In recent years researchers have argued that in order to fully understand perceptual cognitive expertise in sports, representative tasks must be used to preserve the tightly coupled links between perception and action that experts exploit. Previously, tasks have been considered as representative or not, with little evidence existing to indicate the degree to which a task is representative enough. This thesis primarily aimed to investigate experimentally representative tasks in cricket batting and the degree to which a laboratory-based task of cricket batting was able to represent batters’ emergent perceptuo-motor behaviour for perceiving bowlers’ delivery length. A secondary aim was to re-evaluate perceptuo-motor behaviours thought to contribute to skilled performance and their development. In chapter 2 skilled batsmen’s foot movements were recorded in response to balls bowled to a range of lengths under in situ and video-based laboratory conditions. Kinematic analyses quantified decision-making skill and movement scaling. Analyses revealed the laboratory condition to have a high degree of fidelity. Skilled batter’s Foot movements were reliably replicated and differences were found compared to a novice group. In chapter 3, response mode, occlusion condition and skill level were compared on the representative laboratory test developed in chapter 2. Analyses identified that skilled performance was only aided by maintaining coupled responses under occluded conditions, whilst no differences were observed under un-occluded conditions. Skilled performers were also shown to possess greater anticipation skills compared with novices under both coupled and un-coupled conditions. In Chapter 4, the effects of manipulating information present in situ, through simulated ball flight, and fully simulated training aids were compared in a novel experimental paradigm. Skilled batsmen faced deliveries across a range of lengths from a bowler (in situ), from a bowling machine (simulated ball flight) and from a ProBatter simulator (fully simulated action and ball flight). Results showed that simulated ball flight condition resulted in foot movements that were closer to in situ than the fully simulated condition, suggesting that if present, the link between bowling action and ball flight needs to be tightly coupled. These results demonstrate for the first time that representative tasks must not be considered unilaterally as representative or not, but instead the degree of representativeness should be quantified and evaluated against the expert behaviour under investigation. Determination of the degree of representativeness would allow researchers to apply findings to the performance environment with greater knowledge of their potential impact.

This thesis investigates the England Visually Impaired Cricket Team, whose squad members comprise sixteen men aged 18-54, and their lived experiences' of playing visually impaired cricket. This is the first piece of research to examine elite visually impaired cricket and the first to explicitly analyse the social dynamics of any visually impaired sports team. Through an embodied theoretical approach, that accounts for the corporeal experience of impairment alongside the role of social institutions and discourse in the high performance culture of modern disability sport, this thesis establishes the significant aspects of this previously unexamined research 'site', both on and off the pitch. This study consisted of ten months of ethnographic fieldwork using participant observation and semi-structured interviews shaped by a new method of recording and eliciting data. To capture the participants' sensorial experiences of playing visually impaired cricket, 'soundscape elicitation', the process of composing auditory 'tracks' of the players' participation and then using these recordings during semi-structured interviews to prompt sensorial discussions, was utilised. This original and innovative method was central to the production of previously unexamined knowledge and is a significant methodological advancement in the wider field of sensory studies. The findings present a number of original contributions to knowledge regarding 'sporting bodies', the sensorial experiences of sport, and the construction of identity through disability sport. The participants' embodied experiences of playing visually impaired cricket reveal an alternative way of 'being' in sport and physical activity. However, it is the inescapable ocularcentric value of 'sight' that inhibits the resistive potential of the game. Instead of the presumed empowering experience, elite visually impaired cricket is disempowering for many participants due to the irreversible relationship of blind cricket institutions with mainstream cricketing bodies. Furthermore, a 'hierarchy of sight' based upon the official sight classification process emerges that highly values those players with the highest sight classifications and marginalises the blind players. All of these factors inform visually impaired cricket players’ construction of their own identities. Although many players view visually impaired cricket as a way of demonstrating their 'normality', it actually accentuates the impairment that they are attempting to dissociate from and is one of the few social situations where they are 'outed' as disabled or blind.

This study provides a representation of the lived transitional experiences of a group of student-cricketers on a passage toward professional cricket. Set in the local context of a university cricket academy, the investigation focused on players’ adoption of a cricketing role that they used in combination with their structured cricketing environment to explore what it might be like to be professional cricketers. The aim of the research, therefore, was to portray a culturally embedded process of identity-exploration through which a group of young men arrived at a conception of themselves as ‘cricketers’. The data on which the study is based have been drawn from research conducted over twenty seven months from November 2010 to March 2013 where I, as a researcher, became immersed in the research context as an active member of the participant group. The methodological approach of ethnography was used to obtain an insider’s account of the student-cricket experience as seen from the point of view of the actors involved. Application of traditional ethnographic techniques such as participant observation, note taking and unstructured, field-based ‘interviews’ provided the means through which situated, day-to-day experiences were captured and explored. What is presented, therefore, reflects some of the contextual responses to real-life situations experienced by the group and its individuals, mediated through a developing analytical interest in players’ identity engagements with their cricketing environment from the theoretical standpoint of ‘emerging adulthood’ (Arnett, 2000, 2004). Adding to the ethnographic accounts offered within this thesis, the study contributes a conceptual framework that plots players’ transitional pathways through the academy to share the key points of interaction that impinged on individual participants ‘finding their level’ in the game. Through contact and exposure to a cricketing way of life, players’ involvement with the academy saw their cricketing experiences intensify and their attachments to the game transform. This resulted in individuals either accepting or rejecting cricket based on what they came to know about themselves and the game, with the findings of the research helping to further understanding on how a group of ‘emerging adults’ engaged with the ‘project’ of their self-identities to reach a point of self-understanding on which to base prospective identity-decisions.

By the late-nineteenth-century, cricket had a well-established national narrative. Namely; that the game‘s broadly pre-industrial, rural, and egalitarian culture had been replaced by the 'gentlemanly‘ ethos of amateurism; a culture which encouraged cricket for its own sake and specific norms of 'moral‘ behaviour exemplified by idioms‘ such as 'it‘s not cricket‘. A century later, much of this narrative not only remained intact, it survived unchallenged. However, a regionally specific sub-narrative had emerged in relation to cricket outside of 'first-class‘ Test and County cricket. Cricket in the North was 'Working class‘, 'professional‘, 'commercialised‘, and played within highly 'competitive‘ leagues, while cricket in the South was 'middle-class‘, 'amateur‘, 'non-commercial‘, and played in non-competitive 'friendly‘ fixtures. Whereas cricket in the North has attracted a good deal of academic attention, there remains a paucity of contextualised academic research of cricket in the South. Due to assumed social and cultural similarities, the so-called 'friendly‘ cricket of the South remains subsumed within the national narrative. Whereas we now know a good deal about who played cricket, and why, in the North, we know little, if anything, of those who played cricket, why they did so, and under what circumstances, in the South. This thesis, which focuses on the County of Surrey, thus examines the social and cultural development of 'club‘ cricket in the South for the first time. In order to test the historical assumption that cricket in the South replicated the gentlemanly amateurism inherent to the game‘s national culture and historical discourse, this thesis shall not only examine the origins of these important cultural 'identities‘, but who was playing cricket, and under what social, environmental, economic, and cultural circumstances, in Surrey between 1870 and 1970. In basic terms, it will demonstrate that much of the historiography proves misleading, especially regarding the universality of non-competitive cricket. Moreover, this thesis will also establish that the introduction, implementation, and spread of non-competitive cricket was a class-specific and discriminatory ideology, which had close associations with the middle-classes‘ increasing insecurity and their migration to Surrey. The ideological basis upon which non-competitive cricket was based, was to have fundamentally negative repercussions relating to the game‘s cultural meaning and popularity, and the 're-introduction‘ of competitive league cricket to the South in 1968 may well have saved the sport from a slow and agonising extinction.