Stumped for Ideas

All over England there are Men in White anxiously staring at the leaden sky while the north wind freezes their fingers wondering whether there will be play today. One of England’s great gifts to a grateful world, the game of cricket met with studied indifference beyond the boundaries of Empire but inside the imperial realm enthusiasm was unlimited. Demotic English is saturated in the language of cricket to the extent that if we denied ourselves recourse to cricketing clichés many of us would struggle to express ourselves at all. Such scruples have never bothered the British advertising industry for whom cricketing metaphors were a constant source of inspiration especially in the distant days when England’s cricketers were able to compete with a sporting chance of actually winning. Genuine inspiration in these examples was in short supply with the exception of Rowntree’s Fruit Gums – one of the few products of its period that was consistently promoted via simple, clear and punchy graphics.