Some years ago, while studying the ferment of near- revolutionary discontent that swept across industrial Britain in the 1840s - Marx and Engels were convinced that this was where the revolution would begin - I came across, in an official report, a suggestion from one government inspector that the dangerous, stroppy, newly urbanised working classes be taught cricket. A game with rules, played under a captain, taking place in a tightly defined space, channelling aggression. Sport as social control.