the very few games in which the amateur can excel the professional," he was describing a world that has vanished completely. As former English captain Andrew Flintoff observed, "Cricket today has changed, it no longer an amateur game. Look at some of the lads today, they are ripped. In our days we played the game and had pints of beer with the opposition. We had about nine more pints and play again."
Athletes like Virat Kohli have redefined what it means to be a cricketer. The casual amateur competing alongside professionals? Unthinkable. Today's cricketers maintain fitness standards that would have seemed absurd—perhaps even unseemly—to the gentlemen players of Orwell's era.
Cricket's Twenty-First Century Renaissance
If cricket wasn't a twentieth-century game, it has certainly become a twenty-first-century sensation. The advent of T20 cricket and the explosive popularity of the Indian Premier League have revolutionized the sport, creating a faster-paced, entertainment-driven format that appeals to audiences who might never sit through a five-day Test match.
The global reach is remarkable. Team USA hosting and participating in an ICC Cricket World Cup? Orwell would have thought it absurd. Yet it happened, a testament to cricket's expanding footprint.
Even Orwell's curious observation about Nazi Germany proves instructive. He noted that the Nazis "were at pains to discourage cricket, which had gained a certain footing in Germany." I was intrigued enough to investigate this claim, and discovered that, like so many of their other efforts, the Nazis failed here as well. Today, Germany boasts more than 350 cricket teams/clubs. The German Cricket Federation (Deutscher Cricket Bund) has been recognized by the ICC since 1999, governing a thriving cricket community.
Reviving Old World Nostalgia
But cricket's revival tells a larger, more intriguing story—one that Orwell, writing in 1944, could never have anticipated. What we're witnessing is India's remarkable ability to breathe new life into fading British institutions, transforming them from relics of empire into global phenomena.
"Reverse colonization" might be too harsh a term, but there's no denying the pattern. What fades in England catches Indian fancy, and then comes full circle when Indians make it popular not just in England, but globally. Cricket is perhaps the most spectacular example, but it's far from alone.
Consider Royal Enfield motorcycles—once cherished in Britain, the brand faded into obscurity before being acquired by India's Eicher Motors. Today, Royal Enfield is celebrated worldwide for its old-world charm and elegance, riding a wave of nostalgia that the British themselves had abandoned. Similarly, TVS Motor Company revived Norton Motorcycles, while Mahindra brought BSA Motorcycles back from the dead.
The trend extends beyond motorcycles. Tata Motors purchased Jaguar and Land Rover, transforming struggling British automotive icons into profitable global brands. Tata Consumer Products acquired Tetley tea. Reliance Brands Ltd. took over Himley's, the legendary toy store. Each acquisition represents shrewd business strategy—Indian companies recognizing the global market value and consumer appeal of British brands, acquiring proven technology and designs, or simply leveraging the international credibility that British heritage brands still command over their Indian counterparts. The cultural revival, if it can be called that, is more a profitable byproduct than a deliberate act of preservation.
Perhaps the most symbolically potent example is the East India Company itself. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British Crown took over the company's administrative and military control of India under the Government of India Act of 1858. The company was formally dissolved in 1874, but it remained a symbol of British colonial power and the abuses of imperialism in India.
In 2005, Indian born British entrepreneur Sanjiv Mehta acquired the dormant East India Company name and its rights. He relaunched the brand in 2010 as a luxury consumer brand with a London flagship store. For Mehta, purchasing the company was a symbolic act of "turning history upside down"—the once-colonized now owning the brand that symbolized India's colonial past.
Cricket fits perfectly into this pattern. The IPL didn't just create a new format; it reinvented the economics and entertainment value of the sport. It took a game that was declining in its birthplace and made it a global spectacle, complete with massive television audiences, celebrity ownership, and player salaries that would have seemed fantastical in Orwell's time. Indian cricket didn't reject the traditions of the game—it embraced them, modernized them, and exported them back to the world, including England.
As I began writing this piece, I expected it would become a rant—a passionate cricket fan's rebuttal to a literary giant. But something shifted as I worked through my thoughts. Can I truly look down upon Orwell's writings, or the man himself, simply because he didn't share my love for the game?
I guess not. Orwell wrote from his particular moment in history, shaped by the class dynamics and cultural tensions of wartime Britain. His observations about cricket revealed something true about English society in 1944, even if his predictions proved wildly inaccurate. It simply reminds us that even the sharpest observers have their blind spots. And sometimes, those blind spots reveal as much about their era as their clearest visions.
Perhaps that's the beauty of engaging with writers across time. We don't have to agree with everything they wrote. We can admire Orwell's clarity, his moral courage, his prescient warnings about totalitarianism—while simultaneously recognizing that his understanding of cricket's future was flawed.
