Sporting the latest cricketing fashions: From the archive, 11 July 1921

The Australia team, at a Test match against England at Trent Bridge in 1921, also scrubbed up well. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

A dreadful doubt crosses the mind in connection with our various sports disasters of the last few years. Has it anything to do with dress? At least Shimidzu, the great Japanese lawn tennis player, who has the advantage of a detached view, has been suggesting that we are too much preoccupied with correct kit for our games and not enough with correct play.

Can there be anything in the suggestion? Some of us certainly can remember the days when even county cricket players were very much less particular about dress on the field than is the case now, when the flannels of professionals were much less immaculate, their boots much less "natty," and their hair much less nuttish than at present. The present writer has lived long enough to have seen a great amateur fielding in black boots; it may be doubted whether "W.G." himself would always have passed muster in this respect, and the old players troubled themselves little about pipeclay for their pads.

Even in minor cricket there has been a great change. A certain working-man's cricket team challenged a village eleven to a match, and received the reply, "Do your men play in flannels?" In the old days if you played cricket that sufficed; your clothes were your own concern.

It is the same in other sports. How many girls who will never wield the racket of a Lenglen are happy if they can achieve the Suzanne bandeau? Golfing girls think more of looking like Miss Leitch than of playing like her. At a Wimbledon meeting a great player wore a silk handkerchief round his forehead; immediately suburban courts were peopled with young men similarly adorned. And how many of the generation of golfers care as much for a correct swing as for the acquisition of a "plus four" get-up in knickerbockers and jackets?

Captains Warwick Windridge Armstrong (Australia) and Johnny Douglas (England) before a 1921 Test match. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

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