YP Letters: Boundary between sports just isn't cricket

NOT for the first time, Ian McMillan has produced a piece that I would love to have written myself (The Yorkshire Post, March 26).

However, it seems to have escaped Ian that the days of the football and cricket seasons are long gone as their boundaries are increasingly blurred.

Growing up during the early post war years, I recall that all thoughts of football were shelved after the last day of the Football League programme and cricket replaced football on the streets until late August. It was a moot point which was the national game.

Ian’s remarks on the autobiographical elements in the late Barry Hines’s early novel The Blinder about a boy torn between professional football and an academic career had me nodding in agreement.

The best schoolboy footballer I ever saw was a friend who, despite the attentions of numerous scouts, gave up the game and went to Oxford University.

The modest maximum wage which obtained at that time was probably responsible for professional footballers being unfairly regarded as “thick”.

I wonder how many inchoate novelists are now being lost to the filthy lucre of the Premier League.