For pool and bar-billiards players, the formula is straightforward. You simply approach a player and ask, 'Is it winner stays on?' This traditional opening is both an enquiry about the local rules on turn-taking, which may vary from region to region and even from pub to pub, and an invitation to play the winner of the current game. The reply may be 'Yeah, coins down,' or 'That's right - name on the board.' This is both an acceptance of your invitation, and an instruction on the pub's system for securing the table, which may be by placing your coins on the corner of the table, or writing your name on a nearby chalkboard. Either way, it is understood that you will pay for the game, so there is no need for any embarrassing breach of the money-talk taboo. If the reply to your original question is simply 'Yes,' you may ask 'Is it coins down?' or 'Is it names on the board?'
Having completed the correct introductions, you may now stand around and watch the current game, gradually joining in the banter as you wait your turn. Further enquiries about local rules are the most acceptable way of initiating conversation. These usually begin with the same somewhat impersonal 'Is it...' as in 'Is it two shots on the black?' or 'Is it stick pocket or any pocket?' - rather than using anything so intimate as a personal pronoun. Once you are accepted as a player, the unwritten etiquette also allows you to make appropriate comments on the game. Well, actually there is only one entirely safe and appropriate comment you can make, particularly among male players, and this is to say 'Shot' when a player makes a particularly good shot. Perhaps to compensate, this one word is pronounced in a drawn-out fashion, as though it had at least two syllables: 'Sho-ot'. Other players may also tease and taunt each other over bad shots, but newcomers wisely tend to avoid making any derogatory remarks until they are better acquainted.
Sex Differences and the 'Three-emotions Rule'
There are some sex differences in the codes of conduct governing pub games, and indeed many sports and games played in other contexts. As a rule of thumb, males are supposed to adopt a strong, stiff-upper-lipped, manly approach to the game, both as players and as spectators. It is not done to jump about and exclaim over one's own or another player's luck or skill. In darts, for example, swearing at one's mistakes, and making sarcastic comments on those of one's opponents is allowed, but clapping one's hands in glee upon scoring a double-twenty, and excessive laughter on failing to hit the board at all, are regarded as 'girly' and inappropriate.
The usual 'three-emotions rule' applies. English males are allowed to express three emotions: surprise, providing it is conveyed by shouting or swearing; anger, also communicated in expletives; and elation/triumph, displayed in the same manner. For the untrained eye and ear, it can be difficult to distinguish between the three permitted emotions, but English males have no trouble grasping the nuances. Female players and spectators are allowed a much wider range of acceptable emotions, and a much more extensive vocabulary with which to express them. This often seems to happen - that one sex is required to be 'more English' than the other, in a certain context. Here, males are subject to more restrictions than females, but in other contexts - such as, say, the giving and receiving of compliments - the unwritten rules place more complex constraints on female behaviour. It may all balance out, but my suspicion is that, overall, the rules of Englishness are probably a bit harder on males than on females.
The Fair-play Rule
The English concern with fair play is, as we have seen, an underlying theme in almost all aspects of our life and culture, and in the context of sports and games, fair play is still - despite the rantings of the doom-mongers - an ideal to which we cling, even if we do not always manage to live up to it.
At the top national and international level, sport has become, for the English as for all other nations, a rather more cut-throat business, and there seems to be more focus on winning and on the exploits of individual superstar 'personalities' (a misnomer if ever there was one), than on high-minded notions of team spirit and sportsmanship. Until, that is, there is some accusation of cheating, unfairness, loutishness or unsporting behaviour, whereupon we all seethe with righteous indignation - or cringe with shame and embarrassment, and tell each other that the country is going to the dogs. Both reactions suggest that the sporting ethic, which the English are often credited with inventing, is still very important to us.
In Anyone for England, one of the many recent premature obituaries for English national identity, Clive Aslet bemoans the loss of all these gentlemanly ideals, claiming that even cricket, 'the game synonymous with the sporting ideal, has changed beyond recognition in terms of the spirit in which it is played.' But apart from the rather unseemly row between Ian Botham and Imran Khan in 1996, the worst sin of which he accuses the England team is that the players 'make little effort to cultivate an image of gentlemanliness through their dress.' He objects to the baseball caps, stubble, T-shirts and shorts worn by off-duty cricketers. He refers to the 'ungentlemanly tactics' of national players, without giving any examples, and then is 'shocked to learn from cricketing friends' that these are even being adopted at village-cricket level. Intimidating 'war-paint' and helmets, as seen in televised international matches, are sometimes worn; opposing batsmen, it seems, are no longer always clapped to the crease; and in 1996, the Woodmancote team, from Hampshire, was expelled from the National Village Cricket Knockout Tournament for being 'too professional'. The first two of these examples do not strike me as particularly shocking, and the third seems to indicate that, if anything, the old values of amateurism and fair play are very much alive and well in village cricket.
Even Aslet admits that people have been mourning the demise of this sporting ethic for at least a century - indeed, the obituaries started almost as soon as the Victorians invented the gentlemanly 'sporting ideal' in the first place. The English have a habit of inventing 'traditions' out of thin air, to suit the spirit of the times, and then almost immediately waxing mournfully nostalgic about them, as though they were a vital and now tragically dying part of our cultural heritage.
Which brings me to football. And the modern evil of football hooliganism, of course. Football violence is always wheeled out as Exhibit A by those who complain that the country is going to the dogs, that we have become a nation of louts, that sport isn't what it used to be, and so on. These complainers admittedly constitute quite a large proportion of the population, but that is an indication of our Eeyorish love of moaning and national self-flagellation, rather than evidence for the truth of our moans.
What all the mourners and moaners fail to understand is that football violence is nothing new. You know the well-worn joke about 'I went to a fight and a football match broke out'? Well, that's pretty much how football started. The game of football has been associated with violence since its origins in thirteenth-century England. Medieval football matches were essentially pitched battles between the young men of rival villages and towns. They involved hundreds of 'players', and were often used as opportunities to settle old feuds, personal arguments and land disputes. Some forms of 'folk-football' existed in other countries (such as the German Knappen and the Florentine calcio in costume), but the roots of modern football are in these violent English rituals.
The much more restrained, disciplined form of the game with which we are now familiar was the reformed pastime of the Victorians, but the violent traditions and rivalries have persisted, mainly among spectators, on the terraces and in the towns. Only two quite brief periods in English history - the inter-war years and about a decade or so following the Second World War - have been relatively free of football-related violence. Historically, these periods are the exception rather than the rule. So I'm sorry, but I cannot accept modern football hooliganism as evidence of a recent decline in sporting manners or values.