Sit still and watch the cricket.
In 1912 appeared the picture, "At the Eton and Harrow Match." Here an "important lady" addresses deep square-leg, standing near the boundary, "Would you kindly move away? It's quite impossible for my daughter to see my nephew, who is batting."
First Officer (to very young Subaltern, who is packing his kit for South Africa): "What on earth do you want with all those polo sticks?"
Subaltern: "Well, I thought we should get our fighting done by luncheon-time, and then we should have the afternoons to ourselves and could get a game of polo!"
If cricket claims less notice in Punch's pages, it must not be taken to imply any lessening of his love. The reason is to be found in the richer field for satire and ridicule provided by other pastimes. The immense development of Association football as a spectacular game, and the wholesale importation of hireling players to represent a district to which they did not belong, found no favour with Punch. His picture of Football Fever in the Midlands on Saturday afternoon in 1892 is deliberately grotesque and hostile. By 1904 the achievements of the Dominions and of Wales in the Rugby game lend point to Punch's burlesque forecast of the "Football of the Future." International matches are to be "refereed" by well-known statesmen; Esperanto is to be spoken; and Great Britain is represented by a team of fourteen New Zealanders and one Welshman. In 1910 a weekly paper advocated weeping for men as "the true elixir of energy and the greatest of Nature's restoratives." This pronouncement was turned to good account in "A Cup Tie Episode," relating how a team, with three—love against them at half-time, turned the tables on their opponents after a copious outburst of tears. Again, when a daily paper in 1913 conducted a referendum amongst its readers to ascertain what subjects of public interest were insufficiently treated in its columns, Punch asserts that "to the Editor's question 465,326 readers replied, football; 235,473, golf; 229,881, flying; and 2, foreign politics." The burlesque snapshots published in the same year if reprinted to-day would hardly be an exaggeration of the latest inanities of the camera in the football field.
While Punch might plead guilty to an "insufficient treatment" of professional football, and glory in his guilt, he could not be charged with a similar neglect of golf. As a solace to the unsuccessful lady lawn-tennis player it is recommended, as early as 1894, in an audacious travesty of Goldsmith:—
When lovely woman tries to volley,
But finds that men refuse to play,
What charm can soothe her melancholy?