Never a Gentlemans Game

Compared with the controversies of contemporary cricket - riven as it is with match-fixing, gambling, cheating and national politics - most people think of the early days of Test cricket as a time of gentlemanly competition and camaraderie, with any disputes settled by Queensberry Rules over a glass of port. Not so.
Cricket between the 1870s and 1914 was fraught with exactly the same bitter, vicious and greedy bad behaviour as the current game. It was cricket in the raw, explored in d