Melbourne, March 18: A new book about 20th-century reporting by author John Simpson says Hitler declared cricket as “unmanly” and tried to rewrite the laws of the game. Simpson cites the piece as appearing in the Daily Mirror in 1930. He says that Oliver Locker-Lampson, an MP, decorated wartime veteran, right-wing zealot and fervent admirer of Hitler, wrote an article under the headline “Adolf Hitler As I Know Him” on September 30, 1930, as the Nazis’ rise to power gathered pace.
According to the Times, Locker-Lampson describes how in 1923, shortly after the Munich putsch, he met some British officers who had been PoWs during WWI. By coincidence Hitler, then a lance corporal in the German Army, was recovering from his wounds in a nearby hospital. “He had come to them one day and asked whether he might watch an eleven of cricket at play so as to become initiated into the mysteries of our national game,” writes Locker-Lampson. “They welcomed him, of course, and wrote out the rules for him in the best British sport-loving spirit.”
According to Locker-Lampson, Hitler returned with his own team and challenged the British to a “friendly match”. Locker-Lampson infuriatingly failed to inform his readers who won, but we can assume that the British PoWs thrashed Hitler’s XI because he immediately declared the game insufficiently violent for German Fascists.
Locker-Lampson said Hitler had an ulterior motive for wanting to play the game: “He desired to study it as a possible medium for the training of troops off duty and in times of peace.” “He had conned over the laws of cricket, which he considered good enough no doubt for pleasure-loving English people. But he proposed entirely altering them for the serious-minded Teuton.”
He “advocated the withdrawal of the use of pads. These artificial bolsters he dismissed as unmanly and un-German ... in the end he also recommended a bigger and harder ball.”
Hitler’s angry contempt for cricket, his attempt to invade the rules and alter them in his own image, and his inability to comprehend the complexities of the sport all point to one, inescapable conclusion: he was out for a golden duck. He only faced one ball.
—ANI