Cricket and National Identity in the

Postcolonial Age

Mention cricket, and some still think of the gentle game played on a village green
in England, where leather thuds against willow, slumbering spectators mutter
‘Good shot, sir’ and church bells toll in the middle distance . . . But this cricket –
and that England – is as outdated as the idea of Empire, and the game today is as
much about cable television, huge crowds at one-day internationals in Mumbai
or Islamabad, or floodlit Twenty20 games timed to maximise broadcast advertising
revenue.
Bringing together leading writers on cricket and society, this important new
book places cricket in the postcolonial life of the major Test-playing countries,
exploring the culture, politics, governance and economics of cricket in the
twenty-first century. It covers

• Cricket in the new Commonwealth: in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Caribbean

and India
• The cricket cultures of Australia, New Zealand and post-apartheid South
Africa
• Cricket in England since the 1950s

Cricket and National Identity in the Postcolonial Age is an original political and
historical study of the game’s development in a range of countries. Ideal for
students of sport, politics, history and postcolonialism, it provides accessible and
stimulating discussion of the major issues, including race, migration, globalisation,
neoliberal economics, religion and sectarianism and the media.

Stephen Wagg is Reader in Sport and Society at Roehampton University, UK.

He has written widely on the politics of sport, of the media, of comedy and of
childhood.
Cricket and National
Identity in the Postcolonial
Age
Following on

Edited by Stephen Wagg

First published 2005
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
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© 2005 editorial matter and selection, Stephen Wagg;

individual chapters, the contributors.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Stephen Wagg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–415–36348–9 (hardback) — ISBN 0–203–01460–X (ebook)
1. Cricket—Social aspects—Commonwealth countries. 2. Cricket—Political aspects—
Commonwealth countries. 3. Nationalism and sports—Commonwealth countries.
I. Wagg, Stephen.

GV927.5.S63C75 2005
796.358—dc22
2004030312

ISBN 0-203-01460-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0–415–36348–9 (Print Edition)

For Phil Crane, Mick Paget, Dave Makins and his
Pearl Harbour, Horace and Baz Suffolk

and for the memory of Steve Wilkinson

Cricket is not an English game any more. It has been subject to the influences of,
to name but a few, Islam, Indian politics, Partition, Tamil separatism, Marxist
writing, Rastafarianism, the New Zealand Prime Minister, the Bishop of Liverpool,
Bob Marley, King Dyall, Benazir Bhutto, aboriginal and Maori rights . . . the
question of trade embargo, the question of diplomatic relations, the pleasure of
drugs, the morality of liars, the morality of money, but also the matter of the
importance or otherwise of the rights of mankind to freedom in the face of the
forces of oppression. Cricket is not a simple game. It just started off that way.
Simon Barnes, The Times (London), 12 April 1990, p. 42
Contents

List of contributors xi
List of abbreviations xv

Introduction: Following on 1
STEPHEN WAGG

PART I
Cricket and the former dominions 7

1 Unity, difference and the ‘national game’: cricket and Australian

national identity 9
BRETT HUTCHINS

2 Kiwi or English?: cricket on the margins of New Zealand national

identity 28
GREG RYAN

3 ‘No one in Dolly’s class at present?’: cricket and national identity

in post-apartheid South Africa 48
JON GEMMELL AND JAMES HAMILL

PART II
Cricket in the New Commonwealth 75

4 Play together, live apart: religion, politics and markets in Indian

cricket since 1947 77
SHARDA UGRA

5 History without a past: memory and forgetting in Indian cricket 94

SATADRU SEN
x Contents
6 Cricket in ‘a nation imperfectly imagined’: identity and tradition
in postcolonial Pakistan 110
CHRIS VALIOTIS

7 Sri Lanka: the power of cricket and the power in cricket 132
MICHAEL ROBERTS

8 One eye on the ball, one eye on the world: cricket, West Indian
nationalism and the spirit of C. L. R. James 159
TIM HECTOR; COMPILED AND WITH EDITORIAL COMMENTARY BY
STEPHEN WAGG

PART III
Cricket in the Old Country 179

9 Calypso kings, dark destroyers: England–West Indies Test

cricket and the English press, 1950–1984 181
STEPHEN WAGG

10 ‘A carnival of cricket?’: the Cricket World Cup, ‘race’ and

the politics of carnival 204
TIM CRABBE AND STEPHEN WAGG

11 Sheffield Caribbean: the story of a Yorkshire cricket club 223

CHRIS SEARLE

12 Clean bowl racism?: inner-city London and the politics of

cricket development 233
NICK MILLER

13 The ambush clause: globalisation, corporate power and the

governance of world cricket 251
MIKE MARQUSEE

Index 266
Contributors

Tim Crabbe is Reader in Social and Cultural Studies in Sport at Sheffield Hallam
University in the United Kingdom. His research interests relate to notions
of ‘race’ and identity, crime and deviance, community and social exclusion
in the context of sport, leisure and popular culture. He is co-author of New
Perspectives on Sport and ‘Deviance’: Consumption, Performativity and Social
Control (Routledge, 2004) and The Changing Face of Football: Racism, Identity
and Multiculture in the English Game (Berg, 2001).
Jon Gemmell teaches Sociology and History at Kennet School, Thatcham, near
Reading in the United Kingdom. He is the author of The Politics of South
African Cricket (Routledge, 2004).
James Hamill lectures in Politics at the University of Leicester in the United
Kingdom. His research focuses upon South Africa’s post-1990 transition,
an area on which he has published for International Relations, The World
Today, Diplomacy and Statecraft and The Commonwealth Journal of International
Affairs.
Leonard ‘Tim’ Hector was a lecturer, writer, administrator and political activist
on the Caribbean island of Antigua. He died in 2002.
Brett Hutchins teaches in the School of English, Communications and
Performance Studies at Monash University in Australia. He is the author of
Don Bradman: Challenging the Myth (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and
has published several articles and chapters on the social and cultural dimen-
sions of sport in Australia. His current research interests are in social theory
and the media.
Mike Marqusee is an American writer and political activist who has lived in
London since the 1970s. His books include Anyone but England (Verso, 1994),
War minus the Shooting (Heinemann, 1996), Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali
and the Spirit of the Sixties (Verso, 1999) and, most recently, Chimes of Freedom:
The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art (New Press, 2003).
Nick Miller is the Partnership Development Manager for the School Sport
Coordinator Programme, based at Southfields Community College in
xii List of contributors
Wandsworth, south-west London in the United Kingdom. Having spent ten
years as a Sports Development Officer working in the inner London areas of
Westminster and Camden, he is now part of the British government’s initiative
aimed at improving physical education and sport in schools. Nick has been
involved in developing grass-roots cricket in London for the Middlesex and
Surrey boards and is himself a keen cricketer.
Michael Roberts is a Sri Lankan Australian whose secondary and university
education was in Sri Lanka, where he graduated in History at the University
of Ceylon at Peradeniya before going to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. He
taught at the University of Peradeniya from 1966 to 1976. He has been
teaching in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide
since 1977. He is now retired and serves as Adjunct Associate Professor. His
special interests are in cultural anthropology and historical sociology, and he
has published many articles and books on Sri Lanka.
Greg Ryan is a Senior Lecturer in history at Lincoln University, New Zealand.
His most recent book is The Making of New Zealand Cricket 1832–1914
(Routledge, 2004). As well as undertaking ongoing research into twentieth-
century New Zealand cricket, he has also published a number of articles on
Australasian rugby and edited Tackling Rugby Myths: Rugby and New Zealand
Society 1854–2004 (Otago University Press, 2005).
Chris Searle has taught in east London, Grenada, Mozambique, Sheffield,
Goldsmiths College of the University of London, and Canada. He has also
been a community worker and political activist. He is the author of a number
of books, including The Forsaken Lover: White Words and Black People
(Routledge), which won the Martin Luther King Award in 1972, and Pitch of
Life (Parrs Wood Press, 2001).
Satadru Sen teaches Indian history at Washington University in St Louis. He is
the author of Migrant Races: Empire, Identity and K. S. Ranjitsinhji (Manchester
University Press, 2004) and Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict
Society in the Andaman Islands (Oxford University Press, 2000). He also co-
edited (with James Mills) Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in
Colonial and Postcolonial South India (Anthem Press, 2004).
Sharda Ugra is a sports writer for India Today magazine and lives in Delhi.
She grew up in Bombay, the home of Indian cricket, and graduated in History
from St Xavier’s College there. She has reported on cricket now for 15 years,
starting out with Mid-Day, a city evening paper, before moving on to The
Hindu and its sister publication The Sportstar magazine. She is co-author, with
Ian McDonald, of Anyone for Cricket? Equal Opportunities and Changing Cricket
Cultures in Essex and East London, a 1998 report on the participation of ethnic
minorities in grass-roots cricket in the region.
Chris Valiotis is a PhD candidate in the School of History at the University of
New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He works on issues of identity and
 List of contributors xiii
diaspora. His current research deals with the construction of a Pakistani cricket
nationalism and transnationalism by numerous competing groups within
Pakistan and England.
Stephen Wagg teaches at Roehampton University in London. He has written
widely on the politics of sport, comedy and childhood, and is writing a book
on the politics of English cricket since 1945.
Abbreviations

ACB Australian Cricket Board

ACC Antigua Cricket Club
ANC African National Congress
ANZUS Australia, New Zealand and the United States
ATSIC Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission
BBC British Broadcasting Corporation
BCCI Board of Control for Cricket in India
BCCP Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan
BCCSL Board of Control for Cricket in Sri Lanka
BCL Barbados Cricket League
BJP Bharatiya Janata Party
CBC Ceylon Broadcasting Corporation
CBI Central Bureau of Investigation (in India)
CCA Ceylon Cricket Association
CCC Colombo Cricket Club
CENTO Central Treaty Organisation
COGOC Concerned Group of Cricketers
COSATU Confederation of South African Trade Unions
CRR Ceylon Rifle Regiment
ECB England and Wales Cricket Board
EEC European Economic Community
FDI foreign direct investment
FIFA Fédération Internationale de Football Association
FtF Fan the Flame (website of the late Tim Hector)
GCC Global Cricket Corporation; Georgetown Cricket Club
GDP gross domestic product
GEAR Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (in South Africa)
HR46 Hit Racism for Six
ICC International Cricket Council
IMF International Monetary Fund
JVP Janatā Vimukti Peramuna
lbw leg before wicket
LTTE Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
xvi List of abbreviations
MCB Middlesex Cricket Board
MCC Marylebone Cricket Club
MDC Movement for Democratic Change (Zimbabwe)
MKV Maharaj Kumar of Vizianagram
NCC Nondescripts Cricket Club
NESB non-English-speaking backgrounds
NRI non-resident Indian
NUS National University of Singapore
NWFP North-West Frontier Province
NZC New Zealand Cricket Inc.
NZCC New Zealand Cricket Council
NZRFU New Zealand Rugby Football Union
ODI one-day international
PCB Pakistan Cricket Board
PPP People’s Progressive Party (Jamaica)
RAF Royal Air Force
RDP Reconstruction and Development Programme (in South Africa)
SACB South African Cricket Board
SACOS South African Council on Sport
SACP South African Communist Party
SACU South African Cricket Union
SADACCA Sheffield and District Caribbean Association
SEATO South-East Asia Treaty Organisation
SLFP Sri Lanka Freedom Party
SNCS Stoke Newington Cricket School
SSC Sinhalese Sports Club
TCCB Test and County Cricket Board (in England)
UCB United Cricket Board of South Africa
UNP United National Party (Ceylon/Sri Lanka)
WAPDA Water and Power Development Authority (of Pakistan)
WICB West Indies Cricket Board
WSC World Series Cricket
Introduction
Following on
Stephen Wagg

In September 2004, the day after I began to write this introduction, the 51-year-
old Old Etonian Simon Mann was sentenced by a court in Zimbabwe to seven
years in jail for trying to buy arms with which to overthrow the government of
oil-rich Equatorial Guinea (Carroll and Meldrum 2004). A photograph on the
front of the London Guardian (11 September 2004) showed Mann offering a fairly
unambiguous ‘V’ sign to waiting cameramen. Mann, it turned out, was heir to the
Watney Mann brewing fortune and the son of George Mann, once an amateur
cricketer for Middlesex, who’d captained England on tour to South Africa in the
winter of 1948–9. The image of the bedraggled, khaki-clad Mann brandishing his
defiant two fingers was evocative. Mann was a link with a past, which – drawing
on an axiom of postcolonial study – survives into the present. Quite by accident,
he called up an apparently vanished world in which British merchant adventurers
took large parts of the world as their own, beating back the people who lived there
with often murderous force. And while Equatorial Guinea may itself be typical
of the kleptocratic regimes that have plundered the postcolonial state in Africa,
he was also a reminder that governments of the former colonial territories still
have to deal routinely with the depredations of the Western powers and their
agents. Indeed, these depredations are recognised in the widespread use of the
term ‘neocolonialism’ and in challenges to the appropriateness of the term ‘post-
colonial’ itself: Robert Young, for example, prefers ‘tricontinental’ – referring to
Latin America, Africa and Asia (2001: 4–5). Finally, Mann’s lineage, widely
remarked on in the British press, drew attention to the historic link between
the British Empire, the English upper middle classes and the game of cricket.
Many colonial subjects were taught to play this game, often as part of a frequently
invoked ‘civilising mission’. Cricket is quintessentially the imperial game
(Sandiford and Stoddart 1998). It remains an identifiable element in the national
cultures of many ex-British territories and it is the nature of the part played by
cricket in the forging by these various countries of a new, independent national
identity that is the subject and purpose of this book.
2 Stephen Wagg
Cricket and the postcolonial
This book is clearly an attempted contribution to the literature on postcolonial
culture. In this context it explores the relationship between national identity and
an important and, originally, imported cultural activity in countries that were
once variously territories within the British Empire. That empire, as is widely
acknowledged, once comprised one-fifth of the world’s land mass and one-quarter
of its population. The process of dismantling this and other European empires
began after the Second World War, and the period between then (1945) and the
present is, generally speaking, the chosen time span of the chapters that follow.
So, the book deals with the postcolonial in the following specific sense: it covers
the postcolonial period and thus the time during which political self-government
was established and, in tandem with this, an independent national identity was
sought.
There is, of course, a prodigious and ever-growing literature on the post-
colonial. Much of it is in the realm of theory and takes the form, as so often in the
social sciences and humanities, of academics writing essentially about what other
academics write about the postcolonial. Those leafing through this (substantial)
section of the postcolonial canon may occasionally be tempted to endorse what
the Canadian singer Leonard Cohen told a music journalist in 1988: ‘As you get
older, you get less willing to buy the latest version of reality’ (de Lisle 2004: 4). In
one intermittently tortuous essay, the influential writer Stuart Hall once accused
another (equally influential) contributor to the postcolonial debate of ‘a desire to
out-theorise everyone else’ (1996: 249) – a charge which, in this field of textual
wrangling and rising opacity of language, almost anyone could justifiably level at
almost anyone else. This part of the postcolonial argument seems to be confined
almost wholly to academics.
Much of the debate over the postcolonial is contoured by postmodernism
and there are therefore frequent invocations of the death of ‘grand narratives’,
the evasiveness of meaning and, importantly, of the crucial need for formerly
colonial subjects to speak for themselves. The noted rhetorical question of the
Bengal-born, American-based academic Gayatri Spivak – ‘Can the subaltern
speak?’ – has greatly informed argument on this latter issue. Rather in the manner
of Jean Baudrillard’s enigmatic claim that the Gulf War of 1991 ‘never happened’,
Spivak’s remark has launched a thousand conference papers, not to mention a
new discrete field of academic enquiry known as subaltern studies. As Leela
Gandhi observed, ‘it is postcolonial studies which has responded with the greatest
enthusiasm to Spivak’s “Can the subaltern speak?” Utterly unanswerable, half
serious and half parodic, this question circulates around the self-conscious scene
of postcolonial texts, conferences and conversations’ (1998: 2). For good or ill,
however, this book has avoided taking up ‘utterly unanswerable’ questions.
‘Subalterns’ or not, a number of its writers are nationals of the countries of which
they have written. Others are not. All of them share, however, the assumption
widely held in postcolonial studies that in all the ex-colonies and dominions the
imperial past strongly informs the present: independence day was not – and could
 Introduction 3
not be – some cultural ‘year zero’ (ibid.: 6). Indeed, the continued presence and
importance of cricket in these societies attests to that. The cricket cultures of the
world are the product both of imported imperial practices and of the indigenous
response to them. As the Caribbean Marxist C. L. R. James observed, ‘The British
tradition soaked deep into me was that when you entered the sporting arena you
left behind the sordid compromises of everyday existence. Yet for us to do that we
would have had to divest ourselves of our skins’ ([1963] 2000: 66).
It is ironic, then, that postcolonial writing and debates have thrown up almost
no reference to sport. Huge recent introductory texts such as those by Young
(2001), Ashcroft et al. (1995) and Williams and Chrisman (1993) carry no men-
tion of sport, although these books are 400, 500 and 500 pages long respectively
and, as John Bale and Mike Cronin recently observed, sport is ‘one of the most
globalized and commonly shared forms of human activity’ (2003: 2). This is
plainly because postcolonial debates are concerned almost wholly with literature
and hardly at all with physical activities such as sport. Thus, for example, discus-
sion of postcolonial India may concentrate on novels such Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children (whose title is a direct reference to the granting of Indian
independence), even though, as chapters in this book make clear, cricket has had
a far greater purchase on the popular imagination of Indian society than Rushdie
or any other writer. Similarly, it is difficult to think that any Australian novelist
or poet could be accorded a state funeral on the scale of the one staged for the
ex-Test cricketer Sir Donald Bradman in 2001.
Among the few academics to recognise, and to try to remedy, the lack of
interest hitherto in the relationship between sport and the postcolonial are
John Bale and Mike Cronin, whose edited collection Sport and Postcolonialism
appeared in 2003. In their introduction they prescribe three avenues of inquiry
for researchers: the ‘when’ questions – that is, ‘[c]hronologically, what should
we consider as postcolonial in relation to sport?’; the ‘what’ questions, dealing
with the different forms that sport has taken in postcolonial culture; and the
‘how’ questions, which relate to method. This method will, among other things,
entail ‘emphasizing aspects of colonial relations between the colonizer and the
colonized; providing alternative readings of conventional colonial wisdoms and
dominant meanings . . . [and] displaying awareness of resistance to colonization
in texts written during and after the generally accepted period of colonialism’
(Bale and Cronin 2003: 3–7). This book, it is hoped, complies at least in part
with these recommendations. It is a book primarily about history, politics
and culture, and looks variously at the place of cricket in those ex-British
territories that are today the game’s principal international exponents. In this
regard it is hoped that the book will add to the small but growing literature on
cricket, politics and nationhood. Pre-eminent in this literature is C. L. R. James’s
often autobiographical polemic on Caribbean cricket, Beyond a Boundary ([1963]
2000), coupled with Hilary Beckles’s exhaustive two-volume political history of
cricket in the West Indies (1999a, b); there is Mike Marqusee’s delightful
dissection of English cricket in its relation to class, race and empire (1994, 1998)
and, more recently, Jon Gemmell’s excellent analysis of the politics of South
4 Stephen Wagg
African cricket (2004). (Mike and Jon are both contributors to this volume.)
There is also, as mentioned earlier, the important collection of essays assembled
by Keith Sandiford and Brian Stoddart in 1998 which examine cricket as an
imperial phenomenon (Sandiford and Stoddart 1998). But a broad examination
of cricket’s postcolonial progress has so far not been written. It is as well, however,
to note right at the beginning that this progress has been influenced at least as
much by factors of globalisation as by postcolonial factors – that is, factors, be they
political, economic, cultural . . ., that derive specifically from colonial heritage.
It is a commonplace, for example, that Australian society is no longer run, as
in the 1950s, by an Anglophile elite that since the Second World War, it has
drawn many of its immigrants from southern Europe or the Pacific Rim; and that
it enjoys a particularly vibrant national identity-through-sport. Likewise, recent
developments in Caribbean cricket seem to have been more affected by neo-
liberal policies urged by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
and by the spread of ‘American’ consumer culture than it has by colonial residues.
Similarly, the liberalising of the Indian economy in the 1990s has greatly affected
cricket culture there. And so on.
Central to each chapter, then, are questions of national identity. The chapters
are arranged as follows. The book is in three parts. The first deals with the societies
that constituted the ‘white’ dominions within the British Empire. These were
essentially settler colonies, governed by European settlers and their descendants,
indigenous ethnic groups having been repressed and disenfranchised. These
territories have enjoyed effective independence since the beginning of the
twentieth century. In this part of the book, Brett Hutchins traces the origins
of cricket in Australia in the nineteenth century and explores the relationship
between cricket, politics and national identity in post-Second World War
Australia. Much of his analysis is organised around the life and death of Sir
Donald Bradman, leading Australian cricketer between the 1920s and the 1940s
and frequently claimed to be Australia’s one national hero. Greg Ryan then
examines the fitful progress of New Zealand cricket in the second half of the
twentieth century and probes, in particular, the efforts of the New Zealand cricket
fraternity to maintain a significant place in the national consciousness in the
face of formidable competition from the All Blacks rugby team and the exploits
of the mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary. Finally in Part I, Jon Gemmell and
James Hamill look at the politics of South African cricket after apartheid,
concentrating in particular on efforts to bring about a team that faithfully reflects
the ‘racial’ composition of contemporary South African society. It might be
argued, with some justification, that the ‘postcolonial’ period in South Africa
should refer only to the years since 1994, when the constitution was rewritten and
free elections held.
The second part of the book covers the cricket-playing countries of what is
usually termed the ‘New Commonwealth’, inhabited principally by people of
brown or black skin and granted independence during the post-Second World
War period. Here there are five chapters. First, Sharda Ugra discusses the politics
of Indian cricket, documenting its progress from colonial pastime to the national
 Introduction 5
popular cultural obsession that it is today. She analyses Indian cricket in relation
both to the sectarian strife that has characterised Indian society since the
partition of India in 1948, and was heightened by the rise in the 1990s of the
Bharatiya Janata (Hindu Nationalist) Party (BJP) and to the adoption of neo-
liberal economics – again, enthusiastically promoted by the BJP. Satadru Sen also
contributes an elegant chapter on Indian cricket culture, which examines the
changing place of memory in this culture and talks insightfully about cricket and
the ‘new’ postmodern India, brought about by liberalising economic reforms, the
growth of televised and one-day cricket, and increased use in India of the Internet.
The next chapter, by Chris Valiotis, discusses the politics of Pakistani cricket,
addressing the paradox of how the Pakistan team’s successes have been achieved
in spite of a series of scandals and controversies in the country’s domestic cricket.
This is followed by a detailed political history of cricket in Sri Lanka by Michael
Roberts. Part II closes with an essay on the political journey of West Indian
cricket compiled from the writings of Leonard ‘Tim’ Hector. Tim Hector died
not long after he agreed to write for the book, so I have compiled the chapter
for him posthumously, drawing on the writings he had published on the Internet.
In these writings Tim was particularly acute about the ravages of neo-liberal eco-
nomic policies on the Caribbean and the consequences for cricket there.
The final part of the book looks at cricket in relation to post-imperial England.
Here, first, I examine the fluctuating descriptions of Caribbean cricketers in the
British sports press between the 1950s and the 1980s. During this time, of course,
West Indian migrants moved from being (comparatively) welcome settlers with
dual citizenship to being a purportedly menacing presence, bringing crime and
rioting to British streets. The British Nationality Act of 1981 effectively pulled
up the legislative drawbridge on those Caribbean people seeking a new life in
the United Kingdom. This, to a significant degree, is reflected in the reporting
of Test matches between England and the West Indies during the period. Next,
Tim Crabbe and I discuss the contradictions in the invocation of carnival that
accompanied the staging of the World Cup by the England and Wales Cricket
Board in 1999. Chris Searle then provides an account of the struggles of Sheffield
Caribbean Cricket Club, founded in the 1950s and making its way in conditions
perhaps surprisingly adverse for a city said by the British press in the 1980s to
be the capital of ‘the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire’. The following
chapter, by Nick Miller, is based on his experience as a sport development officer
in London and examines the progress of initiatives to combat racism and widen
participation in cricket in the metropolitan area. Finally, Mike Marqusee dis-
cusses the contemporary governance of cricket in relation to globalisation,
arguing that control of cricket in the era of globalisation has drifted away from
Lord’s towards entrepreneurs on the South Asian subcontinent and other
powerful interests such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Greater efforts
will be made, he anticipates, to ‘break’ cricket in the United States.
This book, as I have indicated, is global in its reach and its authors are scattered
far and wide. I should like to thank Tim Chandler, Paul Dimeo, Jon Gemmell,
Gideon Haigh, Malcolm Maclean, Mike Marqusee, Jim Mills, Satadru Sen,
6 Stephen Wagg
Rob Steen and Sharda Ugra for help in bringing them together. Jon Gemmell,
James Hamill and Alan Bairner were also kind enough to read and comment on
drafts of some sections of the book.

References
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen (eds) (1995) The Post-Colonial Studies
Reader, London: Routledge.
Bale, John and Cronin, Mike (eds) (2003) Sport and Postcolonialism, Oxford: Berg.
Beckles, Hilary McD. (1999a) The Development of West Indies Cricket, vol. 1, The Age
of Nationalism, London: Pluto Press; Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies
Press.
Beckles, Hilary McD. (1999b) The Development of West Indies Cricket, vol. 2, The Age
of Globalization, London: Pluto Press; Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies
Press.
Carroll, Rory and Meldrum, Andrew (2004) ‘Coup plot leader gets seven years’, Guardian
(London), 11 September.
de Lisle, Tim (2004) ‘Who held a gun to Leonard Cohen’s head?’, Guardian (London),
17 September.
Gandhi, Leela (1998) Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Gemmell, Jon (2004) The Politics of South African Cricket, London: Routledge.
Hall, Stuart (1996) ‘When was “the postcolonial”? Thinking at the limit’, in Iain
Chambers and Lidia Curti (eds) The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided
Horizons, London: Routledge, pp. 242–60.
James C. L. R. ([1963] 2000) Beyond a Boundary, London: Serpent’s Tail.
Marqusee, Mike (1994) Anyone but England: Cricket and the National Malaise, London:
Verso.
Marqusee, Mike (1998) Anyone but England: Cricket, Race and Class, London: Two Heads.
Sandiford, Keith and Stoddart, Brian (1998) The Imperial Game: Cricket, Culture and
Society, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Williams, Patrick and Chrisman, Laura (eds) (1993) Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial
Theory, Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Young, Robert J. C. (2001) Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Part I
Cricket and the former
dominions
1 Unity, difference and the
‘national game’
Cricket and Australian national
identity1
Brett Hutchins

The political character of cricket and nation is conflicted. At different times the
game has demonstrated the capacity for both liberation and repression; bound up,
for example, in both the cause of West Indian self-government and the enforced
racial segregation of the South African apartheid regime (James [1963] 1986;
Booth 1998). It is a sport that unifies and divides, leads and follows, is ahead of its
time, of its time and behind the times. As Hall (1985) reminds us, however, unity
does emerge from the cacophony of representations and stories that create the
world we live in. Dominant or preferred readings do develop in relation to specific
frameworks of history and culture. In the case of Australian cricket, the picture
that comes into view is one of social conservatism, of a sport that shows a limited
desire to shake the vestiges of a past that is intimately connected to the British
Empire. It is a proudly traditional sport that emerged from an imperial age and
appears reluctant to transcend the social and cultural boundary markers that
defined this bygone era.
The political character that I describe has not precluded the game from pio-
neering new sporting forms and practices. McKay and Miller (1991) pointed out
over a decade ago that cricket, in the guise of the one-day revolution of the 1970s,
was at the centre of a far-reaching commodification process that fundamentally
altered the economic practices and institutional structures of Australian sport. It
was a revolution that sat comfortably alongside the ascendancy of neo-liberalism
in official political forums, the decline of the welfare state, and the spread of
individualist ideologies and technologies. It is in the social arena that cricket
has shown itself to be at best inattentive, or at worst stubbornly resistant, to the
ebb and flow of change. The political impacts of Aboriginal self-determination,
multiculturalism and second-wave feminism have not passed the game by com-
pletely, but other sports such as the various Australian football codes, athletics
and basketball have coped better with the challenges posed by them. This is
a curious situation, as it is cricket that has been most successfully modelled as
the ‘national game’. Geographically, cricket has achieved a national spread; it
is played in centres across the length and breadth of the country. In social and
cultural terms, however, it has fallen short of welcoming and including all those
groups and communities that constitute the nation.
10 Brett Hutchins
The aim of this chapter is to provide a critical commentary on cricket’s
relationship to politics in Australia. Those who officially represent the game
continue to believe that sport and politics should remain separate, a stance
defended as recently as the 2003 World Cup (an issue that is discussed later). As
Harms (2002–3) pinpoints, this is another example of the ‘establishment’ ruse
that conservative politics is life – the ‘natural’ state of order – while critical or
radical politics is ‘politics’ and to be resisted. Political power lies in the inter-
section between official institutional contexts and the ‘everyday’, the ‘popular’; to
pretend otherwise is to ignore both historical experience and the demands of
political citizenship. Therefore, both formal and informal political matters are
examined, from government involvement in the game through to the people who
watch and play.
In completing this chapter I owe a debt to historians such as Cashman (1984,
1994, 1995, 1998), Haigh (1993, 1997, 1998, 2001) and Mandle (1973, 1976,
1977, 1982), whose research makes my job easier. I bring to the party my own
work on Australian national mythologies and the champion cricketer Sir Donald
Bradman (1908–2001) (Hutchins 2002). ‘The Don’ is an inescapable figure when
examining cricket and/or nation given his dominance of the Australian game and
the cottage industry that has been built around his memory. He is used here to
coordinate my examination. The beginning of each section, under the headings
of ‘History and nation’, ‘England, Australia and politics’ and ‘Gender, race and
ethnicity’, supplies a snapshot of media reaction to his death. Of concern are the
nationalist narratives that featured in the coverage, with these connecting to the
issues then examined. This is followed by a discussion of the relevant issues that
moves across and between decades and eras, designed to provide a compelling case
about the political character of a sport that emerged from empire and has not
moved far outside this framework in the contemporary age.
A short note is required on Don Bradman for those not intimately familiar with
his story. Australia’s greatest cricketer, he passed away in his Adelaide home on
25 February 2001, aged 92. He has been described as Australia’s one national hero,
is referred to simply as ‘the Don’ by many, and was once described by the current
prime minister, John Howard, as ‘the greatest living Australian’. Biographers and
commentators have alluded to Einstein, Mozart, Keats and Shakespeare in
measuring his skill. Bradman’s first-class playing career spanned the years 1927 to
1949. He continuously broke batting records, finishing with the unsurpassed and
totemic Test average of 99.94 runs per innings. He captained the national side,
never losing a series. In retirement he received a knighthood and a Companion
of the Order of Australia, and served as chairman of the Australian Cricket Board
(ACB). International Who’s Who named him as one of only two Australians among
the top 100 people who did the most to shape the twentieth century.2 He is also
one of the few sportspeople in the world to have a museum, the Bradman Museum
in Bowral, New South Wales, dedicated to his memory. In sum, he is an icon of
Australian sport and culture.
 Australian national identity 11
History and nation
The linking of representations to ideals of nation and national identity is deeply
embedded within contemporary ways of thinking. News stories reporting
Bradman’s death asserted that he was Australia’s greatest-ever sportsman, the
world’s greatest cricketer, Australia’s most notable hero and the greatest
Australian of the twentieth century. The vital feature of these hyperbolic reports
was the implication that he was somehow a hero for all Australians and that these
outpourings had the consent of the entire nation. This manufactured unity
featured in claims that he was a hero, genius and the embodiment of the ideal
Australian. The then governor-general, William Deane, told us that Bradman
‘was a man who embodied the best of the Australian spirit – a love of life, a love
of sport and the ability to bring out the enthusiasm in all who knew him’ (Sir
Donald George Bradman Memorial Service 2001). Readers, listeners and viewers
were assured that Bradman’s death would not diminish his legend and that his
stature as a national hero had moved from unquestioned in life to untouchable
in death.
The national unity that was assumed in these responses highlights a dominant
narrative of Australian history. Submerged or smothered under the imputed unity
and uniformity are difference and diversity. A genuinely national embrace and
romance with cricket appears to have been long taken for granted by many of
those who play, write and comment on the game. A by-product of this attitude is
a reluctance or failure to acknowledge those groups and individuals historically
excluded from the field of play. For example, at the turn of the twentieth century,
cricket reflected the policy of racial exclusivity that was at the heart of the consti-
tution agreed upon by the states and that confirmed Federation in 1901. It was a
white man’s sport played in an outpost of empire. Nonetheless, as Mandle (1976)
details, alongside the motifs of the bush, goldfields and city, cricket played an
important role in the formation of an Australian national identity for those lucky
enough to be recognised as legitimate members of the nation.
Cricket came to be seen as the national game during the nineteenth century.
Football in its many variations, swimming, rowing, tennis and athletics were
vehicles for national pride, but cricket most clearly announced the imperial
bond and offered the first chance for a nascent Australian nation to match itself
against the mother country. Australian teams started recording victories against
English XIs from the mid-1870s. These victories were accompanied by erosion
in deference towards English touring sides. As Sissons and Stoddart (1984: 41)
report, Plum Warner, the leader of the 1903–4 English tour of Australia, believed
the behaviour of Australian spectators to be loutish and ill-mannered. After
enduring a boisterous Ballarat crowd, he made the suggestion that some vocal
young males be caned in order to discourage them from growing into ‘barrackers’,
the scourge of touring sides then and now. On the field, success against English
sides hints at the young nation’s growing confidence. At the end of 1899, England
had won 26 Test matches to Australia’s 20 (11 Test series to Australia’s 6).
However, from 1901 to 1926, Australia registered 27 victories to England’s 16
(7 series wins to England’s 5).
12 Brett Hutchins
A unique feature of cricket in Australia is that it achieved the appearance of
unifying the nation prior to Federation. National teams were officially competing
from 1877.3 In taming the ‘tyranny of distance’, plotted by Blainey (1966) as a
defining feature of Australian history, cricket was a popular activity played in both
city and country areas and in all states. This was unusual when compared to the
nation’s football codes, in which loyalties were fractured from state to state and
remain so to this day. As the travails surrounding the consummation of Federation
demonstrate, getting the states to agree on uniform arrangements over the
distances encompassed by the great southern land was a major feat.
In conjunction with cricket’s almost spiritual connection with empire during
the nineteenth century, its appeal may be understood through its easily under-
stood spectacle and the unspoken message that accompanied the playing of the
game every summer across the country – in spite of the distances separating
communities, ‘we’ have something in common. This is an idea that fits well with
Anderson’s concept of the ‘imagined community’. Anderson (1991) describes the
‘natural’ feeling of solidarity that accompanies routine activities such as reading
the daily newspaper, or in this instance playing a game with a bat and ball. The
meaning and significance of such mundane acts are increased exponentially by
thousands of other people, far away, whom you may never meet, having the same
interests and doing the same thing. The act of play becomes both physical reality
and collective cultural expression. During the nineteenth century, Australia was
a place where the need for ‘togetherness’ and the subsequent search for shared
experience between white communities proved especially fervid. A small popu-
lation – about 3 million by the late 1880s – was dispersed across an enormous
island continent, with communities isolated from one another by limited commu-
nications and transport infrastructure. News from afar was slow, infrequent and
often stale upon arrival, with this situation only gradually improving after the
introduction of the telegraph in the 1870s (Blainey 1966: 225). Further historical
research on the spread of the game in Australia and its regional variations is
needed in order to understand the divisions and nuances that comprised the
‘togetherness’ perpetuated by cricket.
The point has already been made that the historically dominant skin colour
in Australia is white. The gendered character of the nation is masculine – in
part, a consequence of an imbalance that saw men outnumber women for the first
125 years of British settlement (Blainey 1966: 170). 4 The sporting field proved
fertile ground for the cultivation of the ‘Australian type’, a mythical figure defined
by a masculine, Anglo-Celtic and intensely nationalistic character (Turner 1993).
The origins of the type are thought to lie in the 1890s, a period during which,
according to Palmer (1966), a distinctive Australian tradition and impulse
developed. The ‘type’ was measured in the military theatre of the Sudan and the
Boer War, appraised at Oxford and Cambridge, and, significantly, put to test in
cricket and sculling (White 1981). Ward’s ([1958] 1989) famous thesis about the
forging of the national character by the ‘Australian legend’, the tough, taciturn,
independent, itinerant male rural worker who preferred the social company of his
mates to that of women and his wife, helped to disseminate and popularise the
 Australian national identity 13
image of the ‘typical’ Aussie bloke. This is an effigy that features prominently in
contemporary Australian television drama and beer and truck advertisements,
and has resonance when observing the steely-eyed demeanour of Australian Test
captain Steve Waugh, and the rugged assuredness of former master batsman David
Boon. A difficulty with celebrating this image, besides the inferior status awarded
to men who fail to live up to the ideal, is the inevitable subordinate role of women
and women’s cricket, an issue that is taken up in an upcoming section.
In continuing the theme of difference that lies submerged within narratives
of national unity, a brief examination of participation and spectatorship statistics
in Australia is worthwhile. These reveal the historical legacy of what has been
discussed. Many of those who make up the nation do not necessarily play or watch
the ‘national game’. In 1996–7, according to a national survey conducted by
Sweeney Sports Research Consultants (1997), cricket ranked only 17th in terms
of sporting participation, well behind swimming, tennis, golf and cycling.5 Of
those who stated that they played cricket, males outnumbered women by a ratio
of 5:1. Cricket was most popular as television viewing, with 54 per cent of respon-
dents saying they watched games. Matches televised are mostly international
fixtures, with contests between state sides being comparatively unpopular both on
television and with paying spectators. Interestingly, a much closer male–female
breakdown of 5:4 was reported in television viewing, suggesting that while the
game is popular with both men and women as a media spectacle, the culture of
participation is not as inclusive. Nonetheless, this leaves over 40 per cent of the
survey respondents neither watching nor playing the summer sport. Even
conceding the contestability of survey statistics, this leaves the national game
looking more like a sectional pursuit, albeit one that is reasonably popular on
television.
The question is, where does the compulsion to claim cricket as a source
of national unity come from? The answer arguably lies in a desire for national
mythologies that offer steadfast ontological security: the ‘psychological state
that is equivalent to feeling “at home” with oneself and the world’, or the nation
as it may be (Cassell 1993: 14; Giddens 1984: 50). Like other settler societies,
Anglo-Australia lacks such stories, especially when compared to many European
countries with comparatively lengthy histories, dense mythologies and ‘the
stories, the tunes, the images and the names of heroic ancestors’ that award their
national identities the appearance of naturalness and authenticity (Turner 1994;
Bauman 2000: 81). Similarly, the Aboriginal community have ‘the dreaming’ and
a complex range of rituals to explain their presence and spirituality. White
Australia has limited material with which to fashion a history that naturalises
the nation as ‘home’. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offer up an array
of colourful explorers, motley convicts, rebellious prospectors and recalcitrant
bushrangers, but precious little that clearly announces an Australian identity
to the world. The Anzac experience of the First World War, read as a story of
sacrifice and courage, has gone closest to achieving the status of a foundation
myth. Spoilsports have rightly questioned the celebration of the landing at Anzac
Cove in 1915, given that it involved the death of at least 7,000 Australian soldiers
14 Brett Hutchins
and that celebrating it runs the risk of glossing over the ugly realities of warfare
(Buchanan and James 1998–9). In the canon of Anglo-Australian stories it is the
indomitable Bradman in the 1930s and cricket – the ‘national game’ before the
nation even existed – that come most readily to mind after the Anzacs. Cricket
consistently announced Australia as an independent and successful country to the
world, or at least the Empire. Australia needs cricket and the figures of Victor
Trumper, Bradman, Keith Miller, Dennis Lillee, Alan Border and Steve Waugh
to create the vision of a glorious history and a unified and triumphant nation.
The problem with this situation is twofold: the era of empire is long past, and
whatever symbolic unity the game and its heroes can muster can only ever be
partial and contested. The following section shifts the analysis of cultural unity
and difference on to the issue of British–Australian relations, as well as the official
level of politics and the use of cricket by politicians.

England, Australia and politics

In the past decade, Bradman’s death was one of the few events about which
both sides of Federal Parliament openly concurred. Then opposition and Labor
Party leader Kim Beazley recognised Bradman as ‘an icon, exemplar, hero’.
However, it was the prime minister and Liberal Party leader, John Howard, who
took the lead in political mourning. Howard’s association with Bradman was
demonstrated by his visit to the cricketer’s home less than a fortnight before his
death and by his attendance at the Don’s private funeral. A number of national
newspapers carried a dedication to Bradman penned by Howard. Visibly moved
upon hearing of Bradman’s death, the prime minister spoke at length about his
abiding affection for the ‘great man’: ‘In many ways he was the most remarkable
figure that Australia has produced in the last hundred years. He had an impact
on our country that is difficult to properly calculate’ (Lateline 2001). Other state-
ments made by Howard stressed that ‘no individual has so inspired successive
generations of Australians across such a breadth of age, geography and circum-
stance’ and that Bradman was ‘the quintessential Australian hero who was as
gracious as he was valiant’. As with media reaction generally, Howard’s comments
assume that Bradman was a hero for all Australians, irrespective of gender,
politics, race, class, cultural heritage or interests. A small group of commentators
contested this assumption, explaining that many people were simply unmoved
by Bradman’s passing. It was said that his death would finally allow a diverse and
self-confident Australian nation to cast off the musty uniform of empire once and
for all. This claim, however, over-simplifies matters.
In analysing the relationship between Australia and England, Horne (1968)
discusses an uneasy tension that exists between cultural independence and
dependence. On the one hand, there is admiration for those who represent
a defiant and independent Australian character; the self-styled underdog who
‘knocks’ authority figures and loves to lambast a ‘whingeing Pom’. On the other
hand, the Union Jack has pride of place on the national flag, and the Queen of
England is on the country’s coinage. With the ‘no change’ vote actively supported
 Australian national identity 15
by the prime minister, a majority of the public decided at the 1999 Republic
referendum that Queen Elizabeth was an appropriate head of state. Cricket is
implicated in this independence–dependence dynamic, with the bodyline series
of 1932–3 between Australia and England having been discussed at length:

England’s body-line tactics in 1932–33 struck so deeply at the core of

Australia. Devised and implemented to stop Bradman from making his
match-winning centuries, it was a negative philosophy born of defeatism.
. . . Its employment by the patrician Jardine was interpreted as a symbol of
Britain’s determination to keep Australia under her dominion.
(Wright 1998: xiii)

The story is repeatedly told that the bodyline series gave rise to an independent
and assertive Australian identity. Yet the statement unfolded through cricket, a
game originating from and inextricably bound to British culture. When faced with
the tactics of the English captain, Douglas Jardine, no one in the settler society
challenged cricket itself. Although not strictly the same situation, in Ireland the
decision of the Gaelic Athletic Association to ban cricket among its members in
the 1880s is an instance where such a challenge was launched. In other words,
Australia, like many other Commonwealth countries, accepted the legitimacy of
the British game and many of the cultural values that travelled with it.
Of the Australian prime ministers, it is the longest-serving, Sir Robert Gordon
Menzies (1939–41, 1949–66), who best personifies an Australian identity that
is almost elementally aligned with British culture. Considered a founder of the
Liberal Party and its most revered hero (Henderson 1998), he was a man who
believed that Australia was a loyal and willing member of the British Empire and
that the nation’s political and cultural arrangements should uniformly adhere
to those of England. He openly admired the Queen, declared himself ‘British to
the bootstraps’ (Clark 1993: 487), and felt that the connection between Britain
and Australia was so strong that in early 1941 he entertained serious thoughts
about attempting to claim England’s prime ministership from the clutches of
Winston Churchill (Day 2001). Presiding over a period of unparalleled economic
stability, Menzies stood for anti-communism, the monarchy, free enterprise and
individualism. His electoral popularity was built on appeal to and elevation of the
middle classes, those he called ‘the forgotten people’ in his famous 1943 address
and subsequent weekly radio talks (Brett 1992).
Menzies’ favourite recreation was watching and following cricket. The
Australian cricket community throughout the 1950s and 1960s epitomised ‘the
Liberal ethos of free enterprise and moral decency’ (Haigh 1997: 259), with this
ethos probably contributing to the friendship that existed between the prime min-
ister and Bradman. Menzies thought cricket a potent tool in the communication
and spread of English cultural ideals, encapsulated in maxims such as ‘playing a
straight bat’ and ‘it’s just not cricket’. He wrote on the game, including a regularly
quoted article in the 1963 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, in which he stated, ‘Great
Britain and Australia are of the same blood and allegiance and history and
16 Brett Hutchins
instinctive mental processes’ (Cashman 1998: 47). He composed verse of uneven
quality, addressed Test dinners, served as a trustee of the Melbourne Cricket
Club, and was founder of the annual Prime Minister’s XI match. Notably, Sir
Robert resolutely proclaimed that sport and politics should be kept separate. In
contradiction of this position, he used cricket for political ends. First, he believed
the game was ‘a unifying factor’ for the Australian population and publicly
displayed his admiration for it (Martin 1993: 222). Second, and more explicitly,
he deployed cricket as a diplomatic tool in relations between Commonwealth
nations. Haigh (1997: 69–71) describes a prime example of this strategy in 1953.
After an entreaty from Jamaica’s governor, Sir Hugh Foot, at a Commonwealth
economic conference, Menzies personally wrote to the Board of Control (later to
become the ACB) expressing support for a proposed Australian tour of the West
Indies in 1955. The tour would celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of
British settlement and was declared by Menzies to be ‘a very sound move’ in terms
of British–Commonwealth relations. Despite the Board’s demonstrated reluctance
to accept touring invitations outside the Ashes cycle, the trip went ahead.
An appreciation of cricket is not limited to the conservative side of Australian
politics. Men and women of the Labor Party – Evatt, Hawke, Kernot, Ray and
Faulkner – have expressed a love of the game. However, it is the Liberals,
especially Menzies and the current prime minister, John Howard, whose beliefs
and values have coincided most felicitously with the politics and history of
cricket, the sport of empire. Both Menzies and Howard have paraded their
veneration of men dressed in creams or coloured pyjamas openly, and sometimes
brazenly. Statements uttered by John Howard over the past few years underline
this point:

I really have regarded being captain of the Australian cricket team as the
absolute pinnacle of sporting achievement, and really the pinnacle of human
achievement almost, in Australia.
(Winkler 1997)

Nothing will shake my love of cricket, nothing.

(Voices of the Week 2000)

Even now, in another century, in a world scarcely recognisable to that in

which he played, the name Bradman resonates with meaning – talent,
determination, commitment, fair play, honour.
(Howard 2001)

These are outlandish statements that imbue cricket and its heroes with an almost
religious aura that is difficult to live up to, and this is to say nothing of the
challenge of convincing many Australian people that any sport or activity could
possess such qualities. Furthermore, Howard has openly publicised his friendship
with the former national cricket captain Mark Taylor, paralleling that of Menzies
and Bradman.
 Australian national identity 17
Not coincidentally, Howard nominates Menzies as one of his heroes and a
political inspiration, is openly pro-monarchy, and espouses the worth of anti-
collectivism, free enterprise, and ‘family values’. A proud and politically dominant
social conservative, Howard is nostalgic about the Menzies years during which
he grew up: ‘I think of the Menzies period as a golden age in terms of people.
Australia had a sense of family, social stability and optimism during that period’
(Henderson 1998: 13). Howard’s affection for men’s cricket is inextricably
linked to his idealisation of the Menzies era and the propagation of an Australian
brand of social conservatism that has its historical basis in the era of empire.
Howard’s love of cricket is about more than simply gaining political capital among
the electorate. Consider the ideological sub-text the next time Howard offers
his views on the national side’s selection, speaks on the Channel Nine or ABC
radio cricket coverage, publicly wishes the national men’s team well before a
game, sends messages of support and congratulations to the players, expresses
disappointment at a cricket scandal, comments on the legality of a bowler’s
action, or reflects on a player’s contribution to the sport on the eve of their retire-
ment. The meaning of Howard’s cricket romance runs deeper than the publicity
associated with these actions. The personal, social and political dimensions of his
devotion to cricket are indivisible and extend to the reinvigoration of a social
conservative political tradition.6 This tradition is underpinned by middle-class
values and dovetails nicely with a white, pro-imperial Australian past that is both
protective and proud of its British origins. In other words, cricket is part of a
popular political and cultural package, ensuring that the balance between
dependence on, and independence from, British culture does not swing too far
away from the former.
Cricket has been politically and popularly constructed as part of ‘mainstream’
Australian culture (Dale 2000). It is a superficially convincing image, given
the long history of cricket being represented as the national game and the open
and emotive support this perception has received from national leaders. Such
representations demonstrate the irreducibility of national identity to politics.
The propagation of a mainstream Australian identity sets up an ‘us’ and ‘them’
opposition that excludes marginalised political and/or cultural identities, forms
and practices that exist in relation to it, such as those stressing cultural or racial
diversity (Hage 1998; Stratton 1998). In promoting an Anglocentric mainstream
national character, the current minister for employment and workplace relations,
Tony Abbott, asked in 1990:

The issue is the sort of Australia we want our children and grandchildren to
inherit. Will it be a relatively cohesive society that studies Shakespeare,
follows cricket and honours the Anzacs; or will it be a pastiche of cultures
with only a geographic home in common?
(Jamrozik et al. 1995: 200)

Cricket is an integral plank of a ‘common culture’ featuring distinctively British

overtones. Abbott expressed regret at this statement only recently and conceded
18 Brett Hutchins
that Australian society has effectively absorbed and adapted to cultural change.
The problem is that cricket has not achieved a similar proficiency. As will be
shown, its culture and players remain largely homogeneous, consisting mainly of
Anglo males.
Continuing cultural uniformity presents a problem for cricket, with two main
issues standing out. First, homogeneity in sport is increasingly difficult to sustain
and justify as, proportionally, Australia has more migrants than any other nation
in the world except Israel (Bessant and Watts 2002: 230). Finding common
reference points among myriad cultural differences is necessarily a process of
collective negotiation and exchange. Cricket gives the appearance of being
unwilling to enter, or uninterested in, such a process. Second, given the game’s
history, cricket’s reputation as the national sport relies on the continuing main-
tenance of a seamless link between an Australian identity and an English-derived
cultural activity. In other words, the case must be ceaselessly propagated that
the essence of the Australian nation is firmly, exclusively and timelessly allied
to British culture. Yet as White (1981) convincingly argues, national identity has
no essence and is an ongoing project. Australian culture is a series of historically
competing identities, alternatively dominant and marginal, that are the products
of social change, cultural exchange, geographical context and political power.
I am not claiming that these identities are somehow unreal, or are imaginative
fictions; only that the social and cultural character of the nation does and will
change. Cricket’s readiness to accommodate cultural shifts and developments
remains in question. In supporting this line of reasoning, issues of gender, race and
ethnicity are now examined.

Gender, race and ethnicity

A feature of the reception to Bradman’s death was the similarity of those people
who responded. At the risk of sounding disrespectful, it was predominantly white
males mourning a dead white male. Voices heard on television and radio and
in the newspapers belonged to current and past male cricketers and sportsmen,
politicians, journalists and commentators. Only seven of the seemingly endless
newspaper articles I examined were by women. This is to be expected, given
the male dominance of both sport and media institutions, although it did run
counter to the statements of those who claimed the nation was in mourning and
spoke on behalf of all Australians in honouring the Don. In The Australian
newspaper, Deborah Jones (2001) dared to state that Bradman’s death left her and
many other women unmoved, for which she was roundly, although not totally,
condemned in articles and in the letters pages. ABC media commentator Stuart
Littlemore described the coverage of Bradman’s death as ‘unremittingly blokey’
(Littlemore 2001). As for Aboriginal Australians, and those from non-English-
speaking backgrounds (NESB) – routinely described as belonging to ‘ethnic
communities’ – their silence after Bradman’s passing was telling. Either the event
was not thought worthy of comment, or no one bothered to ask representatives
for a reaction, a small but telling indication of the history and culture of the game
 Australian national identity 19
in Australia. In the end, Bradman, a deeply conservative man, saw his way clear
to recognise the realities of the past and present. He left a request that half of
those invited to his memorial service in Adelaide be female, and prompted the
founding of a special ‘Bradman Memorial Fund’ that aims to foster cricket among
disadvantaged groups, including indigenous communities.
The history of women’s cricket in Australia is one of success and inattention.
The first recorded game was at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1886 before 1,000
spectators, with the start of international competition coming against the English
in 1934–5 (Cashman and Weaver 1991). Australia has been affiliated to the
International Women’s Cricket Council since 1958 and is ranked number one in
the world. In the World Cup, staged for the first time in 1973, Australia has won
four out of seven tournaments. In 1998 the current national captain, Belinda
Clark, was recognised as the cricketer of the year by Wisden Australia, beating the
likes of Glenn McGrath, the Waugh brothers and Shane Warne. Despite all this,
Cashman (1994: 67–9) describes women as having to endure constant media and
public apathy towards, or prejudice against, their participation. There have been
signs of improvement lately, with access provided to major grounds and slowly
improving newspaper coverage. Sadly, probably the most attention the game has
ever received was the result of a 1994 media scandal when an Australian player,
Denise Annetts, made poorly founded and damaging accusations of biased
selection policies involving lesbianism (Burroughs et al. 1995; Jefferson Lenskyj
1995). Such a situation is not helped by the Prime Minister, a self-confessed
‘cricket tragic’, only belatedly holding an official reception for the women’s team
after their 1997 World Cup victory. Suffice to say that there was no such reluc-
tance in 1999 when the men’s side won their World Cup.
For those living under the umbrella of nation, relations of power are not
limited to gender. Race is another key dynamic in Australian society and history,
with prevalent patterns of race relations firmly rooted in the soil of Empire.
Williams (2001) makes the determination at the outset of his book Cricket and
Race that the British Empire was built upon the assumption of white supremacy,
and Australian cricket bears this legacy. Up to 1987 there had been just eight
Aboriginal first-class cricketers from a pool of about 3,000 players (Whimpress
1999: 22). Only one man, Jason Gillespie, and one woman, Faith Thomas, have
ever gained national selection, which is a poor record compared to indigenous
sportspeople’s success in rugby league, Australian Rules football and boxing (Tatz
1995). Whimpress (1999) and Colman and Edwards (2002) demonstrate that the
past treatment of outstanding Aboriginal cricketers, such as Queensland fast
bowler Eddie Gilbert, is cause for regret.7 Small of stature with a slinging action,
Gilbert bowled with startling pace off a short run, notably claiming Bradman for
a duck in a 1931 State match. It was the fastest stint of bowling the Don ever
witnessed. During the 1930s and the age of the White Australia Policy,8 Gilbert
had to endure being called for throwing by suspect umpiring, teammates refusing
to speak to him, as well as a demonstrated reluctance to share taxis and rooms
with him (Whimpress 1999: 228–46). It has been suggested that on another
occasion he had to suffer the indignity of Bradman refusing to play in a social tour
20 Brett Hutchins
match at Gympie if the paceman was a member of the opposing side. Gilbert was
conveniently withdrawn from the match due to a ‘shoulder injury’, and Bradman’s
possible motives are unknown (Colman and Edwards 2002: 112–13).
The ACB has conceded the lack of indigenous interest, involvement and
progress in the sport. It is obvious, for instance, that few Aborigines are found
in cricket crowds at major grounds. Ross Turner, of the ACB, admits, ‘It’s a game
of whites. . . . Cricket whites, white picket fences, green greens. It all represents a
historically white anglo [sic] point of view’ (Dossier 2001). This recent realisation
prompted the ACB to create an Aboriginal Cricket Working Party in 2001 that
aims to develop the game in indigenous communities. Initiatives associated with
this programme include an annual national indigenous cricket competition,
which is proving popular and successful. Also, John Howard has lately come to
the party in a symbolic, if not practical, act of reconciliation. With a nod to
the example of Menzies, he initiated an annual Prime Minister’s XI match against
an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) XI in 2001.
However, there are question marks over both the longevity of the fixture beyond
Howard’s prime ministership and the medium- to long-term future of ATSIC,
especially if the current government maintains power.
The experience of Australians from NESBs in cricket is more likely to be one
of ethnocentrism than of outright discrimination (McKay et al. 2000: 290). While
the names of players of European and, very occasionally, Asian heritage appear in
player lists, by and large cricketing culture has proved unattractive to ‘new
Australians’. The case of the Australian fast bowler Len Pascoe, who played for
the national team between 1977 and 1982, is occasionally used to represent the
experience of ‘new Australians’ in the game. He was a first-generation Australian
from a Yugoslavian family whose surname was Durtanovich. He changed this
name to Pascoe in order to avoid ethnic abuse on the field, a move that was not
altogether successful when bowling to the Chappell brothers (Cashman 1995:
168). The Pascoe story is an interesting historical example of why the culture of
cricket has not been widely regarded as welcoming to Australians from NESBs.
Contributing to this situation is the homogeneous, mythical and overwhelmingly
white image that accompanies cricket when it is promoted and discussed as the
‘cornerstone sport in Australian culture’ (Derriman 2000). As Roebuck reminds
us, the stain of imperialism and Anglo dominance remains:

Cricket is still struggling to reach beyond its confines . . . still the game is
mainly Anglo-Saxon. For a long time this has been the game’s main
limitation. Apart from a few dubiously treated Aboriginals in decades past,
and some sons from families of European origin, cricket has been unable to
convince new communities that it is a game worth playing.
(Roebuck 1999; see also Stoddart 1998: 153)

Cricket is emblematic of a wider national pattern. Participation rates in sport for

people born overseas are significantly lower than Australian-born individuals,
particularly if they are female (McKay et al. 2000: 290). One of the few exceptions
 Australian national identity 21
to this pattern is soccer, with many clubs maintaining traditional cultural
affiliations connected to the post-Second World War immigration boom.
While cricket might be popularly considered the national game, the above
summary illustrates that a nation is defined as much by its differences as its
similarities. To claim that cricket defines and unifies Australian society imposes a
cultural order onto the population that is not necessarily present, and privileges
a dominant white identity that is intimately connected to the former British
Empire. This is undoubtedly part of its appeal to people such as the prime minister,
who only three years ago maintained, ‘Most Australians still regard our relation-
ship with Britain as the most important’ (Henderson 2000). It is a declaration
more nostalgic than substantive, given Australia’s inevitable cultural and eco-
nomic engagement with South-East Asia and the importance of the United
States in the development and implementation of national defence strategies.
Australia’s past might come neatly wrapped in the Union Jack, but to contain its
present and future is a more unwieldy proposition.
As I was writing this chapter, the 2003 World Cup was unfolding in Southern
Africa. The depressing events in Zimbabwe demanded that a postscript be added
to this section. Race and the relationship between sport and politics were again
brought to the fore, recalling a long history of political actions by athletes at the
Olympics, in football, boxing and athletics. Discussion and debate over whether
the Australian team should play in Zimbabwe, a country ruled by the dictatorial
and brutal regime of Robert Mugabe, was a poignant reminder of disputes over
the worth and effect of sporting boycotts during the apartheid years in South
Africa.9
Attitudes towards South African sport during the decades of apartheid were
marred by disengagement, disagreement and protest (Booth 1998; Nauright
1997). Menzies argued for the strict separation of sport and politics, derided
anti-apartheid protestors and defended South Africa’s right to national sover-
eignty (Menzies 1970: 276–85). Even in the context of the time, his opinions
appear misplaced. He claimed that apartheid was ‘a rude word’ that simply meant
‘separate development’ and defended the former president, Dr Vorster, claiming
he was no racist. The cancelled 1971–2 Springbok cricket tour of Australia was
a disappointment to Menzies and signalled a bloodletting in Australia’s dis-
association from the Republic. The Board, chaired by Sir Donald Bradman, made
it deliberately clear that the tour’s cancellation had been for security reasons and
was in no way politically motivated. Social justice and the lamentable living
conditions of the majority of the South African population were not the business
of the cricket community. This attitude was confirmed by Bradman’s 1974 visit to
the Republic and meeting with President Vorster, in which discussion was solely
devoted to resolving the cricket situation (Page 1983: 356).
The 2003 World Cup stand-off revealed that the case made by the ACB, which
had the full backing of the International Cricket Council (ICC), was the same as
in 1971–2 but produced a different result. Administrators held fast to the position
that the decision of the Australian team to play in Zimbabwe was based purely on
player security. As during the apartheid era, there was no concession that playing
22 Brett Hutchins
there might lend legitimacy to an unjust, anti-democratic and violent regime that
was systematically starving its people and eliminating its political opponents.
Irrespective of whether Australia should have played or not, the apparent
indifference to this suffering was puzzling, and the deliberate short-sightedness of
the administrators’ case was clear after Zimbabwe’s first match, when their leading
batsman, Andy Flower, and leading bowler, Henry Olonga, wore black armbands
protesting against the ‘death of democracy’ and human rights abuses in their
country. To the chagrin of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union, their brave action was
widely reported around the world.
The argument of Australian cricket administrators on the issue of South Africa
in 1971–2 and Zimbabwe in 2003 is instructive, highlighting an unavoidable
tension that exists between their sporting roles and the political meanings
attached to their actions. They maintained that participation or non-participation
was a sporting and security decision. For example, speaking in support of playing
in Bulawayo, the Australian one-day captain, Ricky Ponting, stated on separate
occasions:

We’re not going to Zimbabwe to support any political regime or go against

any political regime. . . . We’re 14 cricketers going to Zimbabwe to hopefully
bring back some World Cup points. That’s about where it sits with us at the
moment.
(Brown 2003a)

We’re not ignoring or condoning what is happening in that country but

as far as we’re concerned we’re a team of cricketers, we’re going there to
hopefully play well and get some World Cup points on the board. . . .
[Australia’s position will change] only if safety and security gets a lot worse.
(Brown 2003b)

The problem for the captain, the ACB and the ICC is that it is impossible to limit
their comments and actions to cricket and its administration. In both statements
Ponting’s initial qualifier gives away the fact that his comments are made with
political considerations in mind. Attempting to disguise as apolitical what were
inescapably political issues and practices is a clumsy sleight of hand that failed to
fool many journalists, editors, callers to talkback radio and those who wrote letters
to newspapers on the issue. Recalling many of the protests against apartheid, the
actions of Flower and Olonga further underline this argument. A well-known
slogan of anti-apartheid protest was ‘no normal sport in an abnormal society’.
Those who control and play cricket in Australia and elsewhere would do well to
note that there is no apolitical sport in a world where politics is central to social
life and human consciousness.
 Australian national identity 23
Conclusion
Elsewhere I have argued that it is both unnecessary and unfair to set up one
cricketer, Don Bradman, as the ideal embodiment of the Australian nation
(Hutchins 2002). No individual can adequately symbolise the innumerable
meanings, values, ideas and beliefs that create the colour and texture of an ever-
changing national culture. The same may be said of cricket. Claims that it is the
‘national game’ create an unreasonable expectation that the sport offers an all-
embracing inclusiveness, both culturally and politically. The sport’s emergence
from the British Empire and its continuing masculine, white Anglo complexion
ensures that for all those included, others are excluded or feel unwelcome. Cricket
cannot avoid the fact that a body politic is sustained as much by difference and
negotiation as by unity and consensus. Past attempts at setting the game up as a
fundamental component in a ‘mainstream’ Australian culture reinforce my point.
To express faith in such an entity condemns those on the ‘outside’ to make their
way alone, unaided in the tributaries. It is time to move on from such ideas, to try
to find unity among difference, and to develop a more measured appreciation
of the game, its political character and social function. The problem is that, on
balance, Australian cricket remains tied to images of the past, not visions of the
future.
As stated at the outset, Australian cricket has had difficulties transcending the
social and cultural boundary markers of empire. This is an argument supported by
examination of English–Australian relations, national mythologies, politics and
politicians, and issues of race, gender and ethnicity. Measures such as the ACB’s
Working Party for indigenous cricket hint at a growing critical understanding of
the game’s past and cultural character, although this is an uncommon measure.
Faced with the obedience to the past exhibited by those who represent and follow
the game, the issue is whether a desire exists to change cricket. Those in control
of the sport appear comfortable with the notion of the ‘national game’, which
offers them cultural legitimacy and dominance, and makes matters of social justice
and politics irritants that detract from the sporting spectacle.
The prevailing cultural and political winds in Australia are blowing in cricket’s
favour. It is a sport that offers the certainty of the past in the face of global
uncertainty, anxiety and violence. In this environment, perhaps those who run
and play the game cannot imagine failing to honour its male-dominated imperial
past and the moral rectitude that accompanies image of both cricket and empire.
As if to stamp a seal of approval, the prime minister, a man who has proved
popular with the electorate over the past seven years, incorporates cricket into a
vision of the nation that embraces its British heritage and bows before the
traditions of yesteryear. Cricket is not merely a reflection of the national political
culture; it actively contributes to and structures it. Success on the field is matched
by consistent television ratings and widespread media coverage, at least for the
men. The impetus to change must seem slight. Problems lie ahead, however, if the
winds of political opinion change direction.
Future generations may slowly begin to find the sameness on the cricket field
unappealing. It is a game played mainly by white, Anglo-Celtic males and falls
24 Brett Hutchins
well short of representing the cultural diversity of the population. Constantly
staring at the past in the rear-vision mirror may also become a liability. The sport’s
main icon, Bradman, is a cricketer from the age of the White Australia Policy,
and the quality international touring sides who reach Australia’s shores rarely
come from outside the boundaries of an Empire that collapsed long ago. Tradition
can quickly become unfashionable in our contemporary consumer society. The
prime minister’s effusive support of the game may also prove a problem in the
future, as he openly politicises a sport that tries in vain to distance itself from
politics. The worth and enjoyment of playing and watching cricket is not in
question, only the game’s readiness and flexibility to move with the rhythms
of social, cultural and political change. Cricket will never appeal to all those
groups who make up the Australian community, but it can aspire to represent a
broader cross section of the population by creating a more inclusive environment.
Substantial moves in this direction would ensure that rather than relying on the
well-worn garments of the past staying in fashion, cricket would be able to adapt
effectively to change in the future and possibly even lead the way forward.

Acknowledgements
Thank you to Keith Jenkins, Jim McKay and Janine Mikosza for their comments
and help on drafts of this chapter.

Notes
1 Parts of this chapter contain arguments that first appeared in my book Don Bradman:
Challenging the Myth, published by Cambridge University Press in 2002.
2 The other former Australian was Rupert Murdoch. Bradman was one of just three
sportspeople selected, alongside boxer Muhammad Ali and football’s Pele.
3 This ignores the first Australian team that toured England in 1867–8, consisting of
Aboriginal players. Administrators stubbornly refuse to recognise this side as an
official Test team (see Mulvaney and Harcourt 1988).
4 Blainey shows that in 1831, men outnumbered women by more than 3 to 1. By 1850
there were 143 males for every 100 females, although the disparity was more marked
among the adult population. By 1900 there were 110 males for every 100 females. It
was not until 1916 that a balance was achieved, and this was due to the fact that many
men were abroad fighting in the First World War.
5 Similar results were also reported in a 1997 Australian Bureau of Statistics report (see
McKay et al. 2000).
6 For a more substantial account of this argument, see Hutchins (2002: 108–28).
7 Gilbert claimed 87 wickets at 28.98 in 23 first-class matches between 1930 and 1936
(Colman and Edwards 2002: 264).
8 Regarded as a key plank in the Federation of the Australian States in 1901, the White
Australia Policy was a deliberately restrictive and discriminatory government policy
designed to maintain racial unity in Australia, or a ‘white Australia’. The policy was
initiated in 1901 and was not formally abandoned until the election of the Whitlam
government in 1972.
9 A tragic irony is that Robert Mugabe is on record as stating in 1984, ‘Cricket civilises
people and creates good gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe.
I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen’ (Fitzsimons 2003). In the history of cricket’s
 Australian national identity 25
association with dictatorial politics, this statement was recently rivalled by the 2001
decision of the ICC to admit Taliban-ruled Afghanistan as its 74th member (Miller et
al. forthcoming).

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2 Kiwi or English?
Cricket on the margins of
New Zealand national identity1
Greg Ryan

Indications of the status of New Zealand cricket were no more apparent than
in 1956. On 13 March, against the West Indies at Eden Park, Auckland, and at
their 45th attempt, the New Zealand cricket team finally won a Test match.
While this was recognised as a considerable achievement, reactions from the press
were hardly euphoric and followers of the game were reminded that New Zealand
had been heavily defeated in the first three Tests of the series. As one editor
observed, ‘We have snatched a victory from them in a final Test when the keen
edge of their endeavour was possibly a little dulled.’ Another stressed that ‘One
swallow does not make a summer, and one Test match victory in 30 years does
not make New Zealand a top-class cricket country.’ Less than six months later, on
1 September, also at Eden Park, the All Blacks defeated the Springboks in a test
series for the first time in perhaps the most intensely contested and supported
rugby encounters ever witnessed. Their prize was the unofficial world rugby
‘crown’, and the outcome cemented the status of the game as one of the corner-
stones of a popular New Zealand conception of national identity (McLean 1956;
Andrewes 1998).
Other events of the 1950s also dwarfed the status of a first cricket Test victory.
Edmund Hillary’s completion, with Tenzing Norgay, of the first ascent of Mt
Everest in 1953 was quickly mythologised as very much a New Zealand contri-
bution to perhaps the last great imperial achievement (Hansen 2000; Booth
1993). At the end of the decade, Peter Snell embarked on an athletics career
that yielded six world records and three Olympic gold medals in 1960 and 1964.
He would eventually surpass such national ‘icons’ as the 1905 All Blacks and
George Nepia to be recognised as New Zealand’s sportsman of the twentieth
century (Palenski 2000).2
This chapter is inevitably about such contrasting fortunes. As with the period
prior to the Second World War, the local and international profile of New
Zealand cricket since 1945, and its consequent impact on national identity,
has remained to a considerable extent in the shadow of other achievements
and especially, in sporting terms, the continued dominance of the All Blacks
on the international stage. As rugby strengthened its place at the core of a set of
interlocking myths about the distinctive egalitarian and pragmatic (masculine)
qualities of New Zealand society, cricket epitomised a lingering strand of cultural
 New Zealand national identity 29
Britishness and dependence. By virtue of very limited international success from
which to derive confidence, cricket remained until the late 1970s bound to a
conservative preoccupation with the best amateur virtues of the English game.
This position was reinforced by a combination of demographic, economic and
climatic impediments and a largely dysfunctional cricketing relationship with
New Zealand’s dominant Australian neighbour.
As British cultural and economic influences decreased in significance during
the 1970s, cricket, and the one-day version especially, certainly had a role to play
in New Zealand’s resurgent relationship with Australia. Consistent international
success during the early 1980s and at the 1992 World Cup also boosted the profile
of the game and prompted its administrators to fully address the requirements of
professional international sport and the demands of sponsorship and marketing.
Yet progress for cricket was only relative. As much as the game moved forward,
rugby moved faster – and especially so once it became openly professional in 1995.
The decidedly negative public reaction to industrial action by New Zealand
cricketers at the end of 2002 was a clear indication of the secondary cultural
importance of the game to New Zealand.
As New Zealand cricket embarked on the post-war period, it remained shackled
to the same combination of amateurism and Anglophilia that had characterised
its nineteenth-century development. Yet in doing so it merely reflected broader
cultural trends. Colonial New Zealand eschewed its diversity of settler origins and
experiences in favour of a mythology of itself as being settled and shaped by the
best type of carefully selected, loyal British ‘stock’ – or ‘better Britons’. Critical to
this process was an over-emphasis on Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s systematic
colonisation schemes of the 1840s wherein the careful selection of migrants and
close attention to the regulating of class relationships had supposedly produced
an ordered and unified pre-industrial society.3 Implicit was a distinct separation
from the supposed convict taint of neighbouring Australia. Despite a multitude of
trans-Tasman interactions and certain elements of an ‘Australasian’ identity prior
to 1914, New Zealand exhibited a tone of moral superiority and resisted all
overtures to federate as part of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 (Belich
2001: 46–52, 76–87).
Notwithstanding perceptions of an emergent national identity, and especially
those derived from achievements on rugby field and battlefield, New Zealand’s
links to Britain were strengthened during the twentieth century. The consoli-
dation of a collective ‘Australian’ identity after Federation and a stronger sense of
cultural separation from Britain accentuated the divergence from New Zealand
and produced an environment in which formal trans-Tasman interactions were
both limited and frequently characterised by mutual disregard (Belich 2001; see
also Ross 1978). At the same time, New Zealand forged a substantial economic
relationship with distant Britain rather than closer Australia. Britain provided at
least 60 per cent of imports prior to 1914 and took 85.2 per cent of New Zealand
exports by 1935 (Grey 1994: 345). Thus, by preference and necessity, New
Zealand remained firmly committed to preserving its British connection until at
least the late 1960s (Belich 2001: 46–52, 440–3).
30 Greg Ryan
This cultural climate led the middle-class elite who dominated early New
Zealand cricket to an almost obsessive preoccupation with replicating the
manners and mores of the English game. While cricketing contacts with Australia
were both frequent and relatively inexpensive until the late 1920s, the preference
of administrators and spectators alike was for contact with England. The New
Zealand Cricket Council (NZCC) made constant overtures to Lord’s and to its
Australian counterpart in an effort to entice visits from English teams after they
had toured Australia (see Ryan 2003, esp. chs 7–10). As a microcosm of the
broader pattern of trans-Tasman relations, the desire for English teams was
reinforced from the 1930s by the increasing reluctance of Australian authorities
to assist New Zealand cricket. Its very low standard had little to offer at a time
when Australian international commitments were moving to embrace other
emergent cricketing powers such as South Africa and the West Indies. While 19
Australian teams visited New Zealand between 1878 and 1928, there were no
more until an ill-conceived Test match in March 1946. With first-class cricket
hardly recovered from the abeyance of the war years, and a number of its best
players still overseas on active service, New Zealand scored 42 and 54 to lose by
an innings within two days. Thereafter, New Zealand was accommodated within
the increasingly crowded Australian itinerary only in so far as it provided a useful
opponent against which to trial emerging players. Five Australian ‘B’ teams visited
New Zealand between 1949 and 1969. From their first visit in 1898–9, New
Zealand teams played only 29 first-class games in Australia until 1973–4, when
the two countries finally began regular Test match competition.4
The perceived ‘English’ character of New Zealand cricket also endured because
the game never produced a pattern of success necessary to sustain expressions of
assertive colonialism and later emergent nationalism such as those characteristic
of New Zealand rugby or cricket in Australia and the West Indies. The few
victories by New Zealand provincial and representative teams prior to the Second
World War were against very weak opposition (Payne and Smith 2002: 395–9,
414–18, 471–8; Neely et al. 1985: 35–58).5 After waiting 26 years for its initial
Test victory in 1956, New Zealand did not win again until 1962 in South Africa
and not at home until 1968. It did not win a series until 1969–70 and had won
only 53 of 301 Test matches to the end of the 2002–3 season.
When compared to its international rivals, New Zealand cricket has faced a
set of impediments to both the scale and the standard of the game. First, although
the population increased from 1.72 million in 1945 to 3.87 million in 2001, it is
still significantly smaller than that of any other major cricket-playing country –
including the combined nations of the West Indies (World Guide 2001/2002 2001
passim). Certainly a developed country such as New Zealand is better able to draw
potential players to the game, but this advantage is mitigated by the wider variety
of recreational and sporting opportunities offered in such countries.
It follows that the pool of potential players, paying spectators and sponsors from
which to derive revenue is also smaller than in other cricketing countries. The
average population of the five New Zealand cities in which international cricket
is regularly staged is one-sixth of that of their Australian counterparts (World
 New Zealand national identity 31
Guide 2001/2002 2001: 82, 94). Yet the NZCC has faced many of the same, and
sometimes greater, running costs for the game in terms of such necessities as
travel, accommodation and ground preparation. Accordingly, its finances were
precarious throughout the twentieth century, with irregular profits from some
international tours, and especially those to and from England, being rapidly
absorbed by losses on other tours and the basic running costs of the domestic
game.6 In this environment there was no scope for retaining professional players
and little compensation to amateurs for basic expenses, let alone lost earnings.
Given these parameters, the NZCC was reluctant to make demands on its
players. Although the addition of Central Districts in 1950–1 and Northern
Districts in 1956–7 increased the number of first-class teams to six, the fixture list
did not extend beyond five matches a season for each province until 1975–6.
Moreover, the staging of this first-class programme around the Christmas holiday
period to minimise the need for work leave, and the timing of most visits from
touring teams in late February or early March after a series in Australia, meant
that players were frequently expected to make the transition to Test cricket
without adequate preparation. For good reason, New Zealand teams were often
given the sobriquet ‘Saturday afternoon cricketers’ (e.g. Cartman 1980: 26–7).
Nor was New Zealand cricket assisted by climatic conditions. As with Andrew
Hignell’s examination of English cricket, there is equally a case to make that
wet or cold weather contributed to the financial vulnerability of the New
Zealand game as playing hours were lost and spectators less inclined to brave the
conditions. Various surveys suggesting a correlation between lower batting
averages and lower bowling averages on wet or damp wickets and outfields are also
applicable. While batsmen thrived and bowlers frequently toiled on hard wickets
in Australian heat, New Zealand batsmen were simply not accustomed to making
large scores, and bowlers required a narrower range of skills to exploit inferior
surfaces (Hignell 2002: 113–70; Ryan 2003: ch. 7). These limitations were to be
repeatedly exposed by international opposition.
The years immediately after the Second World War certainly offered contra-
dictory messages to New Zealand cricket followers. As already mentioned, in
March 1946 a strong Australian team visited and dismissed its ill-prepared
New Zealand counterpart for 42 and 54 in what was retrospectively recognised
as the first Test match between the two countries.7 While some suggested that
New Zealand should not have the temerity to tackle Australia and should restrict
itself to second-string MCC sides and Australian state teams, at least one editor
felt that

If that is to be the reaction, then let us give up cricket altogether. The

occasion is not one for despair, rather it is one in which hope should rise
Phoenix-like from the ashes. . . . Was defeat final? Was Dunkirk final?8

The New Zealand team to England in 1949 more than met this challenge as they
lost only one first-class match and drew all four of the three-day Test matches.
More importantly, they gained a reputation for playing ‘bright’ cricket in the best
32 Greg Ryan
amateur spirit. ‘New Zealand cricket’, observed the editors of the New Zealand
Cricket Almanack at the end of the tour, ‘may be said to have reached maturity,
and our aim must be to so continue to develop our players that the position now
won can be fully held’ (Carman and Macdonald 1949: 7).
Yet the 1949 tour was an aberration, to be followed by the most calamitous
decade in the history of the New Zealand game. New Zealand lost 21 of its 32 Test
matches during the 1950s and provided perhaps the most consistently inept
batting performances seen in international cricket. Nine of its 53 completed
innings failed to reach 100 and another 24 failed to reach 200. The nadir was
obviously a completed innings of 26 against England at Eden Park in March 1955.
But five scores under 100 from nine completed innings during the 1958 series in
England were little better. The 1960s produced a marked improvement among
batsmen, but only six wins and 18 losses from 45 Test matches.
Responses to such consistent failure reveal the paradox of the amateur game in
New Zealand. Inevitably there were calls for more international cricket –
especially against Australia – and greater commitment from players. As the New
Zealand Herald observed after the 1955 debacle,

So long as our players get an opportunity to play in a big match only at long
intervals, so long will they be liable to psychological failures at key moments.
Vigorous promoting of contests with other countries would give our cricketers
the experience they lack.9

But most recognised that as long as New Zealand lacked the financial resources
to sustain professional cricketers and an expanded international programme, the
chances of success were limited. As the Evening Post put it after another bad
performance against England in 1963,

One stark fact emerges from the current tour – weekend cricketers are no
match for seasoned players. And our team need make no apology for this. It
only stands to reason that men having played as a team in cricket-hardened
Australia for some time now, and who consistently pack more cricket into
one season than the average New Zealander does into three, must be more
than a match for a team drawn together for a quick tryout before taking their
place against Test odds on Eden Park.10

It was accepted that amateurism was a product of necessity.

But there is a stronger sense in which many administrators and followers of
New Zealand cricket were amateur by inclination and seemingly quite happy
to place ideals above success. Typical was the decidedly unambitious response to
repeated suggestions that New Zealand should capitalise on the success of the
1949 tour by including a team in the Australian Sheffield Shield competition.

Would New Zealand be wise to endeavour to lift cricket from its present
standing as a popular and respected form of recreation by making it, so far as
the leading players are concerned, a part-time profession? We think that
 New Zealand national identity 33
there would be a strong body of public opinion against such a proposal. . . .
Nor is there real reason to believe that New Zealand, by straining its resources
to the utmost, could establish itself on a par with England and Australia, the
admitted champions of the cricket field. . . . The accomplishments of a team
are measured against its background, in New Zealand’s case that of a game
still regarded as a pastime.11

In 1953 the New Zealand Listener embarked on a lengthy critique of certain

media and public reactions to failure in a home series against South Africa. The
particular target was excessive scrutiny and an overly ‘scientific’ analysis of the
game:

Cricket is a game good to play and watch; but it is only a game, and the
quickest way to kill it is to turn it into a contest weighed down by inter-
national prestige and rivalry. . . . Yet it is idle to ask for yesterday. New
Zealand is in international cricket, for better or worse, and we can argue in
vain that players would do better if they were given less attention. When
cricket is a little more than a game, it is not a science, but an art; and art
should never be separated from joyfulness. A hard fought match is a joy to
play in, and a joy to watch if it can be understood that the chances and wilful
risks are all in the tussle. Afterwards, however, it should be like the sunlight
fading from the grass, or the bouquet of a remembered wine. The paradox in
our present situation is that we are crying out for a return to carefree cricket,
and at the same time are insisting on conditions – the big game, the statistics,
the publicity and the inquest – which make it impossible.12

The following year, the same journal outlined its preferred circumstances for any
New Zealand success:

Some day, perhaps, a New Zealand team will win fame in the cricketing
countries. It is a success devoutly to be looked for – but only if it can be gained
without any loss of that easy friendliness and sportsmanship, on and off the
field, which help us to remember that cricket is still a game even when it is
played by international sides.13

In similar context, the comprehensive failures of the 1958 tour were deflected into
a positive light by the Evening Post:

Though it may not have added to New Zealand’s reputation on the cricket
field, it has fully maintained the Dominion’s name for good sportsmanship
and good fellowship – and that, as it is repeated at public function after public
function, is the essence of cricket. Perhaps it is the most important point on
which to have succeeded.14

In 1962, inspired by the refreshing cricket played by a touring Fijian team and
with an eye to the growing politicisation of sporting contacts with South Africa,
34 Greg Ryan
the editors of the New Zealand Cricket Almanack presented an unequivocal
manifesto:

Cricket is a game to be played first of all for the pleasure of participant and
spectator, and heaven forbid that we should so organise our sport that the
same seriousness and intensity that dominate our politics should drive from
our game its natural enjoyment. . . . Let us, then, of New Zealand so play our
games that we will be remembered for the style of our play and the pleasure
we gave rather than merely because of securing a certain number of victories.
It is possible to be more honoured in defeat than victory.
(Carman and Macdonald 1963: 7–8)

As late as 1973, when the New Zealand team came closer than any of its pre-
decessors to achieving an elusive first victory over England, the Almanack was still
convinced that ‘When all is said and done, our cricket will be far better known
by its quality than by the mere tally of wins or losses’ (Carman 1973: 39).
Such sentiments were not merely the domain of conservative elements within
the press. The NZCC also pursued an agenda in which progress and success were
often secondary considerations. This is most apparent in the ‘inclusive’ itineraries
they designed for touring teams wherein the objective was to give opportunities
to as many players as possible rather than the best players. Despite repeated
complaints from touring teams dating back to at least 1903 (Warner 1903: 140;
Carman and Macdonald 1950: 7; 1957: 7), the Council persisted until the 1960s
with a plethora of non-first-class fixtures against regional teams. Only 50.7 per
cent of games on the full tours by Australia B in 1950, 1957 and 1960, the West
Indies in 1956 and the MCC in 1960–1 were first class.
The Council was also extremely cautious, and sometimes reactionary, in
responding to the crucial changes occurring in world cricket from the late 1960s
– and particularly the introduction of one-day cricket and its attendant commer-
cialisation of the game. In August 1969, when it was suggested that a domestic
one-day competition could generate as much public interest in New Zealand
cricket as had the Gillette Cup and Sunday League in England, the NZCC quite
rightly pointed out that any new competition would impose greater economic
strain on a body that already ran its domestic affairs at a consistent loss. But
a further suggestion that money could be saved by scheduling one-day games on
the Sunday of existing first-class games was met with a concern that injury to
players in the ‘lesser’ game could detract from their performance in the ‘more
important’ one. Further, as the five-match first-class programme already made
‘considerable’ physical demands on players, it was important to maintain a rest
day during these fixtures.15 On religious grounds, others objected to the expansion
of Sunday play. Indeed, this issue sat uncomfortably with the NZCC from the
mid-1960s onwards and its gradual introduction for first-class and one-day cricket
curtailed the representative careers of several leading players with strong religious
convictions (Carman 1968: 7).16
 New Zealand national identity 35
The NZCC’s decision to embrace one-day cricket in 1971–2 was motivated not
by a desire to modernise local cricket, but by a more pragmatic determination to
prepare New Zealand teams for the Australian inter-state V&G Knockout
tournament, to which they had been invited from 1969–70. The domestic one-
day competition, generally scheduled before the first-class season, gained little
momentum or public interest until the knockout format was replaced by a round-
robin in 1980–1 (Payne and Smith 1984: 119). Similarly, although New Zealand
was the first country to schedule one-day internationals for touring teams
on a regular basis during the early 1970s, two of the first five were in Dunedin and
one in Wellington – the two international venues with the lowest spectator
capacity. A fixture was not played at the largest venue, Eden Park, until February
1976. Thereafter, and despite New Zealand reaching the semi-finals of the 1975
and 1979 World Cups, only one other one-day international was played in New
Zealand during the next six years.17 If one-day cricket had originally been
conceived as a means of addressing declining attendances and fragile finances in
the English game, these objectives were apparently not uppermost in the minds
of the even more vulnerable NZCC.
The emergence of Glenn Turner as New Zealand’s first fully professional
international cricketer also posed problems for the Council. Having established
himself in county cricket during the late 1960s, Turner was forthright in his
determination to be treated as a full-time professional player and to ensure that
other New Zealanders were adequately compensated while playing for their
country.18 However, his approach was frequently viewed as fractious and merce-
nary. In 1977 the NZCC chairman, Walter Hadlee, a former New Zealand captain
and father of Richard Hadlee, insisted that New Zealand did not have the
population to sustain professional cricketers, and players should play purely for
the ‘fun’ of the game. Predictably, the editor of the Cricket Almanack added, ‘It
will be a sad day when players perform for financial gain rather than for the sake
of sport itself and for the honour of representing one’s country or province’
(Carman 1977: 7).19 Turner responded that those who made such statements
generally did so from the comfort of expensive cars en route to expensive homes
and did not appreciate that an expanding international programme was placing
severe financial strain on players.20 Amid further acrimonious exchanges over
money, and a brief suspension by the NZCC in June 1978, the most successful
batsman produced by New Zealand generally absented himself from the national
team after 1977.21
When set against such popularly acclaimed achievements as the conquest of
Mt Everest by Edmund Hillary, world-renowned athletic performances by Peter
Snell and others during the early 1960s, and the triumph of the All Blacks over
the Springboks in 1956 and their dominance of international rugby for much of
the remainder of the twentieth century, the lack of cricketing success and seeming
lack of ambition on the part of many of its administrators and supporters left the
game with nothing to contribute to the strengthening rhetoric of a New Zealand
national identity during the post-war years. More to the point, and as I have
argued elsewhere for the period prior to 1914, reactions to New Zealand cricket
36 Greg Ryan
during the 1950s in particular highlight the banality and shallowness of much
of that rhetoric and the limitations of the subsequent interpretation of it (Ryan
2003: ch. 10). On the one hand, the exploits of Hillary, Snell and the All Blacks
were repeatedly attributed to the supposedly dominant characteristics of the
New Zealand setting. Geographical and cultural isolation, a small population,
and limited funds and facilities are supposed to have imbued the New Zealand
male with a unique determination and ability to overcome obstacles with ‘Kiwi
ingenuity’. It was also supposed to be no coincidence that many of the most
successful national ‘icons’ apparently hailed not from urban privilege but from the
egalitarian world of the ‘ordinary’ New Zealander in a small town or rural setting.
In turn, these interpretations of success and the myths they embody have been
seized upon by later scholars as a vital part of New Zealand’s emergent ‘national
identity’ (see, for example, Phillips 1984; 1987: 108–22; Sinclair 1986: 143–55;
Fougere 1989). Yet the contemporary rhetoric and the subsequent chronicling of
it ignore the fact that this same setting produced a cricket team incapable of over-
coming these same obstacles. Moreover, the prevailing cricket culture was tied to
a set of conservative ‘Old World’ values that were supposedly anathema to much
that shaped success in New Zealand. The obvious polarity between these two
positions calls for a recasting of the standard scholarship of New Zealand identity
that is well beyond the scope of this chapter.22
It was coincidental, but highly advantageous in terms of enhancing its profile,
that cricket began to enjoy greater international success at a time when New
Zealand was embarking on something of a cultural realignment, distancing itself
from Britain and Britishness. Following a series victory over Australia B in 1967
and home Test match victories against India in 1968 and the West Indies in 1969,
New Zealand drew a series in India and won its first series in Pakistan in 1969–70.
A drawn series in the West Indies in 1972 was followed by strong performances
during the 1973 tour of England, a first victory over Australia in 1974, semi-final
appearances at the 1975 and 1979 World Cups and, finally, a first victory over
England at Wellington in February 1978. Following the lead of Glenn Turner, an
increasing number of players secured English county and league contracts. With
Richard Hadlee in particular developing as a world-class player, New Zealand
could finally boast a team with professional commitment and experience. In turn,
and especially in the post-Packer era, the domestic first-class programme was
expanded and sponsorship was secured as administrators found the confidence to
replace their conservative attitude to professionalism with a relatively progressive
approach that better prepared New Zealand for international cricket (Hadlee
1993: 202–5).23
In terms of results and attitude the early 1980s are the true halcyon period
for New Zealand cricketers. They did not lose a Test series on home soil from
1980 to 1992, completed first series victories in Australia in 1985 and England
in 1986, and managed a ratio of Test match wins exceeded only by the West
Indies during the 1980s (Devlin 1987).24 But the most enduring feature of
this period was the role of cricket in a markedly changed relationship with
Australia.
 New Zealand national identity 37
The fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942 and the subsequent reliance
on the United States to win the war in the Pacific signalled to New Zealand that
the traditional reliance on Britain could not be taken for granted. From 1951 the
Cold War ANZUS alliance between Australia, New Zealand and the United
States, paralleled with Britain’s gradual withdrawal from empire and shift towards
Europe, ensured a pronounced change to New Zealand’s international per-
spective. By necessity and inclination, New Zealand gradually came to identify
itself as a Pacific nation with distinctive regional interests. For many, although
not the politicians, who had anticipated it for more than a decade, this change
was also reinforced by Britain’s entry to the EEC on 1 January 1973 and the
consequent erosion of New Zealand’s long-established preferential economic
relationship. At the same time, the expansion of global media, communications
and international travel after the Second World War also reduced New Zealand’s
traditional cultural insularity as British influences were joined by American and
Australian elements. From the mid-1960s, when it became apparent that better
economic conditions in Australia were not a temporary phenomenon, the number
of New Zealanders visiting and settling in Australia increased dramatically.
By 2001 there were 435,000 New Zealanders permanently resident in Australia,
and 1.5 million people criss-cross the Tasman each year. Consequently, recent
decades have witnessed a much greater awareness of Australian mores, events and
personalities, and Australia became culturally, economically and politically
important to New Zealand in a way that had not been apparent since the
‘Australasian’ connection prior to 1914 (Belich 2001: 440–3; Sinclair 1987;
Grimes et al. 2002). Certainly the relationship is a lopsided one in that the
disparity in size and population between the two countries, among other factors,
dictates that New Zealand is rather more preoccupied with Australia than vice
versa. But in New Zealand minds at least, the greater interaction has contributed
to a heightened trans-Tasman rivalry in which sporting encounters became the
most visible manifestation – and none more than the ‘underarm’ incident on
1 February 1981.
The World Series of 1980–1 was of considerable importance to the profile of
New Zealand cricket because it represented the first exposure for players and
television viewers alike to the Packer-driven intensity of one-day international
cricket with floodlights, white balls and coloured clothing. When New Zealand
required six runs off the last ball to win the third final of the series at the
Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Australian captain, Greg Chappell, ordered his
brother to bowl the last delivery underarm. Although New Zealand lost the game,
it claimed a significant moral victory. Responding to Chappell’s apparent
cowardice, the New Zealand Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, said, ‘I thought it
was most appropriate the Australian team was dressed in yellow.’25 The underarm
incident ‘confirmed’ many long-held opinions about the Australian character, and
‘underarm’ quickly became a New Zealand byword for things devious or unethical.
For its part, Australia was rather less consumed by New Zealand feelings, and its
cricketers placed much greater emphasis on enduring rivalries with England and
the powerful West Indies.
38 Greg Ryan
When Chappell’s team visited New Zealand in February 1982, an unprece-
dented 43,000 people turned out for the first one-day international at Eden Park.
If some traditionalists were unnerved by the ‘boisterous’ antics of many new
followers of New Zealand cricket, and especially those who were intoxicated by
much more than the play,26 none could deny that there was a refreshing change
from the timidity and deference of earlier decades. Nor could they argue when the
new fascination for one-day cricket translated into a dramatic increase in playing
numbers. While registered competitive adult players increased by only 22.5 per
cent in the three years after 1981, those engaged in ostensibly ‘social’ cricket, such
as mid-week competitions between business teams, increased by 211 per cent.
Perhaps more importantly, the total number of registered schoolboys jumped by
184 per cent between 1981 and 1985, and many other children were introduced
to the game through coaching programmes and modified forms of the game such
as Kiwi Cricket, which used a softer ball and ensured full participation by all
players. There was also a marked increase in the numbers of women and girls
following and playing the game.27
Cricket also benefited greatly from blows to the credibility of rugby caused by
the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand. The tour, conducted despite the ongo-
ing sports boycott of South Africa, produced large and violent protests. Although
rugby retained a strong core of support, to judge by the large television audiences
and sold-out grounds during the tour, many others dissociated themselves from
the game, and New Zealand was subjected to considerable scrutiny within the
international community – not least in terms of threats to its participation in
events such as the 1982 Commonwealth Games (see Templeton 1998, esp. pp.
178–203; Richards 1999). At the same time, an entirely unheralded New Zealand
team was advancing to its only appearance at the soccer World Cup, and many of
those disillusioned with rugby found a new outlet for their winter sporting passions
(Keane 1999). While cricket did not gain custom from these changes, it shared
with soccer a brief period of positive results and public enthusiasm relatively
unimpeded by the dominance of rugby.
But popular enthusiasm and a high profile for cricket was relatively short-lived,
and the game was ultimately unable to capitalise on the advantages it enjoyed
during the early 1980s. Although New Zealand continued to prosper in Test
matches at home and overseas during the late 1980s, the retirement of Richard
Hadlee in 1990 signalled a sharp decline in confidence and results. During the first
half of the 1990s New Zealand won only four and lost 18 of 37 Test matches.
Moreover, one-day cricket, so crucial in attracting new support at the start of the
1980s, was no longer a novelty and New Zealand’s performances were decidedly
erratic. It failed to reach the semi-finals of the 1983 and 1987 World Cups and
after 1985–6 the relationship with Australia was seldom rewarding – producing
only six one-day international victories from 28 attempts during the next decade.
As the young enthusiasts of 1982 moved on to the more time-consuming demands
of higher education and employment, those who followed found rather less to
captivate them. Indeed, the playing numbers of 1984–5 had decreased by as much
as a third by 1991.28
 New Zealand national identity 39
Amid these declining fortunes, the 1992 World Cup was an aberration – but
one that was to have significant consequences for the direction of New Zealand
cricket. Although New Zealand co-hosted the tournament with Australia, its
recent performances, and especially a series of comprehensive failures against
England, suggested little prospect of success.29 Yet the innovative captaincy and
brilliant batting of Martin Crowe and spectacular hitting by the opening batsman
Mark Greatbatch contributed to New Zealand winning seven games in succession
before succumbing to Pakistan in a semi-final. As the tournament progressed,
one detected the same mix of confidence and exhilaration that had greeted the
one-day game a decade earlier. In turn, playing numbers in all junior grades
increased during the following two seasons.30
As popular ‘euphoria’ echoed throughout the 1992 World Cup, those who
administered New Zealand cricket were, not surprisingly, determined to harness
and cultivate the feeling. Their primary method was an emphasis on various forms
of one-day cricket at the expense of the longer form of the game. For the 1992–3
season the NZCC officially sanctioned Action Cricket – a 20 overs per innings
format that allowed for two games on the same day. The following season it
introduced a second round to the domestic one-day competition and began to sig-
nificantly reduce the amount of domestic first-class cricket. From 1991–2 to
1995–6 the one-day programme doubled while first-class cricket was reduced by a
third (Payne and Smith 1995: 9–10). In 1995–6 the one-day game was condensed
still further with Cricket Max – a three-hour package in which each team has two
10-over innings and an opportunity to double the value of runs by hitting the ball
straight into a ‘Max Zone’.31 That Cricket Max was largely designed and marketed
by Martin Crowe, the architect of the 1992 World Cup success and more recently
director of cricket for Sky Television, is no coincidence (Crowe 1995: 241–8).
The 1990s also saw New Zealand Cricket Inc. (NZC), the successor to the
NZCC, greatly expand its marketing, ‘branding’ and merchandising activities.
Going to the cricket was presented as a complete ‘entertainment package’ replete
with music between overs and a wide range of souvenirs to satisfy young con-
sumers. The national team, supported by extensive sponsorship and television
advertising, was recast firstly as the ‘Young Guns’ – despite being on average older
than most of their predecessors – and latterly as the ‘Black Caps’. Provincial teams
were also adorned with such sobriquets as ‘Knights’, ‘Firebirds’ and ‘Wizards’.
Cricket followers were largely unimpressed by such strategies – perceiving
many of them as an attempt to artificially inflate the credentials of the national
team and disguise its continued inconsistency and failure to perform at crucial
moments.32 Despite propaganda to the contrary, Cricket Max largely failed
to generate public interest and did not expand to club, business league and
junior competitions in the manner envisaged by its promoters. As an increasing
amount of Australian cricket appeared on New Zealand pay television, there
was a growing awareness that the success of and support for cricket across the
Tasman was a product of attitude and ability in the two established forms of the
game – rather than to the artificiality of team names and ‘slogathons’ such as
Cricket Max.33
40 Greg Ryan
By the late 1990s, attendances at one-day international series in New Zealand
had dwindled to less than one-third of those during the early 1980s, and those for
domestic competitions spiralled downwards to the point where NZC abandoned
gate charges for first-class cricket.34 Eventually, moves were made against the
unproductive preoccupation with the one-day game as Cricket Max became a pre-
season event with little fanfare and the balance between one-day and first-class
domestic cricket was significantly redressed with the introduction of a second full
round of inter-provincial fixtures. Efforts were also made to secure development
tours by academy and ‘A’ teams to and from New Zealand (Payne and Smith 2002:
129, 172).35
The substantial increase in televised international cricket during the 1990s
was also a mixed blessing for NZC. It is probable that the relative quality of cricket
on offer is more attractive to some than watching domestic competitions or
the exertion of playing. Nor is there an imperative to attend international
matches, which, because of their frequency, now lack the air of anticipation and
importance that once accompanied short and irregular visits from touring teams.
In a sense, cricket has become a victim of its own promotion. Alternatively, it has
been suggested that the shift of most New Zealand cricket coverage to pay
television in 1998 has reduced access to the game among those, especially in lower
socio-economic groups, who are unable or unwilling to subscribe and can least
afford to attend games.36
But in fairness to the efforts of NZC, the ability of New Zealand to produce
successful cricket teams on a regular basis remains bound to certain of the
impediments that have been present throughout its history – and several new
ones. While the potential pool of players has obviously increased in accordance
with growth in the New Zealand population as a whole, a number of recent
surveys indicate that fewer people are able or willing to play cricket and that
the standard of the game at all levels below international declined markedly
during the 1990s. By way of explanation, several of the arguments of Robert
D. Putnam with respect to the decline of community in the United States (2000,
esp. pp. 184–284) are equally applicable to New Zealand. First, economic reforms
and liberalisation of employment practices since the 1980s have produced an
increasingly casualised workforce wherein many are obliged to work on Saturday
or Sunday and take a weekly holiday at another time (Canterbury Cricket
Association 1997: B2). This, combined with increases in both single-parent and
two-career families, has greatly undermined the traditional notion of the ‘week-
end’ as a time that can easily be devoted to team sport. Second, more disposable
income and elements of cultural globalisation have exposed New Zealand to a
much wider range of individual and team sports that erode the numbers playing
the traditionally dominant sports such as cricket and rugby. At the same time,
there is evidence to suggest that participation and club membership among all
sports have declined sharply in favour of sedentary leisure activities such as
computer games, films, live music, theatre and television watching (Hillary
Commission 1996). Although long-term analysis of New Zealand trends has not
yet been conducted, it is also likely, as Putnam argues, that generational change
 New Zealand national identity 41
has a role to play. As those whom he terms the ‘civic generation’, whose more
cooperative social habits were shaped by the mid-twentieth-century experience
of war and depression, were gradually replaced by generations of less involved
individuals without the same overarching imperative to cooperate, there was an
attendant decline in such things as team and club membership (Putnam 2000:
247–76). Certainly all these factors are equally apparent in other developed
cricket-playing countries such as Australia and England, but they are accentuated
by New Zealand’s small population and economy.
Without systematic inquiry, it is also uncertain how far cricket has adapted
to significant changes in the composition and location of the New Zealand
population – especially in terms of its appeal to burgeoning Maori and Pacific
Island communities in the largest cities. Although historical accounts greatly
exaggerate the Maori embrace of rugby, it is nevertheless substantial when
compared to that for cricket. For much of the twentieth century the largely urban
base and relative expense of cricket placed it out of reach of a predominantly rural
and economically vulnerable Maori population (Ryan 2003: ch. 4). Yet rapid
Maori urbanisation and relative economic improvement from the 1950s, at the
same time as significant migration by various Pacific peoples to New Zealand,
has yet to be consistently reflected in the upper echelons of New Zealand cricket.
The explanations and speculations for this are varied, complex and well beyond
the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say that whereas the two rugby codes and
netball have experienced something of a ‘Polynesianisation’ in terms of dominant
players (Hyde 1993), cricket can boast no more than a handful of Polynesians at
first-class or international level.37 Although NZC and its affiliated associations
have certainly lent their support to various initiatives for Maori and Pacific island
cricket tournaments and for kilikiti, the Pacific derivation of the game (Payne and
Smith 2001: 142–4), cricket remains disproportionately the domain of European
New Zealanders.
The greatest impediment to the popularity and profile of cricket has been
the rehabilitation of rugby since the mid-1980s. Certainly the game was slow to
digest the lessons of 1981 and the threat that continued sporting contact with
South Africa posed to the broader interests of New Zealand sport. Despite
renewed public protests, an All Black tour of South Africa in 1985 was only
stopped by a high court injunction. But a rebel ‘Cavaliers’ team did tour in 1986
– meeting with minimal disciplinary action from the rugby authorities upon its
return (Templeton 1998: 269–90).38 However, in 1987, as the cricket ‘boom’ was
beginning to subside, New Zealand and Australia hosted the inaugural Rugby
World Cup, in which the All Blacks triumphed with a style of open, entertaining
rugby not generally associated with their uncompromising quest for rugby
supremacy. They would remain unbeaten until 1990 and fully consolidate the
position of rugby as New Zealand’s ‘national game’ in terms of the size and passion
of its following (Hyde 1995).
After enduring elements of an internal crisis during the early 1990s as rugby
struggled to reconcile its supposedly amateur status with increased commercial-
isation, nascent professionalism and a more direct threat from professional rugby
42 Greg Ryan
league, the rugby authorities finally embraced open professionalism in 1995. With
seemingly limitless funding from the News Corporation empire of Rupert
Murdoch, rugby was able to expand its national, regional and international
competitions and establish an attendant media and public profile that simply
dwarfed the comparatively limited domestic and international cricket programme.
Moreover, the expanding rugby fixture list began to encroach on both ends of
the cricket season, to the extent that cricket has struggled to secure preferred
venues and acceptable playing surfaces – to say nothing of an adequate share of
discretionary consumer income.39
Perhaps the most crucial aspect of this transformation of rugby has been
the commodification of the All Blacks. Individual players and the team as a whole
are central to a media and marketing campaign in which rugby followers are
conditioned to expect success. Selective nostalgia has made much of the historical
success of All Black teams and the obligation to the past borne by those who wear
the All Black jersey. This was no more apparent than in the saturation coverage
accorded the team and all aspects of its preparation prior to the 1999 Rugby World
Cup. Despite very erratic form during 1998–9, the All Blacks were expected to
win and there was a sense in which all ‘right-thinking’ New Zealanders were
supposed to offer them unconditional support in their endeavour (Hope 2002).
There is an obvious contrast here with the somewhat muted coverage and lack
of expectation surrounding the departure of the New Zealand cricket team to
cricket’s own World Cup earlier in the same year. While rugby has maintained a
consistently strong public following irrespective of the quality of performance,
support for cricket is decidedly fickle in that its teams have to succeed in order to
briefly acquire the status that All Black teams enjoy almost as of right.
Running parallel to the forces of commercialisation, there has been a shift in
the conception of New Zealand identity. In broad terms, New Zealand’s economic
and cultural disengagement from its preoccupation with Britain by the 1970s
greatly reduced the relevance of comparison and measurement, whether expressed
as deference or a more assertive nationalism, against the standards of an external
British or Commonwealth reference point. Moreover, the consolidation of a
distinctly independent identity during the 1980s – not least in the form of
a radical anti-nuclear policy that precipitated the suspension of the ANZUS
alliance in 1985 (Belich 2001: 426–9; James 1986) – has perhaps produced an
environment in which, without as pressing a need to prove anything to the wider
world, confidence is accentuated and success becomes a legitimate and normal
expectation that is almost taken for granted.
This is not to suggest that international sport has become less important
to expressions of national prestige. The best efforts of those who manufacture
‘hype’ ensure that awareness of the connection remains strong. But the most
intense expressions of the relationship are revealed not in the sort of celebrations
of success and conferring of mythic status that accompanied the 1905 and 1924
All Blacks or the exploits of Sir Edmund Hillary, but through invective against
failure. Failures produce an exaggerated negative reaction precisely because they
represent a departure from what is expected. The defeat of the All Blacks by
 New Zealand national identity 43
France in the semi-finals of the 1999 Rugby World Cup produced far greater
comment and analysis from rugby administrators and the public than their victory
in 1987. Rugby followers, aided by the same media that had inflated their
expectations in the first place, saw the World Cup loss as confirming an erosion
of those masculine character traits and rural values that are supposedly at the core
of a strong New Zealand society. As one journalist bitterly observed,

It is sad to relate that the All Blacks have become soft, living the life of luxury
week after week in posh hotels away from the real world, and becoming part
of a money-making entity that seemed almost to lose sight of the team’s
objective – to win the World Cup. They were pampered like gods and movie
stars. They became the Spice Boys.
(Ryan forthcoming)

The social and sporting transformation of the past decade has inevitably altered
the nexus between cricket and conceptions of national identity. Because New
Zealand cricket does not possess a legacy of international achievement to match
that of the All Blacks and has enjoyed only brief moments of elevation to the
same heights of public expectation, reactions to its fluctuating performances
during the 1990s were not as pronounced. Few would respond to the failings of
New Zealand cricket teams with the sort of apoplexy widely apparent after the
1999 Rugby World Cup. But perhaps the consequence of the sense of confidence
among cricket followers that derived from strong performances during the early
1980s and at the 1992 World Cup is the same double-edged sword that hangs over
rugby: a certain expectation of success that has resulted in an excessively negative
reaction if success does not materialise. The past decade has exhibited the same
vulture-like tendency to dwell on the frailties and failings of New Zealand cricket
rather than celebrating its achievements. The most intense coverage of and public
interest in New Zealand cricket during the 1990s has focused not on the semi-
final appearance at the 1999 World Cup, the first Test series win in England
during the same year or the ICC Knockout Trophy victory in 2001, but on
controversies and internal politicking – and none more than the events of the
calamitous NZCC centennial season of 1994–5 in which a string of heavy defeats
was compounded by acrimony between players and officials and a series of off-field
indiscretions and controversies culminating in the sacking of the national coach
and the suspension of three players for smoking marijuana on tour (Payne and
Smith 1995: 7–8).40
Notwithstanding the erratic performances of New Zealand rugby teams at all
levels since 1998, and a certain degree of disillusion with the impact of profes-
sional rugby, it remains the case that cricket suffers in comparison against the
profile of rugby. The polarity between the two sports was most evident in reactions
to a strike by New Zealand first-class cricketers amid their efforts to form a players’
association in 2002. Galvanised by the substantial incomes of their rugby
counterparts, the players sought a 60 per cent increase in overall remuneration
and the full funding of their association by New Zealand Cricket Inc. After six
44 Greg Ryan
weeks of negotiation they secured a settlement slightly in excess of 20 per cent
and no funding for the association.41 More importantly, they entirely failed to
generate public sympathy for their claims. Some critics argued that the inflated
salaries of professional rugby players were no basis for negotiation. Others pointed
to the sharp decline in support for domestic cricket during the 1990s and its
considerable annual losses. This, coupled with the erratic performances of the
New Zealand team, did not stand comparison with the demands and expectations
confronting professional rugby players.42 As one columnist lamented at the height
of the strike,

Even cricket stalwarts must now question the future of what was once
our national summer game. Gone are the days when rugby and cricket shared
the 12 months of the sporting year. Today rugby occupies pride of place,
attracting fans for nine or ten months of the year, while crowd-strapped
cricket competes against so many other summer attractions. With the pros-
pect of many top players out of action for industrial reasons, it might be
argued that this season at least we no longer have a national summer sport.43

It is doubtful whether the resolution of the strike will alter this perception in many
minds.
The prospects for New Zealand cricket are difficult to predict. Consistently
strong performances from the national team will undoubtedly boost credibility
and sustain public interest. But there is also a sense in which the destiny of the
game is beyond its own control, in that any cricketing achievement is more likely
than ever to be subsumed by a more intense media and public focus on comparable
successes in rugby. Even if the All Blacks fail, rugby can fall back on a much
stronger financial base, a more comprehensive infrastructure and a range of
domestic competitions that attract considerable public support irrespective of the
performance of the national team. Yet there is solace for New Zealand cricket in
the knowledge that at various times during the past half-century it has been able
to surmount internal and external obstacles to become genuinely competitive at
international level and secure a share of popular adulation at home.

Notes
1 New Zealand Herald, 14 March 1956, p. 10; The Press, 14 March 1956, p. 12.
2 See also the Evening Post, 18 February 2000, p. 6.
3 For differing perspectives on Wakefield, see E. Olssen (1997) and Martin (1997).
4 For a general discussion of this relationship, see Ryan (1996: 382–7).
5 Unless otherwise stated, all statistics concerning the playing record of New Zealand
teams are derived from these sources.
6 See, for example, New Zealand Cricket Council Annual Report 1959–60; 1961–62;
1962–63.
7 The match was retrospectively granted Test status at a meeting of the Imperial
Cricket Conference in 1948 (Harte 1993: 412).
8 Evening Post, 1 April 1946, pp. 5–6.
9 New Zealand Herald, 29 March 1955, p. 10.
 New Zealand national identity 45
10 Evening Post, 5 March 1963, p. 14.
11 Evening Post, 17 August 1949, p. 6. See also 23 February 1960, p. 12.
12 New Zealand Listener, 2 April 1953, p. 4.
13 New Zealand Listener, 26 February 1954, p. 4.
14 Evening Post, 27 August 1958, p. 20.
15 New Zealand Listener, 7 September 1970, pp. 56–7.
16 See also New Zealand Cricketer, September 1973, p. 39.
17 Dominion Sunday Times, 18 February 1992, p. 26.
18 The Cricket Player, July 1978, p. 2; September 1978, pp. 2, 14–15.
19 See also New Zealand Listener, 12 February 1977, p. 20.
20 New Zealand Listener, 12 February 1977, p. 20. See also The Cricket Player, January
1975, p. 1.
21 The Cricket Player, July 1978, pp. 2–4; September 1978, pp. 2, 12–17.
22 For a corrective as it relates specifically to rugby, see Ryan (2001).
23 See also The Cricket Player, September 1980, p. 1; December 1982, p. 1. W. Hadlee,
The Innings of a Lifetime, Auckland, David Bateman, 1993, pp. 202–5.
24 See also New Zealand Cricket Council Annual Report 1989–90.
25 The Press, 3 February 1981, p. 34.
26 The Press, 15 February 1982, p. 1; 16 February 1982, p. 34.
27 New Zealand Listener, 6 April 1983, p. 14; New Zealand Cricket Council Annual Report
1984–85.
28 New Zealand Cricket Council Annual Report 1988–89, p. 11; 1990–91, p. 12.
29 For example, Benson & Hedges World Cup: Official Souvenir Magazine and Program,
Sydney: PBL Marketing, 1991, pp. 8–9.
30 New Zealand Cricket Council Annual Report 1992–93; 1993–94.
31 Dominion Sunday Times, 3 March 1996, p. 2; Sunday Star Times, 20 October 1996,
p. 11.
32 For example, The Press, 15 May 1997, p. 27; 30 January 1998, p. 21; Sunday Star Times,
1 February 1998, p. 7; Evening Standard, 16 April 1998, p. 7; 13 November 1998, p. 24.
33 For example, The Dominion, 17 January 1998, p. 57; 24 August 2001, p. 23; Sunday Star
Times, 9 April 2000, p. 2; Evening Post, 25 May 2001, p. 29.
34 Sunday Star Times, 21 February 1999, p. B2.
35 For example, see also Evening Post, 24 February 1999, p. 36; Waikato Times, 6 May
1999, p. 8; The Press, 12 February 2001, p. 25.
36 Timaru Herald, 10 March 1998, p. 4; 24 January 2000, p. 4; Daily News, 11 March
1998, p. 3; The Press, 15 April 1998, p. 29.
37 Since 1990 the New Zealand players of Maori ancestry have been Adam Parore,
Heath Davis and Daryl Tuffey. Murphy Su’a, a Samoan, also played Test cricket.
38 The NZRFU suspended the players for two Test matches.
39 For example, The Dominion, 1 September 1999, p. 43; New Zealand Herald, 2 October
1999, p. 19.
40 See also Evening Post, 5 September 1995, p. 5.
41 For example, New Zealand Herald, 8 October 2002, p. 13; Dominion Post, 11 October
2002, p. 12; Sunday Star Times, 10 November 2002, p. 1; 17 November 2002, p. 7.
42 For example, the Nelson Mail, 24 October 2002, p. 26; The Press, 24 October
2002, p. 8; Waikato Times, 7 November 2002, p. 13; Dominion Post, 7 November 2002,
p. 6.
43 The Press, 6 November 2002, p. 14.

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Crowe, M. (1995) Out on a Limb, Auckland: Reed Publishing.
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Zealand 1901–2001, Wellington: Institute of Policy Studies.
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and New Zealand’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42 (2): 307–32.
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Wellington: Hillary Commission.
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3 ‘No one in Dolly’s class at
present?’
Cricket and national identity in
post-apartheid South Africa
Jon Gemmell and James Hamill

In 1976 when Dr Ali Bacher, the emerging head of white South African cricket,
was asked about the chances of South Africa fielding a multiracial Test team and
of the emergence of black players such as Basil D’Oliveira, he announced:

[T]o be honest, a Test team picked on merit now would be all white, but in
two or three years it may be a different story. We don’t have anyone in Dolly’s
class at present, but there are many promising Indian and coloured players
and a few outstanding blacks.
(Marsden 1977)

The development programmes launched during the height of the most turbulent
of periods in South Africa were meant to unearth such talent. They were also seen
as a means of integrating all sections of apartheid society. At the time of Nelson
Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, Bacher enthusiastically proclaimed that ‘If
we had a South African Under-15 or Under-17 team, there is no question it would
be composed of players from all the population groups’ (quoted in Cook 1993:
150–1).
This chapter looks at the progress made towards non-racial cricket in South
Africa in the period since the end of white minority rule. Such an examination,
it will be argued, is only possible if accompanied by a consideration of the
economic and political forces that have shaped the ‘new South Africa’. The
chapter will therefore explore a number of themes:

• the role of the government in encouraging sport;

• the role of sport in the formation of national identity;
• the relationship between class and playing cricket;
• racial attitudes among South African cricketers;
• the success or otherwise of the development programmes in delivering
cricketers from the disadvantaged communities onto the first-class stage.

Ultimately the chapter seeks to evaluate whether the old slogan ‘no normal
cricket in an abnormal society’1 can yet be laid to rest, considering the massive
inequalities that still define the country.
 National identity in South Africa 49
Colonialism
[T]he features of classic colonialism are the hallmark of the relations that obtain
between the black majority and white minority.
(Statement of the Lisbon Conference of the ANC)2

To understand the special role that cultural phenomena have been afforded
in post-apartheid South Africa, it is necessary to appreciate that attitudes to the
old regime were akin to those of coloniser and colonised. As with other coun-
tries being studied in this book, colonialism has been a leading and formidable
presence in shaping the history of South Africa. Although South Africa enjoyed,
along with Australia and New Zealand, dominion status and greater freedoms
within the overall structure of British imperialism, a colonial presence remained
and was exploited by the Afrikaner nationalist movement in order to forge
a political opposition to the status quo. The election victory of the National Party
in May 1948 would lead to a transformation process that not only formally
relegated black South Africans to an inferior status, but also undid a number of
elements within society associated with the hegemony of the English-speakers. If
we consider, then, 1910 (the year of self-government) and 1948 as defining
moments in the historiography of colonialism in South Africa, those of us
interested in cricket would add 1961, the year South Africa became a republic.
Membership of the Imperial Cricket Council (the world’s governing body) was
dependent upon allegiance to the British Crown. The whole controversy about
relations with South African cricket begins not with the subsequent ‘D’Oliveira
affair’ (of 1968) but with this nationalist strike against English hegemony.
The purpose of this exercise, however, is a study not of the history of colo-
nialism, but rather of its enduring effects on contemporary cricket. For that
purpose, this chapter focuses primarily on the period following the ending of white
rule. We are concerned with the development of cricket since the formation of
the United Cricket Board of South Africa (UCB) in 1991. There is, of course, a
theoretical motive for adopting such a standpoint. In South Africa the liberation
movement was naturally engaged in the question of the nature of the future post-
apartheid state.3 In order to maintain a coalition that included an emerging
black petit bourgeoisie and middle strata, the liberation movement flinched from
a rigid socialist orthodoxy, although its rhetoric and sloganising certainly drew
upon the vocabulary of socialism. Instead, the South African Communist Party
(SACP), the formal ally of the African National Congress (ANC), formulated a
strategy known as ‘internal colonialism’. This theoretical approach perceived the
white apartheid regime as colonisers and so allowed for an alliance of the workers’
movement with the forces of nationalism. ‘Colonialism is not monolithic’,
declared the Statement of the ANC’s Lisbon Conference in 1977. Africa has
experienced ‘differing forms of colonial domination’, which have shared one
central characteristic: ‘the denial of the African people of their rights of national
self-determination’.4 In the SACP’s two-stage theory, national liberation would
precede socialism, but it would be an important step down the path to that
50 Jon Gemmell and James Hamill
ultimate goal. The economic pillars of the 1955 Freedom Charter, the move-
ment’s principal pre-1990 philosophical statement – which contained a specific
reference to nationalisation as well as vaguer formulations such as ‘the people
shall share in the country’s wealth’ and ‘the land shall be shared among those who
work it’ – remained impossible to separate from the ‘aspects of national liberation
struggle’.5
This study is one of cricket in South Africa following the demise of white rule.
There were no meaningful steps towards socialism in that period. As a critic of
the ‘two-stage’ theory pointed out, fighting racial oppression challenges ‘capital-
ism in its present form’ but ‘does not guarantee its fundamental transformation’.6
Cricket has developed in a country whose economic structure has remained
largely intact. This reaffirms that a nationalist ideology has always tended to lean
more towards the political rather than the economic and, militant rhetoric apart,
ultimately the liberation struggle appears to have been conducted against the
precise form that capitalism assumed in South Africa, namely a racialised and
discriminatory model, rather than against capitalism per se. It is within such a
setting that the development of cricket in the post-apartheid era is examined.

Reconciliation and national identity

[T]he most significant and important [day] in the history of South African cricket
(Ali Bacher on the formation of the UCB, quoted in Bishop 1991: 12)

The new democratic South Africa faces the same problem as other states in the
global community, namely, that of finding common factors around which it can
unify its disparate inhabitants. The diverse South African population combines
any number of different ideological, ethnic, linguistic and racial interests. This
‘rainbow nation’ emerged from a sustained period of turmoil unprecedented in the
contemporary world, with the possible exception of the ongoing conflict in
Israel/Palestine. It immediately confronted a period during which two mighty and
suspicious powers, the economic and the political, based on racial foundations,
struggled to assert themselves as key shapers of the social fabric.
A politically diverse population, including hard-line Afrikaners, Zulu ethnic
nationalists, liberal whites, coloured communities, descendants of South Asian
immigrants, and both urban and traditional Africans, would prove difficult to
unite around political notions such as ‘national liberation’ and ‘democracy’.
Democracy was something of a double-edged sword in this respect; the downside
was that in a racially divided society it threatened to entrench the dominance of
the majority’s favoured party, namely the ANC. On a more positive note, a
democratic system that would allow all political formations some space and scope
to develop and a democratic infrastructure embracing a separation of powers, a
Bill of Rights, a free press, an independent judiciary and a vibrant civil society
would help temper that one-party dominance. Predictably, the first free elections,
in 1994 and 1999, saw the electorate divide along racial lines, indicating that
ideological differences will take generations to mould into any form of national
 National identity in South Africa 51
identity free of racial and ethnic undertones. Symbols such as the flag and
the national anthem have proved to be areas that, in the immediate post-1994
period at least, have ignited passions, and so while claiming to be symbolic and
representative of the new South Africa, they could not initially claim to be
truly national. Sport, however, was something that could potentially draw people
from all sectors of society together. Cricket was in an advantageous position to
assist in this process. It had a traditionally strong following in the English-
speaking, coloured and Indian populations; was becoming more popular within
the Afrikaner community (four of the 1992 World Cup squad – Wessels, Cronje,
Bosch and Donald – had Afrikaans as their first language); and had always
attracted players of African descent. No other major sport could claim such a
reservoir of potential from which to build a future nationally representative team.
Cricket was the first sport to benefit from the relaxation of sanctions against
South Africa. This was attributable to the timing of the 1992 World Cup
following President F. W. de Klerk’s historic political initiative of February 1990,
the subsequent release of Nelson Mandela and other ANC activists from prison,
and the beginning of negotiations for a new post-apartheid constitutional
dispensation. Sport offered the political elite an opportunity to fashion a national
identity representative of all people. President de Klerk even exploited South
African participation in the cricket World Cup by holding a white referendum
in March 1992, while the competition was still taking place, in which he sought
the approval of the white electorate for his power-sharing strategy, threatening to
‘bring the boys back home’ if he was unsuccessful. (In fact, he secured a resounding
68 per cent ‘Yes’ vote, a figure probably swollen by the cricket factor.) The ANC
leadership, with the power to offer South Africans an entry ticket to the World
Cup, used sport to anchor its reconciliation process.
In December 1990 the black South African Cricket Board (SACB) and the
white South African Cricket Union agreed, at a meeting chaired by the ANC’s
Steve Tshwete, to merge as the United Cricket Board of South Africa.7 Their
initial statement of intent included a number of points that established the
political role that cricket would play in the redevelopment of the nation. Point
A set the UCB the task of endeavouring ‘to achieve peace and harmony in cricket
in our country’. The new body hoped to ‘formulate strategies to redress urgently
imbalances in regard to separate educational systems, sponsorships and facilities’.
The most ambitious and directly political statement, however, was its aspiration
to ‘contribute, through cricket, to the creation of a just society in South Africa
where everybody democratically has a common say and a common destiny’.8
This document subordinated the task of creating a great national side to a more
important role: the reconstruction of the nation, built upon the notion of equality
of opportunity. Geoff Dakin, the UCB’s first president, described the estab-
lishment of a unified cricket board as ‘a catalyst for all other sporting codes to
bring about a new South Africa’ (Day 1991: 10). This optimistic theme would
continue as an integral part of cricketing culture in the new South Africa. At the
1994 annual meeting, for example, UCB president Krish Mackerdhuj’s address
stated that cricket would play a leading role in ‘the social uplift of communities’
52 Jon Gemmell and James Hamill
(Owen-Smith 1994: 56).9 At the 2003 World Cup, hosted by South Africa, the
prevailing theme was one of black empowerment.10
It is clear, then, that South African cricket would remain fully engaged in and
shaped by the political process. This actually worked to the advantage of those
who had previously decried the relationship between sport and politics. Raymond
White, chairman of the Transvaal Cricket Board (a man who had previously held
the ANC to be a terrorist organisation and who believed the SACP wanted to
create another ‘Lebanon’ in South Africa), accepted that without ANC support
South Africa’s readmission to the ICC would be ‘inconceivable’ (White 1991: 3).
The case for readmission was supported by a letter to all foreign ministers of the
ICC full member countries from the then head of the ANC’s International Affairs
Department – Thabo Mbeki.
Considering the UCB’s statement of intent, and its association with the
political process, just how could cricket assist in ‘the creation of a just society in
South Africa’? Initially it was seen as a vehicle to assist in the reconciliation
process. White South Africans were encouraged to embrace democratic and
‘normal’ civilian life in return for the maintenance of their living standards
(and their disproportionate economic power, at least in the short to medium
term) and the lifting of their ostracism within the international community.
In the long term the ANC sought to consolidate its regime around a notion
of national identity. In this way, then, a just society would be one that became
legitimised in the eyes of its disparate parts. As Lincoln Allison has noted, ‘sport
has a complex and important interaction with nationality and the phenomenon
of nationalism’ (1993: 4–5). It allows for the symbols, icons and anthems to be
displayed and performed. Conversely, it provides an arena within which these
national symbols can be challenged and reformed. So, while the whites secured
their return to international cricket, they did so under a cricket authority
represented not by the Springbok, but by South Africa’s flower, the Protea, and
with two national anthems: Die Stem and Nkosi Sikeleli’Afrika (although the latter
gradually began to supplant the former as the ‘true’ national anthem).
Was this merely the triumph of image over substance? A just society and the
fostering of a national identity will require more than supposedly unifying symbols
such as anthems and flags. A just society is one that allows each South African
to reach his or her potential in every field of endeavour, including sport. This
requires not only political changes but economic changes too, especially in the
area of poverty relief. So, was a process of national reconciliation unachievable
without fundamental socio-economic transformation, as Thabo Mbeki would
subsequently argue? Probably. Hassan Howa, the veteran campaigner against sport
in an ‘abnormal society’, complained that the drive towards amalgamation was
premature and ‘happening with indecent haste and disregard for the realities of
South African life’ (Owen-Smith 1992: 53). He protested that the first ever
Indian visit in 1992–3 was ‘dishonest’, as the South African team ‘represented
only those players who enjoyed the great benefits of racial discrimination. It was
not a South African team but a white South African team’ (quoted in Desai et al.
2002: 20). Rushdi Magiet, the first black convener of the South African selection
 National identity in South Africa 53
committee, conceded that ‘a lot of our community did not agree with unification’
(Owen-Smith 1999: 46). To Nelson Mandela, however, integrated sport assisted
the country’s broader political momentum. Late into the whole sports boycott
issue, the ANC enjoyed the luxury of being able to dismiss long-held positions:

We have extremists who say there can be no normal sport in a racial society.
But it seems to me that sport is sport, and quite different from politics.
If sportsmen here take steps to remove the colour bar, then we must take that
into account.
(Nelson Mandela, quoted in Ahmed 1991: 9)

Respect for the moratorium on international cricket, agreed by both parties in

the unity talks, was now sacrificed in order to satisfy the ‘changing conditions and
requirements of the wider liberation struggle’ (Desai et al. 2002: 364–7).11
Although Nelson Mandela’s tendency to develop policy ‘on the hoof ’, and to
indulge in diplomatic freelancing without fully testing opinion in the ANC as a
whole, became a standard feature of post-1990 South African politics, on this
occasion the ANC, including Steve Tshwete, its chief spokesperson on sporting
issues and subsequently Sports Minister in the 1994–9 government, backed the
new approach. That said, it might be asked if this position was really so different
from that advocated by the so-called bridge-builders of the 1980s who urged the
international community to ignore politics and allow South Africa back into the
fold – much to the dismay of the ANC, then tied to a position Mandela now
characterised as ‘extremist’?
Ten years on and the reconciliation process still generates a fierce controversy.
Just how far have black players advanced during this decade? Many have been
provided with opportunities that were legally denied them in the past. But is
this enough? Has the reconciliation process proved beneficial only to those who
might have prospered under the old regime? It has certainly been seen in such
a way. A leading article in the South African Independent complained that ‘all
the “reconciliation”, “forgiveness”, “understanding”, “compromise”, and the
“rainbow-nation” stuff has come from black cricketers and administrators’
(Independent 1998). This raises a number of questions: is there peace and
harmony in South African cricket? How have the imbalances been redressed, and,
more importantly, how far has the ANC gone in delivering the ‘just society’?

Targets
South Africa has been a broken society. We need to do our little bit in cricket to
bring stability back to South African life. The whole of our cricket and country is
in a fragile state.
(Percy Sonn12)

Both the rugby and cricket national teams remain lily-white, despite their much
publicised development programmes in previously disadvantaged communities.
54 Jon Gemmell and James Hamill
Those who had been picked and had proved themselves were constantly forced to
warm the substitutes’ bench and carry drinks to the other players.
(Lulu Xingwana13)

A national identity is usually defined in terms of common origin, ethnicity or

cultural ties (Miscevic 2001). South Africa, though, has been forged out of a
number of distinct ethnic and racial identities, reinforced through an apartheid
system rooted in the notion of separateness. This creates obvious difficulties and
problems for the promoters of nationhood. For the nationalist, the claims of the
nation usually supersede those of other contenders for authority and loyalty. But
is such an allegiance possible in a society that has been legally stratified according
to ethnic and racial origin? In a country as starkly divided as South Africa, though,
perhaps the idea of ‘nation’ is one of the few areas that can unite people with a
sense of common interest (this is certainly an area in which sport can become
involved, as witnessed famously at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, where Mandela
wore the Springbok shirt at the cultural capital of the Afrikaner). This liberal
interpretation of the merits of nationalism ignores, of course, the questions of
power and justice. However, the nation has proved to be an apparatus around
which the ANC could attempt to reconcile and then transform South Africa. Its
project, therefore, has been to overturn a social consciousness that was based on
division, and attempt to define a common identity as the basis for the creation of
a non-racial sense of nationhood.
Under apartheid, the South African Cricket Board (SACB) argued that black
cricketers would not be able to compete on an equal footing with their white
counterparts because of the vast social and economic differences. Whites attended
the best schools, took the higher-paid jobs, enjoyed superior accommodation
and played sports on the best grounds. These inequalities were enshrined in law.
South Africa was a starkly divided society, with social provision determined
by the gruesome racial hierarchies of apartheid. This was the form assumed by
colonialism in South Africa. Following relaxation of some of the ‘petty apartheid’
regulations in the 1970s and 1980s, mixed cricket could at last be permitted.
However, how could individuals who had been categorised as inferior and denied
access to the privileges of the ‘white club’ compete on an equal footing with white
cricketers? Such an argument formed the crux of the position ‘no normal sport in
an abnormal society’.
National identity is supposedly characterised by a sense of cultural homogene-
ity. It is not possible in a society where status and inequality are primarily
determined by skin colour. The reconstruction of post-apartheid society, then,
called for measures that would bestow a sense of empowerment on the disad-
vantaged communities. Positive discrimination or affirmative action would not be
an end in itself but the chosen instrument for the creation of a fairer and more
equal non-racial social structure. The need for such a policy was explicitly
recognised in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act, 1996, in the
Bill of Rights, which states, ‘Equality includes the full and equal enjoyment of all
rights and freedoms. To promote the achievement of equality, legislative and
 National identity in South Africa 55
other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons,
disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken.’14
Elsewhere in the constitution there are a number of references to ‘redressing
the imbalances of the past to achieve broad representation’ – for example, in local
government, the judiciary, public service, and so on. 15 There is a clear consti-
tutional recognition, therefore, that the discrimination of the past was based on
race, gender and the skewed allocation of resources and that it needs to be
redressed. Ideological discourse therefore recognises diversity while attempting
to account for suppressed histories. This recognition of difference (as opposed to
its celebration and enforcement in the apartheid era) forms part of the process
of reconciliation, and thus is the starting point for the development of a sense of
national identity (captured in the ANC’s phrase ‘unity in diversity’), for affir-
mative action is a mechanism through which the government hopes to normalise
society, and by doing so to begin the process of merging its various parts. That
commitment to affirmative action was taken forward with the passage of the 1998
Employment Equity Act, which compels companies employing over 50 people to
take measures to ensure that previously disadvantaged groups – blacks, women
and the disabled – are adequately represented in the workforce. The ultimate
objective of the legislation is to encourage companies, on pain of financial
penalty, to bring their workforce – from shopfloor to boardroom – into line with
the demographic composition of the population as a whole.16
How would the affirmative action initiatives affect cricket? The ANC’s 1994
Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) stated that sport was ‘an
integral part of reconstructing and developing a healthier society’. This could not
be left entirely in the hands of the sporting bodies, though; the government also
had a role to play.17 The UCB was charged with encouraging the disadvantaged
communities to take up the sport. Shaun Pollock, the former captain of the
national team, commented that ‘we have to create a new culture in which the
youngsters [in the townships] want to be associated with cricket’ (Agnew 1998:
30). The fact that Pollock had made such a comment in 1998 indicated that
progress at the top level had been slow. The development programmes were
introducing players of colour to cricket of a higher standard, but it would take
more than the few years Ali Bacher had predicted before the national side would
be representative of the nation as a whole. If political forces were exploiting sport,
they were failing.
In December 1997 Thabo Mbeki became ANC president as Mandela, still the
state president, began his carefully choreographed withdrawal from the political
stage. Mbeki, as ANC president, as an increasingly assertive deputy president of
the country, and as state president from June 1999 has effectively discarded the
harmonious mood music of inter-racial reconciliation with which Mandela was
so closely associated in the period 1994–7. Instead, he has chosen to emphasise
the need for a thoroughgoing project of socio-economic ‘transformation’ – the
latter being the key buzzword of the Mbeki era – as the only route to political and
social stability, to true reconciliation, and to a genuinely non-racial society.
Mbeki’s politics gave much greater attention to the question of race and of
56 Jon Gemmell and James Hamill
continuing racial inequality, and whites have been encouraged (often in quite
apocalyptic language) to embrace the transformation project ‘consciously and
voluntarily’ or else risk widespread social upheaval. Mbeki’s message to whites has
been consistently stark: ‘too little change is a threat’ and ‘non-racialism means
that inequities based on race must be removed’ (Southscan 1997). In November
1997, one month before assuming the presidency of the ANC, he put it in
characteristically blunt terms for The Economist:

The white population I don’t think has quite understood the importance of
this challenge . . . if you were speaking of national reconciliation based on
the maintenance of the status quo, because you did not want to move at a
pace that frightens the whites, it means that you wouldn’t carry out the task
of transformation. You would not produce reconciliation on that basis.
It might look so to the people who benefited from apartheid – everybody’s
forgiven us, nobody’s after nationalising our swimming pools. It isn’t, because
you have the anger that would be boiling among the black people. So you’ve
got to transform the society.
(The Economist 1997)

This more impatient and abrasive racial discourse has inevitably proved
controversial. Many whites have come to view Mbeki as something of a racial
sabre-rattler when compared to his more emollient predecessor, a leader who seeks
to scapegoat minorities for the ANC government’s own failings. For his part,
Mbeki considers his approach to be an honest attempt to reacquaint white South
Africans with the grotesque divisions of South African society which the ‘rainbow
nation’ rhetoric may have obscured but had certainly not removed. He also felt
that whites needed to be disabused of the notion that merely by acquiescing
in the political formalities of transition they had more than met their obligations
to the new South Africa. Whatever Mbeki’s precise motivation, these periodic
interventions have undoubtedly contributed to a renewed racial polarisation of
South African political debate.18
Cricket became embroiled in this process through the visit of the West
Indies side in 1998. The West Indian team were held in special affection by the
cricket-minded among the African population. They had shown that the African
athlete was every bit as capable as his white counterpart. Moreover, the West
Indies had discarded the shackles of colonialism and, by adopting an overtly
political stance, had conquered the cricket world.19 In the townships, role models
came in the form of Brian Lara and Curtley Ambrose rather than Shaun Pollock
and Hansie Cronje. The tactless selection of an all-white XI for the first Test
led to obvious criticisms about the racial imbalance of the national side. The
UCB responded with a Transformation Charter that confirmed its commitment
to the government’s strategy of redressing the imbalances of the past through
the principles of positive discrimination. Targets would be set for both national
and provincial sides. Wherever possible, South Africa would not be represented
by an all-white XI again. Significantly, considering subsequent events, when the
 National identity in South Africa 57
outcome of a series was decided, remaining games would provide opportunities to
promote players of colour into the national team (The Cricketer 1999).
These measures were supplemented by a UCB initiative that sought to
transform cricket by seeking racial parity in all features of the sport by 2002.
General targets were in place for school, tertiary education and provincial cricket.
The wider game was also considered, with guidelines concerning the appointment
of more people of colour as ground staff, umpires, managers, scorers, coaches and
administrators.20 The UCB was even considering a scheme to enable the training
of aspirant black cricket journalists. Bacher said that ‘in three years’ time, if
[transformation] happens, then we tear up the [development] document. Our aim
is to find parity and then let the future be dictated by natural forces’ (Cricinfo
1999). Resistance came from the national captain, the coach and the UCB
president, Ray White, who warned that cricket in South Africa was ‘fracturing
along racial lines’ and that the UCB had become ‘little more than an organ of the
ANC’.21 In all probability, the measures were adopted by a reluctant Cricket
Board to prevent the government, in an election year, from acting first. Despite
its assigned role in the process of reconciliation, the UCB and ANC have
remained uneasy bedfellows.
The controversy accompanying targets reached boiling point at the turn of
2002 when the UCB president, Percy Sonn, intervened in the third Test against
Australia, and demanded that the selectors pick the coloured Justin Ontong
rather than the selected player Jacques Rudolph. The South Africans were two-
nil down in a series of three, so the moment was opportune to select a player
for the future (a criterion both fulfilled). The No. 6 ‘all-rounder’ Lance Klusener
was being dropped. According to Sonn, Ontong was selected to cover the late
middle-order/all-rounder’s position; Rudolph was cover for the top three. Sonn
said that including Rudolph, whether as a No. 6 or to allow someone else to drop
down the order, ‘amounted to exclusion of a person of colour who has the right
to be given the opportunity’. He added, ‘If there is an opportunity for a person
of colour to represent his country then we must make sure that he does get that
opportunity. I regarded that as not having been complied with’.22 Sonn followed
up by expressing a desire for the South African side to be more representative of
the country at large, and said that it was time to increase the number of players
of colour selected to two. There was a sense of disbelief from the media, both
in South Africa and overseas. The former captain Clive Rice was among those
who criticised the position of the UCB president. The reconciliatory and
transformative role that cricket had been allocated seemed forgotten. All that
mattered was the principle that selection should come from the best available,
regardless of the social and economic circumstances that determine who gets
selected and who is ‘the best available’. This debate reflected the time-honoured
intellectual and political struggle between two competing concepts of equality:
the classically liberal notion of equality of opportunity, anchored in equality of
treatment before the law, and the more radical attempt to address the socio-
economic inequalities that are held to make a genuine equality of opportunity
impossible.
58 Jon Gemmell and James Hamill
Economic inequalities
The distribution of income and wealth in South Africa may be the most unequal
in the world.
(Poverty and Inequality in South Africa23)

At the heart of the philosophical opposition to multiracial cricket under apartheid

was the belief that everyday normal activities, such as sport, could not be such
amid the abnormalities of the wider racial economic and political structure. A
policy statement by South African Council on Sport (SACOS) in 1980 pointed
out that ‘there is an inter-dependence between a society and its sporting system.
Sport is a by-product of society. It reflects the spiritual wealth of a society. Or
it reflects its political decay’.24 Poverty was racially defined. It was expressed
through the education system, the labour market and poor housing. Each of these
affected the development of cricket among South Africa’s disadvantaged
populations. Even though the white cricketing authorities eventually made
approaches to the black communities, there could be no parity of contest. How
could schoolchildren compete if the one side had been coached by ex-first-
class players and the other could not even afford textbooks, let alone cricket
bats?
The roots of these abnormalities were economic. With just 5 per cent of the
population (white) owning 88 per cent of the wealth and an African unem-
ployment rate that approached 50 per cent, apartheid South Africa was one of
the most unequal states on the global stage (Murray 1994: 28). Class came to take
on a form that was distinctly racial. An individual’s identity would be first
determined by his or her racial grouping, and under the bantustan or ‘grand
apartheid’ policy of H. F. Verwoerd’s premiership (1958–66) a further layer of
ethnic division was added with the creation of distinct territorial units in which
each ethnic group would be encouraged to exercise ‘self-government’ up to and
including full ‘independence’. This ‘multinational policy’25 ensured that no sense
of national identity was nurtured, no actual sense of being South African. Indeed,
the apartheid government envisaged South Africa developing as a loose confeder-
ation of sovereign states in which, for the black population, a narrow ethnic
nationalism would be prioritised over the broader pan-tribal nationalism
championed by organisations such as the ANC. This actually created problems
for the apartheid regime, for, beyond those obvious accomplices in the creation
of the bantustan system such as the Matanzimas, Sebes and Mpephus, it lacked
reliable allies within the black communities. Requiring support for constitutional
change and socio-economic reforms that might prolong the longevity of white
minority control, the regime set about the task of manufacturing and co-opting
an African middle class to serve as a buffer against revolutionary change. The
expansion of this middle class in the 1980s resulted in a 40 per cent increase
in income within the wealthiest fifth of African households. This was not
redistribution from the wealthier white sector to the less prosperous African
community, however, but intra-distribution within the African population itself.
 National identity in South Africa 59
To allow for such a pattern, the poorest two-fifths of African households
experienced a real income decline of 40 per cent during the same period (Booth
1998: 208).
Today it is argued that because the political apparatus of apartheid has been
dismantled, South African sports teams can be chosen on ability alone. It is a
proposition, of course, that assumes that South Africa is finally a ‘meritocracy’.
It is not. For most whites the new South Africa is, economically at least, little
different from the old one – the very point that has informed Mbeki’s more overtly
racial style of politics and his commitment to ‘transformation’, as discussed in the
previous section. They have kept their maids, houses and cooks and continue to
enjoy a good standard of living. They send their children to the best schools. The
only difference today is that they now live in a democracy. Politically, everyone
has the vote and enjoys legal equality. This formal equality, though, fails to take
account of opportunity, which is still largely determined by social (and of course
racial) circumstance, even if Mbeki rather oversimplifies the situation, and gives
inadequate attention to the emergence of a more affluent section of the black
community, when claiming that South Africa is ‘two nations – one white and
wealthy, the other black and poor’ (see Southscan 1998).26 Here lies the essential
problem: South Africa has never been a society in which merit was the sole
criterion for the selection of professional sports teams.
South African schools cricket has always been of a high standard, and
many leading players went to the top private schools.27 These were fee-paying
establishments that by definition only took those from comfortable economic
backgrounds. At Hilton College (‘the Eton of South Africa’), for example, the
journalist Jonathan Rice wrote of 3,200 acres of fields for 470 boys – seven acres
a boy (1993: 59). These pupils had role models to look up to as well: portraits of
famous old boys such as M. J. Procter and R. A. MacLean hung on the walls of the
Hilton pavilion. They also had the chance to play in the three or four XIs that
could be fielded at senior or colts level. Most black children are excluded from
these institutions, if not today by racial segregation, then by social and material
circumstance. If the Hilton case sounds a little remarkable, consider the Vryburg
High School, which raised its fees to a level of 1,200 rand a year (£120) – the
equivalent of two months’ wages for many African families (Guardian 1999).
South African secondary schools remain in a dilapidated condition and these are
the schools attended by the great mass of African children. Elias Mashile, the
principal of the Morris Isaacson school (birthplace of the Soweto uprising),
highlights a desperate situation: ‘I have 1,000 pupils; we have 30 teachers, which
is a good ratio.’ Up to 40 per cent of secondary school teachers are under-qualified,
some not even having passed ‘matric’ (equivalent to a British A level) (Duval
Smith 1998). The black pace bowler, Makaya Ntini, recalled how there had been
no kit or equipment at his village school (Owen-Smith 1998b: 31).28 The school
of his colleague Mfuneko Ngam, on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth, did not even
have a cricket pitch. It still doesn’t (Prior 2000). Despite the many changes and
the granting of full citizenship, the black child’s life chances remain poor in
comparison to his/her white compatriot.
60 Jon Gemmell and James Hamill
Today there are areas of South Africa that appear to have missed the disman-
tling of apartheid. The conditions of the townships Crossroads and Khayelitsha
were described by Will Hutton (1999): ‘Desperate, incredible poverty; little
shacks that provide one room for a family; dirt as the floor, corrugated iron as the
ceiling. People having to defecate in a hole in the ground. The unemployment.
. . . Five years into the ANC government the apartheid geography of South Africa
remains surprisingly little touched, and the poverty of the townships virtually
unchanged.’ Half a million jobs have been lost since 1993. Naomi Klein wrote in
2001 how wages for the poorest 40 per cent have dropped by 21 per cent. Poor
areas have seen their water costs go up by 55 per cent, electricity by as much as
400 per cent. Many drink polluted water, leading to a cholera outbreak that
infected 100,000 people. In Soweto, 20,000 homes have their electricity cut off
each month (Klein 2002: 109). It was only in 2001 that the combined income of
black South Africans (almost 80 per cent of the population) surpassed that
of whites (10.5 per cent of the population) (The Economist 2001). The increase
in the crime rate has principally affected the black population (even if it is the
fact that crime has reached white suburbia since 1994 that has given it added
newsworthiness), while over the past ten years, spending on private security has
increased 12-fold to 12 billion rand (£1.1 billion) – more than three times the
housing budget of 1999–2000 (Younge 2001).
Although the government is fully committed to a programme of economic and
social development, that programme is proceeding within a highly restrictive
policy framework imposed by the neo-liberal economic orthodoxy to which the
ANC government now fully subscribes, with its emphasis on tight public expendi-
ture control, falling budget deficits and high real interest rates, aimed at stabilising
national debt and producing low inflation. The macroeconomic policy introduced
in June 1996 and known as the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR)
strategy – a self-imposed Structural Adjustment Programme in effect – openly
commits the government to a programme of privatisation or the ‘restructuring of
state assets’, to deploy the ANC’s more delicate description, a diminishing
economic role for the state generally, the removal of tariff barriers, the lifting of
exchange controls, and the introduction of more flexible labour markets. All this
is designed to reassure capital at home, the financial markets, the international
financial institutions and the leading Western governments of South Africa’s
economic ‘responsibility’ and its commitment to the creation of an investor-
friendly climate. The price for such a strategy, however, has been paid by the
very population groups that the ANC claimed would be lifted out of depriva-
tion through the implementation of the RDP, which GEAR has effectively
supplanted. That point has been repeatedly made by GEAR’s critics on the South
African left, particularly the Confederation of South African Trade Unions
(COSATU), the ANC’s formal political ally, for which GEAR is a shameless
ideological retreat from the promise of the RDP, a recipe for the preservation of
the inequalities currently disfiguring South African society, and a betrayal of the
ANC’s own impoverished constituency.29 This begs the question: does South
Africa now qualify as ‘normal’ in the old sense of the term? The term ‘equal
 National identity in South Africa 61
opportunities’ refers to the removal of obstacles that stand in the way of personal
development (Heywood 1994: 231). The obstacle of poverty still confines an
African population to a citizenship that at best is second-class, whatever the
formal position. Makaya Ntini, for instance, was selected for Border’s Under-15
team, quite an achievement in itself. At the time the only footwear he possessed
for playing cricket was a pair of ‘takkies’, which flip-flopped as he ran in to bowl.
It remains the case that on current projections, and notwithstanding the emer-
gence of a new stratum of more affluent blacks who have benefited from the
government’s commitment to black economic empowerment, skin colour will still
largely determine the chances of playing sports at a successful level in South
Africa, and while that is the case, there can be no common destiny.

Racism
I’m not prepared to apologise for what I said because I believe it is part of cricketing
terminology
(Brian Macmillan, quoted in Mail and Guardian 1999b)

The extent of a homogenising national identity can be measured in a number

of different ways. In a society where social, economic and political status has
been structured according to race and ethnicity, it seems logical to explore the
continuation of previous values. Racism in South Africa remains an emotive issue
and one that will long remain on the political agenda, as people are unlikely to
determine their allegiances without a sense of history. Decades of socialisation
cannot be dismantled overnight. A World Cup Music Committee, for example,
can still be divided over a tournament’s anthem because it sounds too ‘African’
(Independent 2002). Racism still exists, and segregation can be enforced using
methods such as separate teaching for Afrikaans- and English-speaking children
in schools. This works its way into sports. The Vryburg High School, for example,
at the centre of controversy for the way it has tried to exclude pupils of colour,
said that it did not have the money to buy a ball for the football team, which is
exclusively black; yet it spent £2,000 on ‘white’ sports, including rugby and golf
(Guardian 1999).
Separate ethnic and racial identities, especially if built upon a feeling of
injustice, will prevent the emergence of a sense of identity to which all groups can
subscribe. Historically, black South Africans shunned the national sports teams
on account of their association with apartheid. They will continue to do so if they
feel that sport remains ‘a last bastion of white dominance’.30 A number of
incidents in recent years have tarnished the efforts of those who have been
concerned with the integration of cricket. Perhaps they might be dismissed as
simply ignorant and insensitive. However, they do show that sensitivity is dictated
by a historical value system formulated within a racial environment, and that
attitudes cannot be immediately eradicated. The young spinner Paul Adams, for
example, earned himself the nickname ‘Goggo’ for his unorthodox action, when
he first broke onto the scene. In Afrikaans, ‘goggo’ refers to a small gnat-like insect
62 Jon Gemmell and James Hamill
that has arms and legs thrashing everywhere. Some coloured cricketers took
exception to this association with clumsiness, a throwback to an era in which the
temperament of black cricketers was questioned by their white counterparts. The
spinner Pat Symcox was accused of using abusive language towards spectators of
Indian origin during a match against Pakistan in Durban in February 1998.
Twelve months later, while playing for Western Province in the SuperSport
Series game against Natal in Cape Town, the international all-rounder Brian
Macmillan suggested that left-arm spinner Claude Henderson bowl a ‘coolie
creeper’ (a slow ball rolled along the ground) to Ashraf Mall, who is of Asian
descent. A ‘coolie’ is a derogatory term used to stereotype the Asian population
as being subservient and sycophantic. The UCB found the ex-international
all-rounder guilty of contravening its code of behaviour and he was severely
reprimanded. At the same hearing, Alan Badenhorst was suspended for the
remainder of the year for using crude and abusive language when he referred to a
player as a ‘half-bred kaffir’ during the Bowl match between Eastern Province ‘B’
and Griqualand West (Mail and Guardian 1999a, b).
The former national captain Kepler Wessells claims that racism is ‘a problem
that people have gotten used to’, and that it isn’t ‘a problem any more’.31 While
racial discrimination has been formally removed from South African social life,
it does not mean that deeply entrenched racial attitudes have been cleansed.
Considering some of the comments from the Minister of Sport, Ngconde Balfour,
against the UCB’s move to abandon targets, Wessells’ remarks suggest at the very
least a lack of understanding and sensitivity, but they perhaps reflect what the
white cricketing establishment believes. Yet it has to be understood that those to
whom racist remarks are directed reserve for themselves the right to measure the
offensiveness of such language and to determine when the issue of racism should
no longer be considered a problem. Those who decry political correctness should
take heed of this.

Multiracial or non-racial?
South Africa is not a normal country at the moment and it is something we must
all understand. If we don’t move forward we stand the very real risk of having
political protests at our cricket grounds again, and they will be made by cricket-
loving people.
(Ali Bacher, quoted in Owen-Smith 1998a)

Cricket was assigned a distinctive role in the development of the ‘rainbow nation’.
In contrast to white sporting values based on notions of competition and victory,
the project for cricket was one of reconciliation and opportunity. If the nation’s
sports teams reflected the social and ethnic fabric then perhaps they might act as
a unifier around the concept of nationhood. While it remained a nationalist ideal,
it was a nationalism based on the forging of component parts, rather than the
promotion and domination of one particular group – the form that nationalism
had traditionally taken. The re-emergence of a political ethnic nationalism would
 National identity in South Africa 63
be extremely divisive and have the potential to devastate the South African social
landscape, as it had previously threatened to do between 1990 and 1993. In order
to avoid further fragmentation, the social and economic environment needs to
reflect real opportunities for all people, regardless of skin colour. Recognising
and accommodating the distinctiveness of ethnic cultures is a worthy attribute of
any political regime, but history has shown that exclusiveness and insularity on
the part of certain groups, especially when accompanied by a sense of injustice
and grievance, will ultimately lead to conflict.
On its readmission to the international fold, South Africa was keen to show
that it could develop cricket within the disadvantaged communities. Young black
players such as Abraham Sinclair, Donald Letlhake and David Makopanele were
sent to Australia to receive coaching. The same Makopanele when younger had
had to walk three kilometres to practise his game (Roebuck 1994: 12). The 1993
Protea Assurance Cricket Annual of South Africa records the inclusion, on merit,
of a black player in the South African Schools XI for 1992–3, together with a
young coloured batsmen from Cape Town – Herschelle Gibbs, now a celebrated
Test match player. At the same time an under-15 South African Schools XI that
took part in a tournament against their English equivalents included five players
of colour, ‘all chosen on merit and all performing with skill’ (Crowley 1994:
21). According to the Schools’ National convener (the former Springbok
captain Jackie McGlew), schoolboy cricket in South Africa is ‘looking extremely
healthy, and with the development programme it’s looking even healthier’
(Alfred 1994: 20).
Towards the end of the 1990s, though, these players were not coming through,
as anticipated, at the national level. The ANC described the side selected to
play against the West Indies at the beginning of December 1998 as ‘lily-white’.
While acknowledging that many young black players had demonstrated great
potential in the fields of cricket, the ANC questioned why ‘nothing has been done
by . . . cricket associations to help them develop to levels where they would be
considered for selection in the national teams’.32 Steve Tshwete announced in
1999 that he felt he was unable to continue to support the national team in its
current set-up. ‘I am worried we will be sending white teams to the rugby and
cricket world cups this year. If this is the case, it will be difficult for me to support
them’ (Hawkey 1999: 40). He added that the government was considering a
special commission with intervening powers to promote black players into the
national XI. Ali Bacher, managing director of the UCB, agreed that ‘the national
team must be a team of colour’ (ibid.: 40). This was an astonishing acceptance of
the failure to fulfil his vision after the formation of the UCB. Cricket, it appears,
was failing in its historical role of reconciler.
Tshwete’s comments aroused the disdain of the UCB president, Ray White,
who told politicians to keep out of the business of cricket. ‘As far as interference
is concerned,’ he announced, ‘we don’t want it and we don’t need it’ (ibid.: 41).
The ANC, however, a decade after the dismantling of apartheid and by this time
into its second term in office, could see that the remnants of the old system were
still rooted in sport – in selection, coaching and administration. South Africa
64 Jon Gemmell and James Hamill
is still represented by teams that fail to reflect the racial and ethnic composition
of the nation. True, it is no longer the preserve of English-speaking whites;
Afrikaners have become regular members of the national side, providing the first
two captains (after Clive Rice’s brief stay at the helm in India in 1991) Kepler
Wessels and Hansie Cronje, and also arguably South Africa’s greatest post-
apartheid player, Alan Donald. Ex-South Africa player Eddie Barlow has pointed
out that in the 1960s Afrikaners had no cricketing facilities and no cricketing
culture (1995: 6). Such a leap forward would not have been possible without the
substantial economic benefits derived from apartheid. This suggests that given a
sufficient investment of resources by the state, a community’s potential for
participation in almost any sport can be massively expanded. We return then to
the question of economics, at the heart of the ‘no normal sport in an abnormal
society’ position. Facilities, especially in the schools, are essential if players are
to progress. Quick-cricket is only a substitute for the real thing and will serve little
benefit if it is the only form of the sport that people play. The non-racial society
envisaged by those early SACB supporters was one in which equality of oppor-
tunity did not just mean the right to vote, but was inextricably bound up with
economic justice. Despite the gradual emergence of a more affluent section of the
black community, the vast differences in income and wealth distribution in
contemporary South Africa are still largely determined by racial category, and
those differences will not produce either a country at ease with itself, or a fully
non-racial national XI selected on merit. Tshwete acknowledged this when telling
Parliament that the ANC had no desire to directly intervene on the sports field:
‘The government’s responsibility is the creation of that environment in which
sport and recreation will become the property of an entire nation’ (Thomasson
1999), although he may have shown a degree of sensitivity in deliberately
underplaying the ANC’s (very real) willingness to adopt a more intrusive policy
should the need arise.
South African cricket will become a genuine force for national identity only
once all its population groups believe that they are being given a fair and equal
chance to compete for their schools, provinces and, ultimately, nation. In order
to realise such ambitions, cricket has to embrace the positive discrimination
agenda in three key areas:

• the provision of adequate facilities to play cricket;

• the provision of coaching to equip anyone interested in cricket to play the
game properly;
• a widening of the opportunity to play cricket at various levels.

Cricketing development must also be situated within a broader project bringing

health, education and nutrition (clean water, electrification and adequate
housing) to disadvantaged communities. How can anyone say that a black player
is not up to standard if he has been denied the basic facilities that would enable
an observation to be made on cricketing talent, rather than on social circum-
stances? Imtiaz Patel, number two at South Africa’s UCB, pointed out that ‘If you
 National identity in South Africa 65
have two equally talented bowlers, one black and one white, it’s a fair bet that the
black bowler has had to work a lot harder to get to that level, which probably
means he’s a lot more talented’ (Chaudhary 1999). Does the selection of a team
on merit, a principle strongly defended by the white liberal establishment, prevent
selection of a side based on equality of opportunity? In a society where the
distribution of economic resources remains as deeply skewed as in contemporary
South Africa then it surely does. In current circumstances the call for team
selection to be based on ‘merit’ – without an accompanying call for a wholesale
transformation in the socio-economic conditions of the black majority – is an
abdication of responsibility that effectively serves to shore up an unjust status quo.
In the context of such extreme inequalities a genuine meritocracy is not remotely
feasible and attempts to package it as such deserve to be treated with derision.

Conclusion
Cricket it is the vehicle for something much greater . . . [it] remains today a
powerful force for change.
(Charles Davies, businessman33)

The South African shares with his Australian counterpart a sporting ethos that
believes in a competitive approach with an emphasis very much on winning. The
middle-class English qualities traditionally applied to cricket, such as the manner
in which the game is played mattering more than the result, have been shunned.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find that victory for the national team is seen
by some as more important than the role cricket might play in formulating a new
national consciousness. This argument proceeds to claim that there is no room
for an interventionist strategy when it comes to the selection of a sporting team;
the market is the sole determinant. A statement from The Cape Times (1998)
summarises this position:

[T]he national selectors’ prime duty must remain the choosing of the best
possible team available. The moment they depart from that principle they
compromise not only the country’s sporting integrity at international level,
but the reputations of the very players they might have put in the side at the
expense of superior performers because of race. No one wants to be a token
anything.

Perhaps we forget that targets have always existed in South African cricket. It
is simply that before the 1990s, being white was the single most important
criterion for selection to the national side. The election of an ANC government
was supposed to get rid of such horrors. No longer would selection be driven
and ultimately decided by social circumstance. South Africa would become
a national entity, with all its ethnic groups sharing the bounty of a democratic
non-racial society. Reform would affect all sectors of social and economic life,
and sport would not be exempt. Such ambitions could be realised only over the
66 Jon Gemmell and James Hamill
long term, but in the short term there were measures that could be introduced to
facilitate the development of disadvantaged communities. Affirmative action was
one such strategy, as the market, by its very nature, is incapable of delivering
equality.
The ANC was delivered to power on a historic programme of redistribution and
equality. It sought economic investment in order first to stimulate the economy,
and eventually to alleviate poverty. Economic growth needed to be improved in
order to reduce the chronic black unemployment rate. Its adopted economic
machinery was that of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and
ANC economic thinking, as discussed above, has endorsed the post-Cold War
‘Washington consensus’ on macroeconomic policy. However, the levels of direct
foreign investment sought by the ANC have not been forthcoming, and this has
been a major disappointment to a government that believes it deserves much
better, given its commitment to ‘responsible’ economic policies and the fact that
it has put in place an economic infrastructure specifically designed to attract
investment.34 The ANC shied away from emphasising redistribution, fearing
international consequences, as any economic meltdown would be an indictment
not just of itself, but of black rule as a whole. Thus, the government ignored calls
for greater public spending, higher corporate tax rates and the maintenance
of exchange controls, favouring policies such as privatisations, the removal of
tariffs, lay-offs and wage cuts in the public sector, and corporate tax cuts. Labour-
intensive industries such as tourism were emphasised. Unfortunately, these
service-sector jobs lack stability and tend to be low-paid, and in the long term
could further exacerbate inequality.
The government is currently criticised as drifting, in search of direction. Its
economic strategy favours its new partners in the banks and big business rather
than its traditional working-class allies. This has led to obvious friction within
the liberation movement, especially between the architects of GEAR within the
ANC leadership and the policy’s critics in COSATU and at least a section of
the SACP, a party that is itself drifting and ‘in search of direction’. Back in 1996,
Nelson Mandela stated that ‘our strategy in dealing with our former enemies has
been dialogue, discussion, criticism and patience. Now we have to apply that
method in dealing with our own allies, the labour unions, who helped to put us
in power’ (Holman et al. 1996). This suggested that while economic policy was,
in Mandela’s own highly provocative phrase of the time, ‘non-negotiable’, the
leadership still hoped to convince its trade union allies of the policy’s merits. That
has proved to be a futile exercise, as COSATU’s opposition to GEAR – and its
commitment to a socialist future – has remained steadfast, prompting Mbeki
to adopt an increasingly aggressive and confrontational posture towards his leftist
critics since 1999. This period of intra-alliance acrimony has led to increased
speculation about an eventual split from the ANC and the formation of a new
leftist party based on COSATU (see, for example, Guardian 2001a, b; 2002;
Sunday Times 2002a, b). With the government struggling to find solutions to
the housing problem, unemployment, crime, education and the need for social
uplift – failures that COSATU attributes directly to GEAR – it has sought to
 National identity in South Africa 67
manipulate other circumstances in order to maintain a semblance of its nationalist
heritage. Sport provides one such opening. It costs the regime little financially,
but allows an opportunity to reach out to a disadvantaged population, providing
visual examples that suggest that they are benefiting from the transformation of
society. This opiate, as we have seen, also has a unique ability to reconcile and
unite all sections of a population, divided by historical and political tensions.
Thus, through sport we witness the dual nature of the ANC’s nationalism: on the
one hand it seeks to promote or uplift the disadvantaged communities that gave
birth to the movement; on the other it seeks things in common around which the
nation’s various groups can coalesce.
On no question is there greater disputation than the policy of affirmative
action in sport. What constitutes merit? It is our contention that a society riddled
with massive economic inequalities, still largely based on skin colour, cannot
reasonably call itself a meritocracy. Indeed, the ANC’s 1994 Reconstruction and
Development Programme acknowledged that economic change was the prerequisite
to success for the majority population on the sporting field.35 True, remarkable
strides have been made on the cricket pitch to provide opportunities to players
from disadvantaged communities. If the object is one of creating a new post-
apartheid national identity then the experiment has to continue, until race is no
longer the principal determinant of inequality. Unfortunately, however, cricket
is still searching for the ‘parity’ that Ali Bacher demanded, and is still not being
played in a ‘just society’ where everyone has a ‘common destiny’. That reality
needs to be explicitly addressed by sporting bodies and by government itself, but
that threatens to be hugely problematic. Sports bodies are notoriously insular and
uncomfortable with even limited forms of engagement in wider political and
social debates, and their instinct is to reach for the comfort blanket provided by
the ‘keep politics out of sport’ mantra. For its part, the government has recognised,
quite rightly, that socio-economic transformation is vital for the creation of the
‘just society’ that will, in turn, unleash the sporting potential of the majority
community, but it is our contention that an economic policy rooted in the
nostrums of neo-liberalism – and one that has so far has failed to reduce colossal
levels of unemployment, to deliver rapid growth, or to halt the growing disparities
between the richest and poorest South Africans – will endanger that noble
objective.
The temporary scrapping of targets in July 2002 aroused excitement within the
cricketing establishment; it also provoked alarm within political circles. An
article by Mark Smit of the South African Business Day made a couple of pertinent
points that seemed to summarise the arguments:

For cricketers, apart from the disaffected few, some who protest the scrapping
of quotas for reasons not necessarily related to cricket, the move heralds the
dawn of an exciting new age in which kids of all colours will compete on
equal terms for places in teams.
The principles of excellence and merit will once again [our emphasis]
become the only criteria by which players will be judged and selected. There
68 Jon Gemmell and James Hamill
will no longer be a need for some to complain that the world sees them as
products of an unfair system.
(Smit 2002)

The ‘disaffected few’ would, we assume, include those who see a larger role for
cricket than merely being the best side. ‘Kids of all colours’, though, will not
‘compete on equal terms for places in teams’. Perhaps the small, yet increasing
black middle class will compete with the white population, as they very gradually
break down the barriers of a historically racist education system. What, though,
of the millions in poverty, those in the large townships and ‘informal settlements’
who placed their faith in an ANC government to alleviate their chronic plight?
While they may have the vote, they also have very limited opportunities to enjoy
the ‘excellence and merit’ that will ‘once again become the only criteria by which
players will be judged and selected’. Merit reflects not just achievement, nor
only ability, but potential. Perhaps it was the ‘disaffected few’ to whom Percy
Sonn was referring when he claimed that there were some people who were failing
to get behind Shaun Pollock and the Proteas? ‘We have to forget what happened
in the past,’ said Sonn at the Mutual and Federal SA Cricket Annual dinner at
the Sandton Sun. ‘We have to get behind him for the World Cup’ (Lichterman
2002). It is not always so easy to forget how we have arrived at the present. What
is important is to use the past to prepare for tomorrow. Oppressed peoples are not
going to discard a lifetime of injustice for some naïve call to rally round the flag.
They will demand change. Already there are disconcerted bodies within the
cricketing structure. The Concerned Group of Cricketers (COGOC) was formed
out of frustration at the slow pace of transformation. Its founding document
argued that the UCB ‘had lost its way’, and reminded those who were interested
of the old slogan, adapted to reflect contemporary concerns, that there can be ‘no
abnormal cricket in a normal society’ (Desai et al. 2002: 410–11).
Following a disappointing World Cup performance, the UCB now finds itself
in a position to rebuild a disjointed national side. Six players of colour were
selected for the 2003 tour to England. This is the second-generation post-
apartheid team and it will face pressure from the ANC to incorporate the
principles of reconciliation, equality of condition and a common destiny. If the
South African cricket authorities adhere to such objectives then they will be
making a meaningful contribution to the forging of a truly national identity. But
the ANC must also be conscious of its own historic responsibility to deliver the
‘equality of condition’ that can help change the face of South African sport and
build a ‘common destiny’. Paradoxically, however, its continuing attachment to
neo-liberal dogma may point to a more shallow and disappointing socio-economic
outcome, one that on current projections threatens to fall well short of the
‘transformation’ envisaged by Thabo Mbeki.
 National identity in South Africa 69
Notes
1 The slogan ‘no normal cricket in an abnormal society’ formed the basis of the
deliberate strategy of the non-racial South African Council on Sport (SACOS). The
strategy, devised in March 1973, argued that the normalisation of sport in South
Africa could only occur once there was political and economic equality for all South
Africans. See Desai et al. (2002: 278).
2 Colonialism of a Special Type, 1977, online at http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/
special.html (accessed 1 January 2003).
3 Lodge and Nasson (1991) provide an excellent summary of the numerous standpoints
and discussions.
4 Statement of the Lisbon Conference, Colonialism of a Special Type, 1977, online at
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/special.html (accessed 1 January 2003).
5 Ibid.
6 University of the Witwatersrand Students’ Representative Council, ‘Working class
politics and popular democratic struggle’, ‘Update’, July 1984, pp. 8–11. Quoted in
Lodge and Nasson (1991: 133).
7 The actual merger took place on 29 June 1991.
8 Statement of Intent. Quoted in The Cricketer (1991: 4).
9 Mackerdhuj later became appointed South Africa’s ambassador to Japan.
10 Only companies with proven black empowerment policies were allowed to tender
for contracts; World Cup mascots and logos were produced by rural cooperatives,
rather than remote contractors; some 50,000 tickets were distributed to cricketers
in disadvantaged areas; and on the field the South African team was required to be
multiracial.
11 The moratorium was seen as a leverage to ensure that white cricket would remain true
to black development and meaningful change.
12 Percy Sonn, president of the UCB, justifying his overruling of the selection of Jacques
Rudolph and the inclusion of Justin Ontong for the New Year’s Test against Australia
in 2002 (Sonn 2002).
13 Lulu Xingwana, head of the parliamentary committee on sport, during the Test series
against the West Indies, December 1998. Quoted in Seale (1998).
14 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996, ch. 2, ‘The Bill of Rights’, 9.2, online
at http://www.polity.org.za/html/govdocs/constitution/saconst02.html?rebookmark=1
(accessed 30 April 2003).
15 Ibid., chapter 10, ‘Public Administration’, 195 (1)i.
16 Employers are required to submit annual reports to the government outlining their
progress. On the Employment Equity Act, see Financial Times (1998) and February
(2001).
17 The ANC, Reconstruction and Development Programme, 1994 (Sixth Draft), p. 72
(point 3.5.3), online at http://www.polity.org.za/html/govdocs/rdp/rdp3.html#3.5
(accessed 1 January, 2003).
18 On that renewed polarisation, see Mail and Guardian (2000), Time (2000) and The
Economist (2001).
19 There are numerous accounts of this process. The best are to be found in Beckles and
Stoddart (1995), Manley (1988), Beckles (1999) and Birbalsingh (1996).
20 Wilson Ngobese became the first groundsman of colour when he took over at
Kingsmead, KwaZulu Natal, in 1999. Vinny Barnes became the first man of colour to
become a coach at a major province, when he succeeded Duncan Fletcher at Western
Province in the same year. In October 2000 Gerald Majola was appointed to succeed
Ali Bacher.
21 Wisden Cricket Monthly, April 2000, p. 17.
22 ‘Selectors forced to deselect’, Wisden.com, 2 January 2002, online at http://www.
wisden.com/news/news.asp?colid=44115066 (accessed 24 December 2002).
70 Jon Gemmell and James Hamill
23 Poverty and Inequality in South Africa, Report prepared for the Office of the Executive
Deputy President and the Inter-Ministerial Committee for Poverty and Inequality,
May 1998, p. 1, online at http://www.socdev.gov.za/Documents/2000/Docs/1998/Pov.
htm) (accessed 1 March, 2003).
24 Policy Statement of the South African Council on Sport, first published in ‘Souvenir
Brochure of the Natal Council of Sport’, 13 December 1980. Quoted in Ramsamy
(1982: 17).
25 Under the multinational policy, Africans were divided along ethnic lines into eight
(later expanded to ten) ‘homelands’, which totalled a mere 14 per cent of South
African territory, consisting of the poorest agricultural terrain.
26 This inattention is all the more ironic when one considers that this more affluent
section of the black community is almost entirely the ANC’s creation. On the rise of
that new black elite, see Southscan (2001). Francis Wilson, a co-author of South
Africa Survey, a barometer of development trends, is quoted in Southscan as saying,
‘Among the wealthiest 20% of South African society, a clear process of deracialisation
is under way. But the base of the pyramid has stayed the same. Poverty remains to be
endured overwhelmingly by African households.’
27 Michael Owen-Smith (1992: 37) estimated that there were at least 25 outstanding
schools in South Africa.
28 Ntini was fortunate; he was sent to Dale College, having been ‘discovered’ by the
development programme. His story is not common.
29 COSATU points out that GEAR has failed to deliver, even on its own terms. Growth
in GDP has been consistently sluggish since 1996 and in 2003 was still barely half the
6 per cent per annum the government had promised by 2000. Unemployment remains
catastrophically high in black communities at an average 40 per cent, the economy
has continued to shed rather than create jobs since GEAR’s introduction, and
inequality is widening. COSATU sees GEAR as the route to a so-called 30–70 society
in which the existing affluent section of the community expands to accommodate a
new black elite, thus giving South African capitalism a multiracial flavour, while
millions of people, almost exclusively black, remain mired in poverty. For an early but
illuminating discussion of GEAR and its reception, see Financial Mail (1996). A
general discussion of GEAR is provided by Blumenfeld (1999: 33–48). For a radical
critique of GEAR, see Bond (2000). For a stridently critical view from the left, see
Harvey (2000).
30 Nelson Mandela to a court hearing following the South African Rugby Union’s
attempt to block a commission appointed by Mandela to investigate allegations
of racism and mismanagement in the organisation. See The Examiner (Ireland), 20
March 1998, online at http://archives.tcm.ie/irishexaminer/1998/03/20/fhead.htm
(accessed 3 May, 2003).
31 Interview with Kepler Wessells, Rediff.com, online at http://www.rediff.com/wc2003/
2003/feb/11kepler.htm (accessed 3 May, 2003).
32 ANC Statement on Transformation in Sport, Issued by ANC department of
Information and Publicity, 30 November 1998, online at http://www.anc.org.za/anc
docs/pr/1998/pr1130a.html) (accessed 1 December, 2002).
33 Charles Davies, chief executive officer of Norwich Holdings. Press release by the
Transvaal Cricket Development Programme announcing Norwich Life Sponsorship
launch, 26 September 1996.
34 Foreign direct investment (FDI) in South Africa since 1994 has totalled about $22
billion, ‘significantly less than went to comparable markets such as Chile and Mexico’.
South Africa’s share of global FDI ‘totals less than 1% of the total flow to developing
countries’. Financial Times (2003).
35 The Reconstruction and Development Programme, 1994; see sections 1.4.9, 3.2 and 3.5
for the references to sport. Online at ttp://www.polity.org.za/html/govdocs/rdp/rdpall.
html#3.5 (accessed 17 May 2003).
 National identity in South Africa 71
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Financial Mail (1996) ‘Economic policy: struggle for the ANC’s ideological soul’, Financial
Mail (South Africa), 7 June.
Financial Times (1998) ‘South Africa’s affirmative action law meets negative responses’,
Financial Times, 11 September.
Financial Times (2003) ‘A less than wondrous record of attracting the cash’, Financial
Times (special report: Investing in South Africa), 6 October.
72 Jon Gemmell and James Hamill
Guardian (1999) ‘Racist school asks court to back ban’, Guardian (London), 19 March.
Guardian (2001a) ‘South African unions threaten split with ANC’, Guardian (London),
2 May.
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23 October.
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 National identity in South Africa 73
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Part II
Cricket in the New
Commonwealth
4 Play together, live apart
Religion, politics and markets in
Indian cricket since 1947
Sharda Ugra

When India plays Pakistan at cricket, it’s said every thing can wait. It often does.
When the fractious neighbours, who have not played each other in Tests since
early 1999, met in a group match in the 2003 World Cup in South Africa,
everything stopped in both countries. Everyone – including former US president
Bill Clinton – was made to wait. Clinton was to deliver, via satellite from New
York, the keynote speech at an international conference in New Delhi where a
gathering of the Indian elite from government, business and the media waited to
hear him.
But only after the cricket. The India–Pakistan match was being relayed live on
the large screen where Clinton was to appear and make his transcontinental
address at a scheduled time. The problem was that the match had dragged on into
an extra-half hour, India were on their way to a clinical win and, naturally enough,
no one was ready for Clinton. His staff were told there was ten-minute delay as a
traffic jam had held up dignitaries. But the penny eventually did drop in New York
(perhaps there was a South Asian on the ex-president’s staff). So the ex-president
of the United States was made to wait as India and Pakistan finished their cricket
match in South Africa. When his image finally flashed on the screen his first words
to a still noisy, celebrating audience were, ‘Congratulations. Yes, I know you won
the cricket match.’1

Thousands of miles away the Indian captain Sourav Ganguly had been receiving
a string of phone calls – before the game from Lata Mangeshkar, a legendary and
much-revered ‘playback’ singer from Indian cinema, and after the match from the
Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani and the Indian Army Chief Gen N. C. Vij.2

Civil society, government and the military. There wasn’t, it seemed, a part of India
cricket couldn’t touch.

The world is frequently told that in India cricket is a religion. The affirmation of
this inevitably follows on a banner held up by a spectator in a stadium, stating,
‘And Sachin is our God.’ It refers in third-person familiar to India’s foremost
batsman, Sachin Tendulkar, who also holds the record for scoring more
international runs than anyone in the history of the game. It is a tall claim to
make in a country with a preponderance of gods and religions. Or is it? Indian
78 Sharda Ugra
cricket, its documented history more than two hundred years old, has continued
to defy capture. The inexplicable popularity of a nineteenth-century English sport
in an environment that is the polar opposite of its original setting has been
variously interpreted, but never satisfactorily explained.
Did the Indians seize and then subvert the game from their colonial masters?
Was it, to use Nandy’s celebrated assertion, ‘an Indian game accidentally dis-
covered by the English’ (1989: 1)? Or like the English language, did the Raj
manage to insinuate itself into the hearts and minds of Indians and thus render
the very mission of Empire complete?
This chapter is not an attempt to settle that argument, which continues to
occupy the attention of scholars, but merely an attempt to trace a more recent
phenomenon: the transformation of Indian cricket in the past ten years from
a popular sport played with much enthusiasm into a vehicle for many purposes.
Or even, to use an orientalist image, a deity with multiple, contrarian heads.
Indian cricket today stands for both First World market domination and Third
World aspiration; inclusion and insularity; arrogance and open-mindedness. It
represents both nation and market, and the use of one by the other. Cricket in
India is a powerful tool and everything depends on who chooses to wield it.
The potency of cricket’s symbolic importance to contemporary India has
intensified in recent years. There remains one critical difference between the
growth of Indian cricket and the growth of other older sporting cultures. Unlike
soccer in Europe or South America and baseball and basketball in the United
States, cricket’s recent spread across India has not been the by-product of local
loyalties to a club or a region. It has not even been responsible for the strength-
ening or rejuvenation of those loyalties. If fact, if the thin crowds at first-class
matches are any indication, regional loyalties have declined.
Cricket’s sweep across the landscape of popular culture in India has had
little time for the growth or development of something so deep-rooted as local
affiliations. All the attention, interest and popularity have had only one target:
the national team. The reasons for that will be discussed a little later, but the
consequences of this are now clear: the close linkage of cricket team and country,
the underpinning of national identity/national pride with the performances of the
Indian team. India sees cricket – and indeed an image of itself on a global stage –
through its cricket team. This chapter traces the strengthening, reassertion and
crystallisation of those linkages in modern India – the more so in the past decade.
In his highly original social history of Indian cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field:
The Indian History of British Sport, Ramachandra Guha has argued that the linkages
between cricket and nation are not new: ‘Cricket has always been a microcosm of
the fissures and tensions within Indian society; fissures that it has both reflected
and played upon, mitigated as well as intensified’ (2002: xv). In the past ten years,
however, in an India caught in the tumult of political and economic change,
cricket’s unique place in the national mind has become clearly identified. Now
the main political/economic forces and mantras that gripped India in the 1990s
– chauvinism and commercialisation – openly seek to embrace, and to piggyback
upon, Indian cricket.
 India: religion, politics and markets 79
Between 1993 and 2003, India was caught up in a period of the most rapid eco-
nomic change in its existence as an independent nation, following the opening
up of the economy in 1991. Until then the economy had been run on Soviet-style
principles of state ownership, five-year plans, protectionism, licences and quotas.
With the opening up of the Indian market the licences and quotas vanished,
foreign investment was welcomed, private players could enter most areas of
industry and the rupee was made partially convertible. As an adjunct, the Indian
skies opened up to satellite television. Cricket was an interested party everywhere.
Since its inception in 1927, Indian cricket has been run, through a bitterly
contested series of elections, by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI),
a private body independent of government control. Cricket’s administrators today
are no longer the princes of the Raj (though Madhav Rao Scindia of the royal
house of Gwalior in central India and Raj Singh of Dungarpur, a minor princi-
pality in the western Indian state of Rajasthan, served as BCCI presidents in the
1990s), but a mixture of businessmen, political strongmen and anyone who can
wield financial clout – whether in the local community at the level of the state
associations or at the national level in the BCCI.
Cricket has always been run by private enterprise in India and relies on
the government for nothing more than Foreign Ministry clearances to under-
take tours. As Bose (1990) says, ‘Modern Indian cricket derives its strength
from the money of the industrialist allied to the power of the civil servant.’ When
the market opened up in 1991, the players of the BCCI were both ready and
knowledgeable enough to cash in.
Between Indian independence in 1947 and the opening up of the economy,
cricket – along with the railways, post and telecommunications – was regarded
as one of the more appetising leftovers of empire. The most popular pre-
independence cricket competition had featured a ‘European’ team and Indian
teams divided on the basis of religions – Parsis, Hindus, Muslims and finally, in
1937, the Rest (Christians, Jews and Buddhists). The quality of cricket was high
and all of Indian cricket’s pioneering and great pre-war players came through
the event, but its religious divisions were contrary to the tenets of nationalist
movement of the day. In the 1940s, opposition to the event grew along with the
demand for a separate homeland for Indian Muslims, which was to eventually lead
to partition of the country and the creation of Pakistan. After communal riots
during the final push for independence claimed thousands of lives, the event was
no longer viable.
Its place was taken by the Ranji Trophy, India’s national cricket champi-
onships, and the sport began to reflect free India – some of its teams came from
the newly formed states, and others from older cricketing powers were still allowed
independent identities. The state of Gujarat contains three Ranji Trophy teams:
Baroda (based around the city and its old princely state), Saurashtra (centred
in Rajkot) and Gujarat (headquartered in Ahmedabad). Mumbai (Bombay) may
be the capital of Maharashtra state but it continues to field its own team, the
competition’s most successful ever, and the Maharashtra state cricket team is
administered from the city of Pune.
80 Sharda Ugra
The popularity of the game spread through two means: the staging of inter-
national matches and live radio commentary. These commentaries were made in
English, as well as Hindi and three regional languages: Bengali, spoken in the state
of West Bengal; Tamil, spoken in the southern state of Tamil Nadu; and Marathi,
spoken in Maharashtra. Cashman believes that the introduction of Hindi
commentary was part of a policy of promoting Hindi as a national language. In a
young country with no fewer than 21 official languages, speaking in one voice and
vocabulary was imperative – whether it was affairs of the nation or the state of
play that was being discussed. The commentary panels never developed the cult
status of BBC Test Match Special (that happened three decades later with the TV
commentators on satellite channels), but they performed another role: helping
the game ‘attract an even broader mass following in urban India . . . well beyond
the mass confines of the English-educated urban middle class to other social
groups’ (Cashman 1980: 146).
What also helped cricket along, Cashman believes, was ‘the absence of
competitors in the business of mass entertainment’ (ibid.: 135) other than the
only alternative – cinema (which was to keep its date with cricket at the
beginning of the new century). The regularity of live international competition
meant that the cricket match was the place for celebrity itself to be seen, whether
it was film star, politician, businessman or general of the army. The status of
cricket as a glamour sport only grew with these associations, and Bose describes
one day in the 1960 Test match between India and Australia in Bombay when
‘the great film stars of the Hindi screen – like Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Pran
and others – were in the CCI pavilion trying to persuade Ramchand (the Indian
captain) to declare’ (Bose 1990: 218).
The crowd was restless, the match was heading for a draw when at that time
another quite extraordinary event took place. One swift act proved that the
demographic of people who responded to cricket, and the manner in which they
did so, had become much wider and more expressive. When Abbas Ali Baig
completed his second fifty, a girl from the respectable North Stand of the stadium
climbed over a fence, ran onto the field and kissed the batsman on the cheek. It
was an unusual, unorthodox gesture in an orthodox and largely conformist nation
where public displays of affection between the sexes are still uncommon. To many
it has remained just another a colourful aside in the official history of Indian
cricket – and the one thing Baig is remembered for right after his century on his
Test debut – but to many it seems like a signature event. It happened during the
first week of the Swinging Sixties, but has seldom happened since, even though
many more women attend cricket matches today. (Brijesh Patel was kissed on
the field, from memory, on the sixth and final day of the fifth Test against West
Indies at Wankhede in 1974–5. He scored a fifty as India collapsed in the fourth
innings.)
Cricket had clearly touched parts that other sports in India could not reach.
The national team’s youngest captain, Mansur Ali Khan of Pataudi, was to write
after India won its first overseas Test in New Zealand in 1967:
 India: religion, politics and markets 81
I cannot pretend there are not many more important jobs to be done in
India today, but in our huge and emergent nation, cricket does have a more
than usually important role. Through it we can meet the rest of the world on
near-equal terms, show our skill and express our artistry and enthusiasm. It is
a game which our people love and follow with an interest unrivalled in the
rest of the world.
(Pataudi 1969: 129)

In the 1970s, India won Test series overseas in England and the West Indies (a
feat it has had considerable difficulty repeating) and, in all, wiped out the memory
of the previous unprofitable decade by winning 17 Tests (as opposed to 9 in the
1960s). Instrumental in these wins were the combined talents of Indian cricket’s
first superstars in opening batsman Sunil Gavaskar and the legendary Spin
Quartet (Bishen Singh Bedi, Bhagwat Chandrashekhar, Erapalli Prasanna and
Srinivas Venkataraghavan). Progress against other nations became quantifiable
even as Indian success in other sports began to wane.
By the time India won the World Cup in 1983, cricket had already won the
contest for the status of India’s number one sport. Field hockey, which has won
India eight Olympic golds, is still officially India’s national game. But crushed by
the advent of artificial turf and the European ascendancy that resulted from it,
hockey had lost its place in the public mind. Like most other Indian sports, it had
a niche following and loyal regional pockets, but, once the results began to dry
up, nothing like a mass appeal.
The hockey team won India’s last Olympic gold in 1980 at the Moscow Games.
Three years later a team led by all-rounder Kapil Dev and nicknamed ‘Kapil’s
Devils’ by the British tabloids brought the cricket World Cup – called the
Prudential Trophy at the time – home. It was an unexpected result, but by beating
Clive Lloyd’s supremely dominant West Indians, and becoming world champions,
the Indian cricket team of 1983 had kick-started the process that was to change
the very idiom of the game in their country. When the team returned home to
India with the Prudential Trophy they received an overwhelming welcome on the
streets and within the corridors of power. The then prime minister, Indira
Gandhi, held a reception for the team in New Delhi and provided the soundbite
for the occasion, saying that the cricket victory had proved ‘India can do it.’ Mrs
Gandhi was no doubt referring to loftier goals such as economic self-sufficiency
and population control, but what India could certainly do from then on was take
one-day cricket to heart. Until 1983, India had played 48 one-day internationals
in nine years. Between 1983 and 1993 that number increased threefold, the team
playing 134 one-day matches. (Since the onset of liberalisation in April 1991, it
has played 357.) While this does correspond to an overall increase in the number
of one-dayers played worldwide, there is an underlying pattern and a clear shift in
preference.
There was a very distinct drop in the number of Test matches played in India
(from 43 in the 1980s to 30 in the 1990s). In contrast, the team played 155
82 Sharda Ugra
one-dayers in the 1980s (65 at home) and in the 1990s played 257 one-day games
(82 at home, 71 away). The big difference was that in the past decade the Indian
team has played the majority of its one-day fixtures in ‘neutral’ venues such as
Sharjah, Toronto, Singapore, Nairobi – that is, in random one-day competitions
not forming part of an overseas tour. The figure more than doubled from 49 in the
1980s to 104 in the 1990s. The popularity of these ‘neutral’ venues/tournaments
was driven by television revenues, which in turn fed into it.
While there is no exact moment when the great mass of Indian spectatorship
flipped a switch and declared its preference for one-day cricket over the traditional
variety, we could use the years 1983–93 as an era in which this ‘mutation’ (used
here to refer to an evolutionary process rather than as a disparaging comment) in
public choice began to occur. The rationale behind Kerry Packer’s heavily
marketed World Series Cricket (launched in 1977) – to take the sport to a wider,
more diverse audience, make it more accessible, increase the numbers of cricket’s
‘consumers’ and earn plenty of sponsorship dollars – worked its magic in
India too.
Children, housewives, women, older retired people, could easily follow the
game through live television and do the simple maths required by one-day
games. (This was well before the Duckworth–Lewis method of adjusting winning
targets, and the huge array of statistical parameters that are now set out during
the broadcast of a one-day match.) When the match ended, there was, to borrow
an Americanism, ‘closure’ and finality. Seven hours after it began, at least
there was a result. There is a great irony in the readiness with which India
took to the one-day game and discovered its passion for the instant form of
cricket, an entertainment spectacle of runs, wickets, fours and sixes compressed
into a single day, requiring neither the discernment nor the patience to follow
Test cricket.
Prior to 1983, India’s love for cricket was explained by the very open-
endedness, the protracted nature and complexity of the game. That India, an
ancient culture, loved the long, unfolding drama of a Test match and had a greater
tolerance even of the tedium that some matches brought, as it mirrored the
rhythms of life as lived out in the East. Indians then were perceived to have
a deep-rooted and fundamental understanding of the idea of the draw because
its very ambiguity (no one won, yet no one lost) suited a country where society
was based on joint families, compromise and cooperation, and not on competi-
tion or individualism. The essential purposelessness and timelessness of some of
cricket rituals perfectly matched a land where, in some languages, yesterday and
tomorrow were the same word.
In Cricket Wallah, an account of the England tour of India of 1981–2 (also the
tour on which the first one-day match was played in India), Scyld Berry discussed
the great potential of cricket in India and in a conclusion of astonishing foresight
said, ‘Although the game grew up thousands of miles away, India is destined to
become the capital of cricket’ (Berry 1982: 157). That is indeed true today, and
the reasoning used to arrive at that conclusion is still valid (a large supporter base,
vast stadiums, the lack of competition from other sports, the BCCI’s financial
 India: religion, politics and markets 83
solvency), but the root, the starting point of his argument – ‘as part of its legacy
from the past cricket in India remains sensitive to the better traditions brought by
the founding fathers from England . . . in batting India remains close to orthodoxy
because the one-day game, which grows fast in other Test countries holds no great
attraction’ – was turned on its head in a very short span of time.
The falling away of batting orthodoxy remains the despair of coaches and Old
World commentators. Known for its resistance to temptation, technical fortitude
and the premium placed on one’s wicket, the Mumbai school of batsmanship has
moved on from Vijay Merchant and Sunil Gavaksar to the explosive expressive
genius of a Tendulkar. In 2000, India played fewer Tests – 6 – than any other Test
nation barring Bangladesh, the debutants that year.
Following the 1983 World Cup win, India travelled to Australia in 1985 to take
part in another multi-nation, one-day tournament called the Benson & Hedges
World Championship of Cricket and, led by Sunil Gavaskar, won the title, with
Ravi Shastri winning an Audi sports car as Man of the Series. The sight of his
teammates piled onto of the car as it took a victory lap of the Melbourne Cricket
Ground has remained as iconic in Indian memory as that of Kapil Dev on the
balcony at Lord’s with the 1983 World Cup trophy in his hands.
One-day cricket was trendy, India was proving to be very good at it, and for a
country starved of sporting success – India had won only one medal outside field
hockey in more than eight decades of Olympic participation – it was reason
enough to switch loyalties. The businessmen on the BCCI cashed in. The board
began to schedule more and more one-day fixtures during tours by foreign teams,
and wherever they were held, tickets sold out early and grounds were filled to
capacity.
The Indian love for cricket was not, it could be confirmed, a particularly
aesthetic, philosophical or cultural choice. The ‘purists’ would remain a handful,
but for the rest, the instant thrill would be attraction enough. Indian cricket was
distinct and special, but not that special. When the change came, Bose described
the roots of Indian cricket as ‘shallow’. He dismissed the Indian attachment
to cricket itself as a flighty, insubstantial thing: ‘One-day cricket has replaced it
[the enthusiasm for Test cricket] but fortune is fickle and Indians could soon
discover another tamasha [spectacle] to titillate and amuse them. I hope it does
not happen but I fear it might’ (1986: 167). It hasn’t happened yet because market
forces, having discovered their golden goose in the form of the largest audience
in international cricket, will not allow it. As cricketer turned commentator and
columnist Sanjay Manjrekar says, ‘As a cricketing nation, India is unique: it is a
poor country that spends a lot of money on cricket’ (2002: 11).
Running parallel to the increase in the number of one-day matches played
by India came the birth and growth of cricket’s first offshore venue – in the
Gulf emirate of Sharjah, keen to tap into the South Asian expatriate population
in the Gulf. Between 1984 and 2000, teams from India and Pakistan were the
centrepiece of tournaments that took place in a stadium in the middle of a desert.
The matches were televised live on state television and the Sharjah cricket
stadium was a place to be seen. Every time India and Pakistan played there (the
84 Sharda Ugra
other countries were merely invited to complete the formality of a tri-nation or
four-nation series), the clubhouse stands were filled with movie stars from India,
television stars from Pakistan and the rich and the famous who were flown over
by the owner of the enterprise, Sheikh Abdul Rahman Bukhatir.
The organiser of these ‘duels in the desert’ was the Cricketers Benefit Fund
Series in Sharjah. Former international cricketers were named beneficiaries,
receiving purses of between $25,000 and $30,000 as overdue payment for their
contribution to cricket. Indo-Pak games were played in front of highly charged
and ultra-jingoistic spectators at the ground and beamed live to both countries,
and a motley mix of Indian and Pakistani commentators cranked up the temper-
ature, billing every match as a mini-battle. Rather than temper Orwell’s ‘war
minus the shooting’, Indo-Pak cricket in Sharjah was pitched as proxy war, and
those echoes linger to this day every time the two neighbours meet.
India had proved it had the enthusiasm for the game (if not the stomach, as an
infamous six hit by Javed Miandad in 1986 won the Australasia Cup for Pakistan
off the last ball of the final versus India and earned Miandad the eternal hatred
of the Indian cricket fan) and the numbers to support it. In 1987 it proved it had
the infrastructure and the organisational skill to facilitate the eastward shift of the
power centre of the game. The World Cup moved out of England for the first time
– to the Indian subcontinent, being jointly staged in India and Pakistan and
sponsored by a fast-growing Indian conglomerate called Reliance. The mascot for
the Reliance Cup of 1987 was, curiously, a dove. The only two cricketing nations
that had ever needed the world’s official avian ambassador of peace played joint
hosts. But the tournament was a financial and organisational success even if the
hosts couldn’t make it to the final.
Australia and England knocked heads for the title at Eden Gardens in front of
a capacity crowd, who greeted the Australian victory far more warmly than crowds
in Melbourne had hailed the winners two years earlier when India and Pakistan
met in the final of the 1985 World Championship of Cricket. A poster at the
ground had scathingly pronounced judgement on the citizenry of the two finalists:
‘Bus Drivers vs Tram Conductors’. But as fireworks exploded over Eden Gardens
and Allan Border and his Australian team posed with the trophy, world cricket
found itself surveying a stage that was distinctly different from the balcony at
Lord’s. However, it had to be admitted that there was no lack of fervour or of
a sense of occasion.
India’s growing confidence in world cricket was evident merely in its even
dreaming of hosting the first World Cup outside England. The Prudential
sponsorship had run its course in England, and the Indian board now resolved to
make a bid for the World Cup. To go by an account written by the then BCCI
president, N. K. P. Salve, the Indian board made its first nationalist ‘Us versus the
old Empire’ pitch back then. Salve declared that he had been refused two extra
passes by the MCC for the 1983 final at Lords and he swore he would stage his
own World Cup.
This has increasingly become the tone of Indian cricket administration over
the years, especially as it has been discovered that it carries political currency and
 India: religion, politics and markets 85
can be used to sway public opinion at a time of any controversy. When Sachin
Tendulkar and five other Indians were penalised by ICC match referee Mike
Denness for their various indiscretions on the field of play during the Port
Elizabeth Test of 2001, the irascible Indian board president Jagmohan Dalmiya
turned it into an East versus West battle, coupled with Old World versus New,
and of course, following almost naturally, black versus white.
The Indian board first sold television rights of a test series to a private television
channel in 1993, when England were touring. The first time cricket appeared on
cable TV in India was during that series, when it went out via Rupert Murdoch’s
Star Sports. Star Sports, the cricketing pioneers of satellite television in India, and
the IMG-owned television production company Trans World International
(TWI), tapped into the Indian audience’s demand for cricket as non-stop, year-
round entertainment. They were welcomed in India because of their excellent
production qualities and high-profile commentary panel, full of illustrious former
cricketers. Viewership ratings were high and sponsors flocked to cricket. What
satellite TV also did through its revenue-earning cameras was turn crowds at
matches in India into part of the show.
Thus, India’s ‘passionate’, ‘volatile’ and ‘colourful’ crowds (words used ad
nauseam by commentators who may have baulked at touring India and playing in
front of these very crowds during their playing careers) found themselves part of
the entire production and consequently at the control of the television producer.
Mark Mascarenhas, whose company, World Tel, brought the 1996 World Cup
into Indian homes, described television’s unwritten policy: ‘In India much more
time is spent on the crowd because they are so animated, so colourful. . . . If you
try to do this Indian type of coverage in England, it won’t go over well’ (quoted
by Ugra 2001: 24).
Whether this ‘Indian-type’ coverage, where cameras seek out spectators waving
flags and banners and indulging in other telegenic acts, has actually led to a
change in the spectatorship in Indian stadiums is yet to be established. What is
without doubt is that Indian cricket spectatorship has changed. Other than the
appearance of more national flags at stadia than in pre-satellite television days,
violent reactions to impending defeat are now more common, and appreciation
of the opposition team’s effort has been diminishing.
Javed Miandad, in his last appearance in international cricket, was heckled off
the field by spectators in the otherwise genteel southern Indian city of Bangalore
during the 1996 World Cup quarter final (Marqusee 1996: 230–1). The New
Zealand captain, Stephen Fleming, said on arrival for his team’s Indian tour of
2003, ‘The greatest challenge in India is to try and keep the crowd quiet. If we do
that we know we are doing well.’3
The knowledgeable and generous Indian spectator seems to be a thing of the
past. The Eden Gardens in Kolkata (Calcutta) has had crowd disturbances disrupt
matches at least twice in the past seven years. The 1996 World Cup semi-final
was abandoned and three years later angry spectators were driven out of the giant
ground, and the final day of the India–Pakistan Test of 1999 was played out in
front of empty stands.
86 Sharda Ugra
These extreme reactions are the result not of other social tensions being
expressed in the microcosm of a cricket stadium, but of a low tolerance for failure
and the elevation of the result of a cricket match into more than just a sporting
defeat or a victory. The one-day game leaves no room for the ambiguous draw or
the honourable retreat. It is confrontational, and its increasing frequency throws
up ‘win or die’ encounters for national teams every day on television. For the
Indian the end result in favour or against the national team began to occupy the
mind of the spectator, especially the one newly arrived to the game, to a greater
extent than the quality of the cricket played. In a developing country whose overt
global triumphs are few and far between, the cricket match has become a
barometer of national self-worth.
In the decade during which live cricket has been fed into India via satellite,
television has also pumped up the volume on jingoism, which scholars have called
‘hypernationalism’. Without a smidgen of self-consciousness, cable networks have
promoted cricket series involving India as Badla (Revenge), Qayamat (Judgement
Day) and Sarfarosh (Ready to Be Martyred). One advertisement for the Indian
team’s official sponsors c. 1996–7 showed fast bowlers hurling balls of fire, batsmen
facing bowlers firing machine guns, and fielders leaping over burning tyres to get
to the ball.
The fires, tyres and thick smoke looked alarmingly like news footage of riots
familiar to most Indians. For a country so used to being told that its differences of
religion, language, culture, wealth could pull it apart, there was another subtle
message: only two things brought India together – war and cricket. Only two
institutions could therefore keep the flag flying: the army and the cricket team.
War and cricket were to be seen as interchangeable.
The country with which India has been to war more times than any other is, of
course, its neighbour and gifted cricketing rival Pakistan. Between 1996 and 1998
the two countries played a made-for-TV tournament in Toronto, Canada, called,
of all things, the Friendship Cup, until the familiar political hostility took its toll.
The bad blood has intensified in the past decade as the Hindu right and its
campaign of national polarisation as a means to power has taken it all the way to
New Delhi.
In the interim, Bal Thackeray, a failed cartoonist turned leader of the
right-wing Shiv Sena in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, asked Indian
Muslims to pass his own sinister loyalty test. ‘I want them [Muslims] with tears in
their eyes every time India loses to Pakistan,’ he said. It is a standard that India’s
largest religious minority has been forced to adhere to as the Indo-Pak dispute over
the northern state of Kashmir has become more intractable. India has accused
Pakistan of supporting separatists in the Kashmir Valley, of supplying them with
arms and men and of funding terrorist strikes in other parts of India.
Months after Pakistan played an eventful three-Test series in India in early
1999, and the Indian prime minister, A. B. Vajpayee, took a peace bus from
Delhi to Lahore, matters went downhill very quickly, impacting on cricket. A
war between the two neighbours in the summer of 1999 in the Kargil district of
Kashmir, an attack on Parliament and an unprecedented troop build-up on the
 India: religion, politics and markets 87
border have meant that there could be nothing as normal as a cricket match
between India and Pakistan. In this not-so-cold war, cricket was turned into a
bargaining chip. The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government banned
‘bilateral’ matches, decreeing that the two could not play each other anywhere
other than in official ICC-sanctioned multinational tournaments such as the
World Cup. The reason, according to the sports minister, Uma Bharti, was that
‘We see cricket not as just a game but as a symbol of a nation’s sentiments’.4
There it was. The official word from the government. India and Pakistan could
play each other at hockey, tennis, soccer – any sport, but not cricket. Cricket
was, the minister said, ‘an extraordinary game. It has begun representing the
sentiments of the people’. Cricket was special, more equal than other sports and
doomed to be the field in which, it would seem, India could not allow Pakistan to
gain ascendancy over it. Every time the two countries ran into one another,
both nations were put into a state of high alert and high anxiety. No wonder the
high and the mighty in New Delhi believed it was acceptable to keep Clinton
waiting.
The freeze on India–Pakistan cricket relations has annoyed the BCCI because
it knows the latent profits waiting upon a resumption of regular Indo-Pak cricket.
Similarly with the Pakistani Cricket Board whose audience size in television
markets is much smaller and whose finances depend on regular appearances by the
national team against the one opponent every Pakistani cricket fan would want
to see. Politics has hit the commerce of Indo-Pak cricket and neither side is
pleased.
The other apparent consequence of the commercial success of Indian cricket
was a succession of soon-to-be-proved rumours of a nexus between cricketers
and illegal betting syndicates. The occasional whispers of deals struck finally
exploded into cricket’s biggest crisis since the Packer era when the Delhi police
tapped into a telephone conversation between the former South African captain
Hansie Cronje and an Indian bookmaker. Betting on any sport other than
horse racing in India is illegal. But the growth of betting syndicates and the
uncomfortable proximity of bookies to cricketers was linked to the spurt in one-
day internationals in the 1980s and 1990s, especially at the offshore venues.
Along with providing entertainment on television, the matches also kicked off
a daily trade in millions of rupees per day, which was run from Dubai and
neighbouring Gulf States (where the most wanted of the Indian criminal
underworld also live), with bucket shops in major Indian cities acting as the hubs
for Indian punters.
But only with the evidence on the Cronje tapes was an official inquiry launched
by the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into illegal betting and the
player–bookmaker nexus. This inquiry identified four Indian cricketers as having
frequent contact with the bookies and assets disproportionate to wealth. The
Indian board held its own inquiry on the basis of the CBI findings and banned the
former captain Mohammed Azharuddin, together with Ajay Jadeja, Ajay Sharma
and Manoj Prabhakar. However, it exonerated one of Indian cricket’s biggest
names, Kapil Dev.
88 Sharda Ugra
The months between April and October 2000 were confusing ones for the
Indian cricket fan, whose heroes not only had turned out to have very strange
friends but had not even, it seemed, been trying to win all the time. The CBI
presented its report, but, because of a legal loophole, could not prosecute any
of the cricketers in a court of law. But the very act of ‘naming and shaming’
the players forced the Indian board to act. Had the BCCI been seen to be dragging
its feet on the issue, the damage to its commercial interests would have been
immense. Azharuddin and Jadeja had lost their endorsement contracts almost
immediately and the speed with which those actions were taken sent out a very
strong message to the BCCI. If the cricketers proved unreliable brand ambas-
sadors, corporate India could once again return to the make-believe world of
Bollywood – no actor could possibly be accused of not trying to dish out a hit.
In hindsight, many factors worked in the BCCI’s favour: Jagmohan Dalmiya,
who had always been a big supporter of offshore cricket and had scoffed at the idea
of betting syndicates, had just finished serving his time as ICC chairman, and had
no say in the punishments dealt out to players by the BCCI. The BCCI president,
the Chennai-based industrialist A. C. Muthiah, acted swiftly, virtually ordering
the then team coach, Kapil Dev, to quit.
Also, ‘Cronjegate’ broke at the end of the Indian team’s season, with most of
the scandals emerging during the off-season months. When it took to the field
again in Nairobi in the ICC Champions Trophy six months later, it had a new
coach, an untainted new captain in Sourav Ganguly, a new set of players and no
sign of Azharuddin or Jadeja even on the fringes. By the time the 2000–1 season
ended, that same team had won a three-Test series against Australia, a series now
being unashamedly sold as ‘the greatest Test series ever’. Once again, all it took
to win back the faith of the doubters was a few euphoric sessions of cricket.
The ugly side of Indian cricket – whether its extreme nationalism or frequent
betting scandals – has tended to obscure the fact that, in this same tumultuous
decade, cricket has reached into corners of small town and rural India in a way
that had never previously done in its two hundred-year life in India. The tradi-
tional metropolitan hubs such as Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata and
the old royal heartlands of Hyderabad, Baroda and Indore continue to produce
players. But so do towns like Bhubaneswar (home to S. S. Das), Allahabad
(Mohammed Kaif), Jallandher (Harbhajan Singh), and even the previously
unheard-of hamlet Srirampur, birthplace of Zaheer Khan.
There has been a genuine democratisation of Indian cricket in the past decade,
its player, spectator and supporter base multiplying by the thousands every year.
It is today in every way a pan-Indian phenomenon, more so, some people would
say, than even Bollywood. Its allure for the advertiser is very clear. An executive
of Hero Honda, the Indian company which is the world’s largest manufacturer of
two-wheelers, admitted, ‘Cricket is the only sport where India can be No. 1 and
hence the pull’ (quoted in Goyal 2002: 51).
Modern times have given the Indian cricket advertiser not only the audience
who will pay attention to his message but, it is now quite clear, perhaps even the
kind of cricketer. For decades the Indian team was criticised for its lack of ‘killer
 India: religion, politics and markets 89
instinct’ as an explanation for its failures in world sports. Rather than a failure to
institute professional and systematic training, this lack of a killer instinct – and
the vegetarian diet – was thought to explain why India, unlike Pakistan, has failed
to produce fast bowlers.
But perhaps influenced by the growth of a palpably overt, somewhat angry and
sometimes belligerent kind of nationalism, projected through the televised cult
of cricket, the Indian cricketer in the past few years has been seen trying to bust
the cliché. The current captain, Sourav Ganguly, often pilloried for conduct
unbecoming, stripped off his shirt and waved it over his head on the balcony at
Lords after India won the 2002 NatWest Trophy final in an improbable run-chase.
It was his retort to a similar gesture by Englishman Andy Flintoff earlier in the
year after England, trailing one-three, squared a six-match one-day series in
Mumbai. As Ganguly is one of the more expressive internationals (he has been
reprimanded or fined no fewer than six times by ICC match referees, three times
as captain), it was a gesture expected of him.
But on the same tour, his sober, well-read and thoughtful deputy, Rahul Dravid,
was asked by Cricketer International, ‘Who would you have liked to have been in
a previous life?’ Dravid replied, ‘[O]ne of the leaders in the Indian freedom
struggle.’5 The postcolonial jibe was lost on no one. Then again, in the later stages
of the 2003 World Cup, as the Indian national anthem played, many players on
the team were seen mouthing the words with hand over heart. It was a gesture
completely alien to most Indians, no doubt glimpsed on television and borrowed
from the West as a way to express how truly moved and motivated they were. In
an extensive cover story, Wisden Asia Cricket, the subcontinental arm of the
English magazine, described Ganguly’s team as standing for a ‘New India’.6
The burden on the New India player to be a representative of the country and
to conform to an image of the ideal Indian, outside even the scope of his skill at
cricket, can be crushing. Nandy described it thus: ‘Eleven players, with an average
age of less than thirty and mostly innocent of politics and culture are expected
to recover the self-esteem of 800 million Indians and undo colonial history in the
southern world’ (1989: 108). Of course, times have changed since then and the
symbolic undoing of colonial history is no longer a priority. In cricket, India is
now the financial powerhouse and can beat England often. But there is no way,
for example, that any Indian cricketer could get away with the ‘metrosexuality’ or
even the fashion choices of a David Beckham. It is what Guha calls the syndrome
of Tendulkar as the ‘only flawless Indian’. The onus on the cricketer is only
slightly different in a new globalised India: ‘Today our cricketers are expected to
substitute for all our failures – they must win matches because our economy is bad.
It is an unfair burden’ (quoted in Ugra 2002: 39).
The team as representative of India, with members drawn from the varied
regions and religions of the country, is another more sensitive theme used by
groups campaigning for calm between religious communities as well as decon-
structionists in the media. In 1987 a poster went into mass circulation showing
pictures of four cricketers – Kapil Dev (a Hindu), Mohammed Azharuddin (a
Sikh), Roger Binny (a Christian) and Maninder Singh (a Sikh) – with the slogan
90 Sharda Ugra
‘If we can play together, we can live together.’ It is a powerful message, akin to
the one inspired by the multicultural French football team winning of the 1998
football World Cup. No Indian cricketer, though, has had the confidence to speak
publicly against the politics of hate, as the footballer Marcel Desailly did against
Jean Marie Le Pen during the 2002 French presidential campaign. The ice, they
know, is very thin.
More than one cricketer (the opener Chetan Chauhan and the all-rounder
Kirti Azad, to give only two examples) has upon retirement joined the BJP, whose
right-wing politics are based on the principle of ‘Hindutva’ – that is, the reju-
venation of Hindu pride. When he was accused of being involved in a nexus with
bookies to fix matches in 2000, the besieged Azharuddin, India’s longest-serving
and, to date, most successful captain (‘for years the ultimate symbol of India’s
all-inclusive nationalism’ – Sardesai 2002) said he was being victimised because
he belonged to a minority.
But still Indian cricket remains pinned to notions of nationalism, like an insect
to a board.
Two young players, Mohammed Kaif and Yuvraj Singh, struck a thrilling
partnership that enabled India to successfully chase 325 at Lord’s to win the
NatWest Trophy final against England in 2002. When India won by two wickets
with Kaif and pace bowler Zaheer Khan, both Muslims, at the crease, the
symbolism proved too powerful.
Earlier that year, riots in the prosperous western state of Gujarat, fuelled by a
deliberately passive government, had claimed the lives of thousands of Muslims.
Here, according to one columnist, was the rebuttal:

As Muslims huddle in fear in Ahmedabad . . . Mohammed Kaif leads the

victory charge at Lords . . . for a generation growing up in the increasingly
ghettoized neighbourhoods of the country, they [Kaif and Zaheer] offer some
hope for a better future, for a non-discriminatory society that rewards merit,
irrespective of religious afflilation . . . like the black West Indian cricketers
of the C. L. R. James era, India’s Muslim cricketers too have a role to play
beyond the boundary.
(Sardesai 2002)

But the challenge to that, which came from another writer, was swift, calling the
NatWest final a ‘short-lived, feel-good glow’ and arguing that the acclaim for Kaif
only symbolised Muslim isolation. His acceptance into the Indian mainstream,
like that of other Muslims, was conditional on conformity: ‘Only flag-holding
achievers of spectacular public achievements confirm. The achievements them-
selves have to conform.’ By contrast, the author pointed out, two prominent
Muslims, a noted painter and a socialist activist, had been threatened by rioters.
‘They are not ordinary Muslims but painting and social activism do not measure
very high on the patriotism scale’ (Mukhia 2002).
Time was to prove, however, that locating Kaif in the centre of a heated debate
about nationalism and the status of minorities was a bad idea. Less than a year
 India: religion, politics and markets 91
later, when India lost its World Cup league match to Australia, Kaif’s home in
Allahabad was one of those targeted by vandals, who flung black paint on it in
protest. By all accounts his home was attacked not because he was a Muslim but
because he just happened to be the only Indian cricketer from that town. In July
2002 he had won a cricket match and had been turned into a national hero.
In February 2003, when his team lost a cricket match, he was a disgrace like the
rest of them.
The Indian cricketer himself is trapped in this maelstrom of emotion, the
only perks being a healthy annual income, the chance to see the world, and more
than 15 minutes of fame. A few hours before the Indians left for the World Cup
in South Africa in 2003 there was a proposal to have them visit a famous temple
to Ganesha, the god of good fortune, in central Bombay. The plan was shelved,
not only because it would take too long, but because some on the team argued
about whether it would seem appropriate. ‘Aren’t we the national team of a
secular India which has Muslims/Christians/Sikhs as members?’7 It is difficult to
imagine this dilemma confronting any other international sports team.
Cricket’s place in modern Indian life was neatly captured by the 2001 release
of a regulation 3 hour 45 minute Hindi film called Lagaan. The film engagingly
and vividly told the tale of a cricket match played in 1893, in which a team of
Indian villagers beat a team of British soldiers as a wager over the imposition of
an exorbitant agricultural tax or lagaan. The Lagaan XI was supposed to reflect the
Indian demographic: Hindus, a Muslim, a Sikh, an ‘untouchable’ (a low-caste leg-
spinner) and, of course, in powerful echoes from Indian history, even the token
traitor who provides secrets to the opposition and deliberately misfields the ball.
At the end of the hour-long cricket match, the Indian team wins off a last-ball six
(take that, Javed Miandad) and is freed of its lagaan, the British regiment being
forced to withdraw its presence from the region. The film proved a critical and
commercial success, turning cinema houses into stadiums where people reacted to
the scenes of the match by whistling, cheering and applauding. The film was
nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Film category.
The twist to this whole tale lay in the past – in 1911 a barefoot team of Indian
footballers from Mohun Bagan had actually beaten the Yorkshire Regiment in the
final of the IFA Shield. This was hailed as a great triumph for the nationalists of
the time and a blow to the pride of the Raj. Rather than immortalise a real slice
of history on celluloid, the ultimate Indian dream factory, Bollywood, sought to
give Indian cricket – flavour for many seasons now – its noble antiquity and
nationalist credentials by creating this story of barefoot cricketers. After all, the
so-called great ancestor of Indian cricket, the Jamsaheb of Nawanagar, K. S.
Ranjitsinhji, did not even consider himself an Indian cricketer. When asked to
help the newly formed BCCI, he is reported to have said, ‘Duleep and I are English
cricketers’ (Rodrigues 2003: 222). During the freedom struggle, political fond-
ness for cricket was split between those who opposed it as a British hangover
(Mahatma Gandhi declared himself opposed to the Pentangular Championships
because teams were picked on religious lines) and others, such as the Westernised
first prime minister, Jawarharlal Nehru, who had learned the sport in Harrow and
92 Sharda Ugra
Trinity College. Lagaan sought to create a simpler mythology. In his book, Guha
proved that the victory of a team of Parsis (the first Indians to take to cricket) over
a team of Europeans in Bombay in 1906 was hailed as far away as Madras.
But to Bollywood the real story was not quite deemed worthy of an epic
movie. It chose to recreate Indian cricket’s folklore instead, depicting a bunch
of barefoot villagers – not a group of educated merchants – as India’s country’s
first home-grown cricket heroes. When the Denness affair boiled over in South
Africa later that year, The Week, an English news magazine, called it a case of
racism and used a poster from Lagaan on its cover, superimposing the faces of
Tendulkar and the other five banned cricketers over those of the actors. The
headline declared, ‘Victims of Racism’ and the cover lines read, ‘Faced with a
totally unfair LAGAAN [their emphasis] from an English match referee, Indian
cricketers and board ponder the best way to counter this discriminatory raj.’8 The
mythology had come full circle.
Indian cricket as religion is far from a quiet, confident, somewhat personal
spirituality. It is more like organised religion with all its fervour, dogma and, often,
even a distinct lack of logic. Cricket has become a motif of a modern Indian
identity but one that is completely at the mercy of many notions of nationalism.
It can either produce the ‘best’ kind of Indian or show up the worst – as in the
overpaid underperformer without killer instinct who cannot win everything.
In Indian public life, cricket is everything, except just the game it needs to be.

Notes
1 India Today, 10 March 2003, p. 19 and interview with Ranjit Sahaya, News Co-
ordinator, India Today, on 1 August 2003.
2 Lokendra Pratap Sahi, The Telegraph (Calcutta), 3 March 2003.
3 Quoted by Reuters on www.cricketnext.com, online at http://www.cricketnext.com/
news1/next/reutersSept03/reuters088.htm.
4 The Hindu, 26 April 2001.
5 Cricketer International, July 2002.
6 Wisden Asia Cricket, December 2002.
7 Interview with Amrit Mathur.
8 The Week, 2 December 2001.

References
Berry, Scyld (1982) Cricket Wallah, Hodder & Stoughton.
Bose, Mihir (1986) Maidan View, George Allen & Unwin.
Bose, Mihir (1990) A History of Indian Cricket, Rupa.
Cashman, Richard (1980) Players, Patrons and the Crowd: The Phenomenon of Indian
Cricket, Orient Longman.
Dravid, Rahul and Mathur, Amrit (forthcoming) Amrit World Cup Diary, HarperCollins
India.
Goyal, Malini (2002) ‘Patriot games’, India Today, 30 September.
Guha, Ramachandra (2002) A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British
Sport, Picador India.
 India: religion, politics and markets 93
Manjrekar, Sanjay (2002) ‘Spare the rod’, Wisden Cricket Asia, December.
Marqusee, Mike (1996) War minus the Shooting, Mandarin.
Mukhia, Sudeep (2002) ‘Kaif only symbolises Muslim isolation’, Indian Express, 18 July.
Nandy, Ashis (1989) The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games,
Penguin.
Pataudi, The Nawab of (1969) Tiger’s Tale, Orient Paperbacks.
Rodrigues, Mario (2003) Batting for the Empire: A Political Biography of Ranjitsinghji,
Penguin India.
Salve, N. K. P. (n.d.) The Story of the Reliance Cup.
Sardesai, Rajdeep (2002) ‘The powerful symbolism of Mohammed Kaif’, Indian Express,
16 July.
Ugra, Sharda (2001) ‘The spectator as spectacle’, The Hindu Folio, 14 January.
Ugra, Sharda (2002) ‘Passion play’, India Today, 5 August.
1
2 5 History without a past
3
4 Memory and forgetting in Indian
5
6
cricket
7
8 Satadru Sen
9
0
11
12
13 That there is something curious, or not quite right, about the way in which
14 Indians ‘remember’ cricket has been noted by at least one historian of the sport
15 in South Asia (Bose 1991: 376–7). It is difficult to deny that as a cultural artefact,
16 cricket has more room for memory than any other sport, including its closest
17 cousin, baseball. There is the structure of the ritual itself: a sport in which games
18 are played over relatively long periods of time, that is awash with recorded
19 statistics, and that focuses attention upon individual performance even as it
20 frames the individual player within the collective, has extraordinary potential for
21 lasting impressions upon the modern memory. The nature of that memory is also
22 significant. The history of team sports, since the nineteenth century, is also the
23 history of the stable collective, with similarly stable claims upon the allegiance
24 of the individual member (Lelyveld 1996: 253–60; Sandiford 1994: 34–52). This
25 has been truer for cricket than it has been for most other sports, largely because
26 cricket has been organised around collectives that, following Benedict Anderson
27 (1983: 1–7), are limited and territorial. In other words, cricket since the Victorian
28 era has been endowed with a historical memory that is recorded and invoked in
29 ways that parallel the histories of that other essential modern institution: the
30 nation-state. Indian cricket was organised ‘nationally’ from the very outset: as a
31 Parsi project, as a ‘pentangular’ project for the regeneration and mobilisation of
32 identifiable nations within India (Guha 2002), and then as the hyper-competitive
33 projects of the Indian, Pakistani and now Bangladeshi national sides. Under
34 the circumstances, Indians who follow cricket should ‘remember’ the sport much
35 as they ‘remember’ the nation: in terms of a series of recorded events, attached
36 to specific points on the calendar, highlighting a set of victories, defeats and
37 revelations.
38 Reinforcing this expectation of a normative memory is the apparent coinci-
39 dence of the normative communities of the cricket follower and the nationalist
40 in India: both are the domains of the middle class. These are not, of course, neatly
41 bounded domains, and the cultural ‘overflow’ into (and from) previously indif-
42 ferent sections of Indian society has accelerated in recent years. Nevertheless, it
43 is apparent that even within the middle-class heart of the nation, the stadium and
44 the sports page, there is a failure of what might be called the memory requirement
45 of cricket. How many Indians who consider themselves cricket fans remember
 Memory and forgetting in Indian cricket 95
1 when India first won a Test match? How many remember Vijay Merchant’s
2 batting average? Those details are precisely the kind of memory that C. L. R.
3 James’s Trinidadian Puritans would possess if they existed (see James 1963), and
4 that English cricket fans of certain classes may have possessed at one time. Why
5 is it that India – a country in which cricket is routinely described as ‘a religion’ –
6 has not produced a body of cricket literature beyond journalism that is instantly
7 relegated to the status of yesterday’s newspaper?
8 So far, two sets of answers have been put forward to explain this culture
9 of amnesia. One is Ashis Nandy’s hypothesis that cricket is fundamentally
0 ahistorical, and therefore aligned with an Indian proclivity to view the past in
11 terms of myth rather than history (2000: 58, 71). Too much need not be made
12 of this, not least because it reduces cricket, nationhood, myth and history to crude
13 essentialisms, eliding their mutual complicities. The other explanation is Mihir
14 Bose’s speculation that it is the recent past that has destroyed the historical
15 memory of Indian cricket, by introducing the element of tamasha (carnival)
16 (1991: 377–83). Appadurai has indicated something very similar in his remarks
17 on cricket in Sharjah, with an added emphasis on the changing class base of the
18 Indian cricket crowd (1996: 41–3). Both writers have implied that while there
19 was a time when Indian cricket was followed by adequately modern and his-
20 torically inclined middle-class fans, the broadening of the popular base of the
21 sport – as a result of the interconnected phenomena of economic liberalisation,
22 corporate sponsorship, satellite television, the triumph of one-day cricket over the
23 longer version of the game, and the adoption of the game by semi-proletarian
24 spectators – has created an environment in which cricket is consumed as instant
25 entertainment, and the specifics instantly forgotten. The argument that I shall
26 make is related tangentially to the Appadurai–Bose hypothesis. It is that Indian
27 cricket has only recently arrived at a historical location at which memory
28 is viable. This memory is different from the normative memory of English or
29 Australian cricket, just as contemporary Indian nationalism is not identical to
30 English or Australian nationalism. From this perspective, the memory of the
31 older, pre-television, pre-liberalisation cricket fan in India can be seen as a ‘failed’
32 memory that coincides with a failed attempt to define the national community in
33 liberal terms.
34 In the century before the 1980s, Indian cricket underwent impressive
35 expansion, moving beyond its status as the pastime of very limited groups of
36 Anglophiles towards a certain centrality as an ‘Indian’ ritual. At the same time,
37 there was nothing hegemonic about its place in the national culture, let alone in
38 the various sub-national and extra-national cultures that existed alongside what
39 Partha Chatterjee has called the society of ‘proper citizens’ (1998: 11). In the
40 discourse of national sports, cricket shared centre stage with hockey, and there
41 can be little doubt that it was eclipsed in Bengal by soccer (Dimeo 2001). Those
42 who inhabited the slums, the provincial towns and the villages did not show
43 any consistent preference for cricket over unorganized forms of recreation such
44 as kabaddi, gilli-danda and ‘street football’, or semi-organised sports such as body-
45 building and wrestling (see Alter 2003). While ‘sport’ as a discourse was not alien
 96 Satadru Sen
1 to this marginal majority (certainly it was a powerful presence in the lives of
2 provincial groups that sought to transcend their provinciality), it was neither a
3 dominant cultural presence nor dominated by a single pastime.
4 Cricket was played within shifting but limited circles of place, class, caste and
5 political affiliation: the middle and upper classes and educationally privileged
6 castes (such as Maharashtrian Brahmins) in major metropolitan areas.1 In fact, it
7 might be argued that in the decades after independence, the geography of Indian
8 cricket actually shrank, as the older centres of princely cricket lost their sources
9 of patronage and, with it, their significance (Cashman 1980: 24–47). I shall not
0 enter here into a narrative history of Indian cricket. I shall point out, however,
11 that this period and place in the history of the game are not devoid of memory.
12 Certain things were in fact ‘remembered’, and these memories can be separated
13 into two categories. On the one hand, there were statistics and memorable
14 performances, which were recorded, in the sense that they were written down.
15 Organised cricket generated documents in India just as it did in England, and this
16 documentation surely counts as a type of ‘memory’. On the other hand, there was
17 what might be described as legend, of folk memory: a Parsi victory over a visiting
18 English team in the 1890s, an exuberant innings by C. K. Nayudu in 1926,
19 England losing early wickets in India’s first Test match, Clyde Walcott trudging
20 to the boundary to retrieve the ball and waste time in Bombay in 1949. This folk
21 memory is not ahistorical or anti-historical: rooted (albeit tenuously) in time,
22 place and collectivity, it is the very stuff of historical consciousness.
23 The two types of memory met with different fates. While neither was ‘success-
24 ful’ in the short term, the second contained the potential for success over the long
25 term. The statistical memory of cricket has little appeal in Indian society, and
26 the documented basis of this memory has been largely buried. The value that
27 has historically been attached in England to the statistical memory of Grace,
28 Hammond and Hobbs is not remotely approached by the cultural significance
29 of what is remembered in India of the batting of Merchant and Hazare during
30 the domestic seasons of the Second World War. Those who remember such things
31 in India are a minuscule minority. This is not a simply a matter of ‘forgetting over
32 time’ as the events in question recede in relevance. It is, instead, evidence of
33 the limited demographic space in Indian society for what might be considered the
34 normative memory of modern sport – that is, a form of remembering in which the
35 sport itself is privileged. I am not attempting, here, to separate athletic ritual from
36 its cultural context. What I have in mind is a cultural perspective on cricket that
37 focuses attention upon specific discursive aspects of the ritual, including statistical
38 records, descriptions and demonstrations of technique, the insistence upon
39 political innocence, and memory. Within this perspective, what is remembered is
40 memory itself, events folding back upon themselves to provide depth to a sporting
41 community that is deeply attached not only to its presumed historicity, but
42 also to the value of history. An aficionado of the game might ‘remember’ that
43 K. S. Ranjitsinhji – whom he has never seen, but who has become a part of the
44 accumulated memory of cricket – had a wristy batting style, and relate that
45 ‘memory’ to the batting technique of the relatively contemporary David Gower.
 Memory and forgetting in Indian cricket 97
1 He believes not only that these relationships are natural, but also that his ability
2 to make such connections are basic to his identity as a cricket fan. The process is
3 much the same as the ability of a British nationalist to ‘remember’ and relate
4 Agincourt and Iraq.
5 There is, within this historical tradition, an essential separation of culture
6 and politics. In other words, there is a deep reluctance to concede that funda-
7 mental cultural institutions might be driven by anything so shallow and fleeting
8 as political purpose. This is effectively the distinction that Liah Greenfeld has
9 noted in her comparison of Anglo-American nationalism on the one hand, and
0 Russo-German nationalism on the other: the former self-contained, innocent and
11 based on liberal civic institutions, the latter driven by ressentiment or existential
12 envy, aggressively focused on what lies beyond the national Self (Greenfield
13 1992: 17–25). The separation that Greenfeld makes is actually a false one; all
14 nationalism is ultimately grounded in ressentiment, and to assume that English
15 nationalism is not dependent upon existential envy directed towards ‘outsiders’ is
16 to read colonialism out of the formation of the modern English Self. Nevertheless,
17 what matters is that the idea of a self-contained and innocent national culture
18 is perceived to be true by citizens, ideologues and sports fans. This conviction,
19 or pretence, is precisely what makes ‘civic nationalism’ of the English variety
20 possible. In England at the turn of the century, cricket existed at the very centre
21 of the culture of apolitical innocence. In fact, the Anglo-Australian cricket
22 establishment, including the mainstream media, have shown an extreme reluc-
23 tance to abandon the idea that political considerations in sport are ‘not cricket’
24 – a reluctance that has contributed to a rearguard action against challenges to
25 other cultural institutions, such as racism, sexism, class privilege and the stuffiness
26 of Lord’s (Sen 1994: 137–83 see also Marqusee 1994).
27 In India the culture of modernity has been overtly political, in the sense that
28 there has been little interest in segregating ritual from the desire to demarcate the
29 Self and the Other, or from the pleasures of competition. Tanika Sarkar (2001:
30 32) and John Rosselli (1980: 121–48) have noted that the Indian middle-class
31 articulation of a physically charged masculinity has been fundamentally grounded
32 in the desire of competing elites to establish and extend their hegemony. Because
33 athletic activity was deeply implicated in this project, Indian cricket was played
34 on explicitly as well as implicitly political fields, and cricketing episodes that did
35 not convey political messages left no imprint upon the memory. The viable
36 images, like the image of the barefooted soccer triumph of Mohun Bagan over the
37 East Yorkshire Regiment, constitute the second type of athletic memory, which
38 I have called ‘folk’ memory. Its constituting images were almost all generated at
39 the intersection of sport and nationhood: they represented the triumph of the
40 national collective or, alternatively, the defeat of that collective. Cricket in India,
41 unlike cricket in England, has no cultural significance when it is divorced from
42 political meaning of a very specific kind, which is the politics of ressentiment.
43 Thus, club-level cricket or even interprovincial competition of the Ranji Trophy
44 variety fails to generate ‘memorable’ episodes in the same way in which the county
45 game does in England, or club sports do in much of the world.
 98 Satadru Sen
1 It is useful to ask why this is so. Ranji Trophy sides, for the most part, represent
2 collectivities that possess nearly all the ideological and institutional components
3 of nationhood. Yet the matches typically attract little or no attention from
4 crowds, sponsors or the media, and players who have secured their places in the
5 Indian national team prefer to leave inter-state cricket to the aspiring and the
6 unfortunate. There is an apparent disconnection between this indifference and
7 the reality of political identities in contemporary India. To explain this discon-
8 nection we must first acknowledge that even when a sport becomes ‘popular’ in
9 a society within which nationalism has become hegemonic, that sport does
0 not automatically become a carrier of the ideology. Tamils and Punjabis who are
11 ‘nationalistic’ in their particular identities do not feel any serious compulsion
12 to take that nationalism into the stadium for a Ranji Trophy match, although the
13 same individuals watch India–Pakistan matches primarily because the sport then
14 functions as a combat vehicle of national identity. Under the circumstances,
15 we can reach two possible conclusions. One is that regional identities in India are
16 not especially competitive – no more competitive than county-based identities in
17 England or state-level identities in post-Civil War America, which exist largely
18 as organisational fictions with only superficial sentimental value. This seems
19 unlikely, given the nature of India’s political society, with its multiplicity of sub-
20 histories and regional parties, not to mention its frequently confrontational
21 politics of language. What is more likely is that the states of the Indian federation
22 do not perfectly represent the identities to which they are attached. In other
23 words, there is in some contexts a separation between ‘Punjabi’ (the identity) and
24 ‘Punjab’ (the state), based on the fact that whereas the former is quite old,
25 historically endowed and thus existentially meaningful, the latter is a relatively
26 recent creation of the Indian Union. The Ranji Trophy team, in this formulation,
27 represents Punjab but not necessarily the more competitive notion of being
28 Punjabi, and thus lacks the power to generate memory even when the standard of
29 the cricket is good by any objective standard.
30 Club cricket, which is even less memorable than the regionally organised
31 sport, presents another dilemma. The question here might be posed as follows:
32 why is club cricket in India played in a vacuum of notice and recollection? It is
33 not enough to say that it is because the standard of play is not high enough,
34 because second-rate club soccer has thrived in Kolkata (Calcutta) for decades
35 and left its share of memories, doggerel and folklore (Dimeo 2001). But Kolkata
36 soccer is club soccer only by default, being the organisational front of regional
37 and religious stress fractures that developed in the city in the process of several
38 generations of migration and resettlement (ibid.). It is, therefore, able to generate
39 the athletic memory of ressentiment in a way that club cricket – which lacks
40 communal affiliations – cannot. It is not that Mohun Bagan and East Bengal do
41 not have cricket teams, but the identities of the clubs are not attached to cricket
42 in the way that they are linked to soccer. Under the circumstances, club cricket
43 in India remains either a private pleasure or an afterthought, and neither can be
44 transmuted into ‘public memory’ – that is, memories that are shared, in some form
45 or other, by significant numbers of people.
 Memory and forgetting in Indian cricket 99
1 The public memory of cricket in postcolonial India until quite recently, then,
2 was generated within fairly narrow limits. While the culture of statistical memory
3 and ‘apolitical’ nostalgia was essentially stillborn, there was a space within which
4 moments that were overtly connected to the politics of competing national
5 identity could be remembered, reproduced and disseminated. This latter space,
6 however, was restricted by the practical economy of Indian cricket. While there
7 is no doubt that the demographics of the sport in India expanded in the decades
8 after independence,2 the new cricket fan was still primarily urban, middle-class
9 and male. The Indian middle class may have been large in terms of absolute
0 numbers, but even if the concept of the ‘middle class’ is interpreted generously, it
11 enclosed a very small segment of a larger population whose interest in the athletic
12 memory of nationhood was either superficial or altogether absent. Moreover, the
13 middle class consumed cricket under circumstances that handicapped the produc-
14 tion of memory. The most crucial of these is that it did not possess significant
15 reserves of disposable income. This did not necessarily keep fans from attending
16 the ‘big’ events: Test matches in India were routinely among the best-attended in
17 the world, with spectators filling giant arenas such as Eden Gardens in Kolkata,
18 with seating for eighty thousand.3 Nevertheless, it did impose restrictions upon
19 how often fans could afford to pay for matches, and this ensured that only certain
20 kinds of games – that is, Test matches – attracted public patronage. The number
21 of international matches that India played was not very large in the decades
22 between the 1930s and 1970s, either in comparison with the frequency of such
23 matches today, or compared with the frequency of ‘major’ cricket matches in
24 England and Australia. This low frequency reflected the limits of the Indian
25 consumer, as well as the marginal status of India and Pakistan in the international
26 cricket bureaucracy in the decades before Sunil Gavaskar emerged as a star bats-
27 man and Jagmohan Dalmia as a powerful bureaucrat. Consequently, opportunities
28 for the generation of memory continued to be limited.
29 Infrequent matches and frugal fans existed in a state of mutual complicity
30 with what was perhaps the biggest obstacle in the way of a culture of memory:
31 underdevelopment of the sports media. In comparison with the highly devel-
32 oped industry of cricket gossip in late-Victorian and Edwardian England, which
33 revolved around an extraordinarily prolific cricket press, the journalism of Indian
34 cricket in the decades after independence was severely restricted in its ability
35 to generate memory. Unlike in the Caribbean, where the local could coexist
36 with the communal among relatively small island communities, the geographic
37 realities of South Asia required effective modern media to disseminate any durable
38 notion of shared cultural and political concerns. Before the Asian Games of 1982,
39 television broadcasting was accessible only in the largest Indian cities, and even
40 there the coverage of cricket was rudimentary at best. For months or even years
41 at a stretch, cricket would not be mentioned on television, except for a ten-second
42 report of the latest Indian defeat. The local Test match would be broadcast
43 live, but with a near-total absence of ‘frills’ – that is, of imagination. There was
44 very little visible corporate involvement in the form of advertisements before
45 Palmolive put Kapil Dev in front of the camera to sell shaving cream. Radio
 100 Satadru Sen
1 broadcasts of Test matches, which had a much wider audience than television,
2 were in fact much livelier and more ‘imaginative’, but their impact was reduced
3 by the infrequency of matches and, I would suggest, by the non-visual nature of
4 the medium.
5 The print media were similarly impoverished. While newspapers provided
6 excellent coverage of Test matches when these were in progress, they paid little
7 attention to ‘lesser’ games. The secondary print media, such as sports magazines
8 and especially the industry of books about cricket, were badly attenuated in a
9 market with a limited readership and without surplus income. The nature of the
0 newspaper coverage of cricket was also critical. It provided information about
11 statistics and technique, and it was oriented towards the action on the field. It was
12 not geared to stimulate the imagination of those who were less interested in the
13 cricket than in the soap opera that surrounded it: the personal lives of the players,
14 their financial fortunes, their sunglasses and cars, and so on. In any case, in the
15 pre-Packer era the financial fortunes and clothes of Indian cricketers tended to be
16 relatively modest and uninteresting. Not only did this mean that less knowledge
17 was being produced, but it also meant that what was produced was remembered
18 only by a very few.
19 The change came in the early 1980s, but it was not entirely sudden. The
20 ideological and economic groundwork was laid in the 1970s. On the one hand,
21 what has been described as the ‘Gavaskar era’ (Bose 1991: 289) reflected and
22 reinforced a new emphasis on triumphalism – that is, a situation in which Indian
23 victories came to be awaited with a mixture of confidence and anxiety. There
24 can be little doubt that Test victories of the 1970s – against the West Indies
25 (1971, 1974–5, 1976), England (1971, 1972–3), Australia (1977–8) and Pakistan
26 (1979–80) – had come with a frequency and a conviction that exceeded anything
27 witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s. Several of these victories, including the series
28 victories of 1971, had come on ‘enemy territory’, where the erstwhile Indian
29 record was notoriously poor. Bose has noted that these victories were received
30 differently from the occasional win of the pre-Gavaskar years: whereas the latter
31 were accepted as a kind of bonus in a narrative composed primarily of defeats, the
32 victories of the 1970s marked a new sense of ‘arrival’ in the ranks of the great
33 powers (ibid.: 260–9). The two experiences were not entirely different, however,
34 because the feeling of arrival was extremely brittle, marked not only by the
35 heightened expectation of victory, but also by an exaggerated fear of defeat.
36 This combination has generated numerous incidents of ‘overreaction’ on the
37 part of Indian cricket fans confronted with lost matches, series and competitions,
38 from the defacement in 1974 of the cricket monument in Indore (erected to
39 remember the victories of 1971) to the riot in Eden Gardens during the India–Sri
40 Lanka semi-final in the World Cup of 1996. Such overreactions are not simply
41 evidence of enthusiasm for cricket, or of the excitability of natives. They reflect
42 a particular stage in the development of the Indian nation-state, at which certain
43 expectations had been badly frustrated and others imperfectly achieved. After a
44 quarter-century of independence and in the aftermath of the Bangladesh War of
45 1971 and the Pokhran nuclear test of 1974, the continued marginality of India
 Memory and forgetting in Indian cricket 101
1 in the structures of global power and significance, not to mention the precar-
2 ious economic circumstances of middle-class life, international cricket could
3 provide a forum for assertive celebration of power as well as deeply anxious
4 acknowledgement and anticipation of failure. In no other country, not even
5 Pakistan, has the national cricket team had to carry the burden of a fraudulent
6 superpower status. The narrative of victory that began in the 1970s did not erode
7 the importance of ressentiment in the memory of Indian cricket, but amplified it
8 to an unprecedented level.
9 There were other changes that occurred in cricket in the 1970s that affected
0 the Indian memory either indirectly or belatedly. Kerry Packer’s World Series
11 Cricket (WSC) was undoubtedly one. This might appear curious, since no Indian
12 player played on the WSC circuit. Nevertheless, WSC – with its floodlights,
13 unorthodox attire, ‘souped-up’ media coverage and, above all, its money – went a
14 long way towards revolutionising how the Indian middle class consumed the
15 images that accompanied cricket. The impact was not perceived immediately;
16 I would argue, in fact, that a change in the culture of the sport did not become
17 apparent in India until 1979–80, when the Pakistan team toured India. Some
18 of the Pakistan players, most notably Imran Khan, had participated in WSC.
19 Their images had been transformed by the experience; the ‘sex symbol’ persona
20 that Imran brought to India in 1979 was a product not of his looks alone, but of
21 the media circus that surrounded Packer’s enterprise. During the tour, Imran,
22 Zaheer Abbas and their teammates made a further transition that had been
23 enabled by the ‘memory’ of WSC: they became the performative equivalents of
24 Indian film stars, shadowed by paparazzi off the field, sought out not only by
25 ‘serious’ and male cricket journalists like Kishore Bhimani and Dicky Rutnagar
26 but also by ‘lifestyle columnists’ and by women reporters such as Tavleen Singh
27 (who did not usually write about sport), escorted to parties by assorted movie stars
28 and starlets, and captured by the cover-page editors of dedicated magazines such
29 as Sportsworld as well as of news magazines such as Sunday. As a result, Indians
30 who followed cricket, and even those who did not, learned to remember a kind of
31 knowledge that was usually associated with the gossipy, personality-driven and
32 widely popular world of Mumbai (Bombay) cinema.
33 This glamour was actually the beginning of a democratisation of the culture
34 of the sport in India – that is, its emergence from the confines of the field and
35 the world of male experts. It was nevertheless a continuation of the older search
36 for a powerfully assertive national self. The archetypal new celebrity cricketer
37 in India – ironically, a Pakistani – was not simply an entertainer in a ripped ‘Big
38 Boys Play At Night’ T-shirt. He was also the symbol of a cosmopolitan self that
39 – again, ironically – is deeply imbedded in the desires of nationalist modernity.
40 The nationalist does not want only to draw borders that will establish a geography
41 within which he is powerful. What he (and increasingly in Indian cricket, she)
42 wants also is the power to eliminate those boundaries by which the relatively
43 powerful segregate the marginal. As a way of participating in a selectively deseg-
44 regated culture of power, cosmopolitanism is integral to middle-class nationalisms
45 in the Third World. Because ‘globalised’ cricketers such as Imran Khan and
 102 Satadru Sen
1 Sachin Tendulkar allow the marginalised middle classes of South Asia to walk
2 and play upon a stage that is not restricted to the margins of the world, the images
3 that convey their centrality in the culture of ‘big boys’ and international glamour
4 are extraordinarily appealing and memorable.
5 What we see by the early 1980s, then, is the convergence of partially new
6 desires and entirely new opportunities for the sustenance and multiplication of
7 those desires. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that these desires
8 and opportunities were still played out within the same, fairly narrow, segment of
9 the metropolitan middle class. In this context the dramatic expansion of Indian
0 television after 1982 marked a major movement. First, by taking coverage of
11 cricket matches into new ‘viewing publics’, the TV revolution exposed entirely
12 new segments of the population not only to the esoteric rituals of cricket but
13 also to the culture of athletic nationalism. By the end of the decade, over 80 per
14 cent of the country was covered by Doordarshan (the national broadcaster), and
15 from the 1990s this reach was exponentially supplemented by the rapid expansion
16 of satellite channels, including ESPN and Star Sports. The new channels in
17 particular were responsible for introducing in India various technical devel-
18 opments in the journalism of televised sport that can be traced not only to Packer,
19 but to US innovations such as Monday Night Football (Patton 1984; see also
20 Chandler 1991). These included the shifting of focus away from the ‘field’ to what
21 used to be the ‘background’: the players as media personalities, and the media
22 themselves, including the journalists. In other words, the soap opera of cricket
23 that became evident in the print medium in the early 1980s was adapted for a
24 television audience that was ‘national’ in more than one sense of the word, and
25 made many times more influential in the process.
26 This process was inseparable from the economic policies that were put in
27 place in India by the Narasimha Rao government in 1991. Collectively known
28 as ‘liberalisation’, these policies involved opening the economy to greater levels
29 of foreign investment, and the partial or complete deregulation of certain sectors.
30 The effects of liberalisation and rapid economic growth upon Indian society have
31 been enormous, and it is probably too early to put forward any sweeping hypothe-
32 ses. Nevertheless, it is apparent that the Indian middle class has changed very
33 considerably over the past decade: in its size, its membership, its spending power,
34 its spending priorities, its political attitudes, and what might be described as its
35 cultural proclivities. For my present purposes the most significant developments
36 are the affluence of segments of the metropolitan middle class, their access to
37 images and products of global capitalism, and the inclusion in ‘middle-class
38 culture’ of small-business-oriented groups and segments of the urban underclass
39 that had hitherto been marginal to it. Taken together, these have not only
40 expanded the existing scope for remembering cricket, but determined the content
41 and the context of memory.
42 The emergence of a relatively flush new market for cricket in India in the 1990s
43 eliminated much of the practical difficulty in the way of disseminating culture.
44 While it has not created a huge new cricket press, it certainly has created a market
45 with greater room for English-language sports magazines, new vernacular journals
 Memory and forgetting in Indian cricket 103
1 such as the Hindi Kriket Kriket, more elaborate sports sections in the daily
2 newspapers (which now cover cricket year-round), and semi-academic work such
3 as Ramachandra Guha’s recent books. The spread of the Internet, with its prolif-
4 eration of news portals, marks an expansion of this market, since most websites
5 for established Indian newspapers and online journals such as Rediff.com place at
6 least one cricket story on their ‘front page’ every day. The online medium has
7 been especially powerful in sustaining the sporting memory of the Indian diaspora,
8 particularly among affluent immigrants in North America who would otherwise
9 be isolated from cricket and ‘home’. Endowed with the flexibility of the Internet,
0 online newspapers not only keep chronically anxious expatriate nationalists
11 informed of the national score, but submerge them in the ‘new journalism’ of
12 Indian cricket, providing gossip and commentary, some of it ‘expert’, much of it
13 decidedly plebeian. Perhaps most crucially, the Internet provides the Indian
14 middle class and their expatriate and foreign-born (‘non-resident Indian’, NRI)
15 cousins with the ability to ‘play’ vicariously by participating in online polls,
16 wishing Sachin Tendulkar a happy birthday, and expressing their opinion without
17 having to get past editors with elitist expectations of literacy.
18 In spite of their location within the ‘middle class’, many of these consumers
19 of cricket are a new demographic in Indian sport, and are in many ways closer
20 to the semi-proletarian cricket crowds of Sharjah and the provincial cities than
21 they are to the ‘old’ middle class (Appadurai 1996: 41–3). These are men and
22 women from the provincial cities and the smaller towns, from the less prestigious
23 educational institutions, and from that sector of the economy which is loosely
24 described as ‘export–import’. They have benefited from the liberalisation of the
25 economy and now claim to belong to the middle class, but their cultural codes –
26 including the meanings and priorities that they attach to cricket – differ from
27 those of the pre-liberalisation elites, sometimes subtly, sometimes not. They
28 embrace cricket as part of their movement into the metropolitan, university-
29 educated, middle-class lifestyle, but the movement is never in only one direction.
30 It would be accurate to argue that the Indian middle class has been partially
31 colonised by the moneyed newcomer in many areas of the popular culture of
32 liberalisation, and the cricket crowd (extended to the Internet portal) has not
33 been immune to this transformation. Those who participate in online polls on
34 ‘Will India win the World Cup?’ or ‘Should Ganguly be sacked as captain?’
35 probably do not assume that the question poses a worthwhile intellectual
36 challenge or requires a deep technical knowledge of the game. It is unlikely that
37 many believe that Tendulkar cares about their birthday greetings. They proceed
38 from the expectation of certain interrelated pleasures: of an interactive new
39 national community in which their voices carry, and of entry into a forum upon
40 which they can subvert authority (of players, administrators, umpires, journalists,
41 experts, intellectuals, men). The process marks the creation of not so much a
42 discourse of athletic knowledge as a cacophony of modern self-advertisement –
43 that is, the announcement of the hitherto silent individual’s arrival in the midst
44 of a vocally performed community. The pleasure of this participation, more than
45 the scorecard, is basic to the modern memory of Indian cricket.
 104 Satadru Sen
1 The biggest changes in how cricket is followed and remembered in India have
2 been in the area of television coverage; in fact, it is television, rather than the old
3 print medium, that has provided the templates for coverage of cricket on the
4 Internet and in the new press. The 2003 World Cup attracted record television
5 audiences in excess of one billion people,4 with the greatest concentration being
6 in South Asia. Needless to say, such audiences attract corporate sponsorship, and
7 cricket – especially Indian cricket – today is so flush with advertising revenue
8 that it makes WSC appear unorganised and small scale in comparison. Sachin
9 Tendulkar’s current five-year contract with the advertising giant World-Tel pays
0 him more than US$20 million dollars, which is an unprecedented level of
11 prosperity and public exposure. My point is that it is not simply the audience that
12 draws the advertisers; the advertisements also draw and shape the audience, and
13 this dynamic profoundly affects what the audience remembers. People who tune
14 in to watch cricket do not simply do so to watch the game. Like Super Bowl
15 audiences in the United States, they do so to watch the advertisements too, not
16 least because consuming images of global products such as Pepsi and Adidas when
17 those products have been attached to Indian national icons like Tendulkar (and
18 thus domesticated, without being stripped of their cosmopolitan glamour) is an
19 experience of the pleasure of being a modern consumer-citizen. Their memories
20 of cricket, then, include the products that are associated with the cosmopolitan
21 stars of the national game, as well as the stark facts of big money: the statistics of
22 batting averages have been reduced to near-irrelevance by the statistics of players’
23 contracts (Ananthanarayanan 2002).
24 The new crowd in Indian cricket also consumes – and thus remembers – the
25 crowd itself. The panoramic eye of the television camera produces a visual
26 memory of one’s fellow spectators that is significantly different from the observed
27 recollection of the ticket-holder in the stands. The crowd is at once expanded,
28 rendered spectacular and incited to perform as spectacle. Without television,
29 there would be little incentive for the painted-face carnivals of present-day
30 cricket, which survive as a continuous trace in the memory of the watcher when
31 the specifics of the game itself have faded. I am reminded of the appearance in the
32 World Cup in South Africa of the so-called ‘Bharat Army’: British Asian soccer
33 fans moonlighting as cricket enthusiasts and India supporters, decked out in
34 tricolour T-shirts and Gandhi caps, waving giant Indian flags and chanting ‘Hoo,
35 haa, Tendulkaa’ (The Telegraph 2003). As a televised phenomenon, the Bharat
36 Army are a part of the Indian’s consumption of the NRI. In the cricket crowd,
37 as in the cinema, the ‘resident’ Indian confronts the ‘non-resident’ not as an
38 autonomous entity but as a projection of his or her own fantastic desires (and
39 anxieties) amid globalised products, images and ‘lifestyles’. In this context the
40 appearance of the boisterous, foreign-yet-familiar, and rather ‘un-cricketing’ NRI
41 in the television audience provides the Indian fan not only with entertainment
42 and amusement, but with a way of remembering what he or she wants to be, is
43 afraid of becoming, and has already become.
44 The Bharat Army are also noteworthy because they simultaneously imitate and
45 parody the ‘Barmy Army’ of England supporters, as well as their own ‘English’
 Memory and forgetting in Indian cricket 105
1 selves as soccer fans.5 In spite of the growing numbers of Asians in county-level
2 and national-level cricket in England, British Asians have their own reasons
3 to be invested in the memory of Indian cricket. In a political climate in which
4 the British-born continue to be viewed as ‘immigrants’, Sachin Tendulkar and
5 Indian performances not only produce the imagination and nostalgia that is
6 essential for an alternative sense of ‘roots’, but also provide a forum for remem-
7 bering the racial tensions of British society. The Bharat Army are an Indian
8 fantasy of the NRI; they are, at the same time, NRIs acting upon their fantasy
9 of India, performing ‘Indian cricket’ as an ironic remembrance of soccer and of
0 ‘English cricket’, in the context of the Tebbit test and the chicken tikka masala
11 controversy.6
12 While discussing the memory of the new spectator in the Indian crowd, it
13 is necessary to raise the phenomenon of women, television and cricket in
14 contemporary India. While small numbers of women have long shown some
15 interest in the sport, the dramatic expansion of the female audience for Indian
16 cricket – both in the stadium and in front of the television – is something quite
17 new. I recently had the pleasure of meeting a middle-aged matron of a distinctly
18 ‘traditional’ sort, who does not pretend to know the difference between a square
19 cut and a hook but idolises Tendulkar and literally prays for him to score runs, ‘so
20 that India can win’. Watching the World Cup final in a room crowded with the
21 fashionable and inebriated wives of slovenly and inebriated Indian men, it
22 occurred to me that the cricket – if the word is used to describe the game itself –
23 was of minimal interest to most of those present. Like the matronly well-wisher
24 of India’s star batsman, these fans were more interested in the possibility of a
25 national victory. They were, however, also invested in the glamour of their own
26 roles as consumers of nationalism and modernity, designer clothes and television
27 advertisements, martinis and the sex appeal of Rahul Dravid.
28 Women cricket fans in India are both different from and similar to female
29 fans of American football. In India as well as in the United States, there is now
30 a significant ‘female demographic’ in the audience for sports that women gener-
31 ally do not play. In the United States, women who follow football often begin
32 (and end) as supporters of high school or college teams. In India, where school
33 and college sports generate little attention from those not actually playing,
34 female interest is generated through other means, and television programming
35 is the most significant of these. The tactics used are not fundamentally dissimilar
36 from the methods pioneered by the architects of Monday Night Football,
37 but Indian networks have improved upon those innovations by introducing
38 the glamorous female ingénue in the role of cricket journalist. I refer here
39 to actress Mandira Bedi’s highly successful (and Ruby Bhatia’s less successful)
40 career during the 2003 World Cup: male ‘purists’ of the game were openly
41 contemptuous, but others were thoroughly entertained. More importantly, the
42 Sony television network calculated, explicitly and accurately, that female viewers
43 would identify with Bedi’s attempt to learn something about the game without
44 being concerned with esoteric technical details or statistical arcana (Banerjee
45 2003; Sen 2003).
 106 Satadru Sen
1 Mandira Bedi represents trends in Indian middle-class culture that are both
2 reactionary and subversive. She epitomises the idea of women as silly, giggling
3 creatures who must be indulged (with various types of pleasure and forbearance)
4 by the male athletes, journalists and viewers who actually own the sport and
5 the profession. She personifies a kind of modernity – that of the liberated yet
6 feminine woman who might share some of the interests of her husband and male
7 friends – that has been deeply attractive to the Indian middle class since the late
8 nineteenth century, when companionate marriage first became an ideal within
9 a narrow segment of the colonised elite (Forbes 1996: 62, 86). Bedi represents
0 also a further feminisation of the culture of the sport, which is recognised by the
11 ‘female-oriented’ television advertising that accompanies the coverage of one-day
12 cricket. The result might be described as an explosion of memory that has no
13 precedent in the history of the sport in India: not only do middle-class women
14 now share the collective knowledge of Indian cricket, but Mandira Bedi herself
15 has become a part of what Indians remember about cricket, as have her fashion-
16 able clothes, and the fact of women’s interest in the game.
17 The reaction that is both buried and manifest in the phenomenon of the female
18 cricket ‘personality’ is closely related to the crisis of liberalism in contemporary
19 India. In its naked affiliation with capitalist forces, its rampant emotionalism and
20 its aggressive nationalism, the present-day culture of Indian cricket is very far
21 removed from the Puritanical world of James’s Trinidad, and from the liberal
22 Englishness that James imagined, absorbed and deployed. In his insightful analysis
23 of Beyond a Boundary, Ian Baucom has implied that what was liberal – and
24 liberating – about James’s vision of cricket and empire was his erasure, within the
25 space of the cricket field, of the ‘boundary’ of Englishness (1999: 155–62). Within
26 this space, by which Baucom means not only ‘place’ but also gestures (such as a
27 cover-drive, or the refusal to challenge an umpiring decision), the distinction
28 between white pedagogy and black performance broke down, the line between
29 nation and empire wavered, and the communal identity became charged with
30 inclusive possibilities.
31 It is quite possible that James’s memory of the Trinidadian cricket field is the
32 desperate reproduction of a middle-class fiction, and there is no doubt that it
33 was exclusive in its own way: towards poor blacks, towards women, towards
34 anybody who declined to make the necessary gestures or made gestures that were
35 proscribed by ‘the code’ (James 1963: 39–46). There is no doubt, either, that the
36 code that James eulogised was deeply implicated in English nationalism and
37 racism. Because James attempted to retrieve it from those associations, his vision
38 of sport, team and community is ultimately incompatible with ressentiment.
39 It cannot survive in an environment in which identity and pastime have both
40 been nationalised. Nor can it flourish in an environment in which the pedagogical
41 has been circumvented by the performative – that is, in which the processes of
42 teaching and learning the discipline of the ritual have been rendered superfluous
43 by the carnival.
44 While the public school code was imparted quite effectively to generations of
45 Indian cricketers and their middle-class fans, cricket as a memorable ritual has
 Memory and forgetting in Indian cricket 107
1 never been played ‘beyond a boundary’ in India. The sport is played, watched and
2 remembered as a part of the boundary between Self and Other: imposed not only
3 by the repressive Other, but also by the assertive Self. James’s code is essentially
4 the athletic counterpart of the ideology of the Nehruvian state, with its rhetoric
5 of secularism, manly asceticism and nationalist internationalism. Both are based
6 on the hope that discrete communities will subordinate themselves to a higher
7 authority, behave with restraint and equity in the present, and merge honourably
8 in the future. Each is elitist, contemptuous of dissent, convinced of the possibility
9 and desirability of pedagogy, and adamant that dissidents play by ‘universal’ rules
0 even when the rules were made by others. Not surprisingly, each has been swept
11 away by those who derive their pleasure and their identity from other, less liberal,
12 but more productive and memorable forms of exclusion.
13 Thus, while certain ‘old’ patterns of recollection persist in Indian cricket, their
14 significance has been both magnified and altered by the changes in the crowd that
15 remembers, and in the mechanisms of remembrance. The attention paid to on-
16 the-field heroics and catastrophes has not passed: the victory in the 1983 World
17 Cup is still cherished, Chetan Sharma’s hat-trick in the 1987 tournament has not
18 been forgotten, neither has the come-from-behind victory against Australia in
19 2001, and Javed Miandad’s last-ball six at Sharjah is probably indelible in
20 a historical memory that reserves a special place for defeat at the hands of the
21 Muslim. But other episodes have vanished from public consciousness, even
22 though their loads of political meaning are just as ‘inspiring’: Vijay Hazare’s two
23 centuries in a lost Test match against Australia in 1948, Vinoo Mankad’s
24 performance in the midst of another defeat, this one against England in 1952.
25 This is not because the political significance of each event is radically different.
26 Each is viewed through the filter of ressentiment nationalism. However, the
27 creation of public memory requires infrastructure, and it requires a certain critical
28 mass of knowledge. In the process of accumulating the infrastructure and the
29 critical mass, the nature of the knowledge has changed. The new Indian cricket
30 crowd, gazing through the new press, satellite television and the Internet portal,
31 does not so much see a series of games as it sees itself, and it experiences the vision
32 as a set of anxious fantasies about nationhood, modernity, power, isolation and
33 connection. The ‘Indian’ – and not the ‘cricket’ – is the primary content of the
34 modern memory of Indian cricket.
35
36
37 Notes
38 1 On caste and cricket, see Guha (1998) and Anand (2003).
39 2 Radio played a major role in this expansion (Bose 1991: 218–19).
40 3 It is worth noting that while admission at Test matches in India was free in the 1930s,
41 the subsequent move towards ticket sales has not reduced attendance in any way.
42 Eden Gardens has been refurbished to seat more than 100,000 spectators.
4 ‘South Africa’s cricket World Cup will dazzle’, www.safrica.info, 18 April 2003.
43 5 On the politics of cultural imitation, see Bhabha (1984: 127).
44 6 In 2001 the British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, stirred up a public debate on the
45 ethnic content of British identity by calling chicken tikka masala ‘a true British
 108 Satadru Sen
1 national dish’. The ‘Tebbit test’ refers to the English parliamentarian Norman Tebbit’s
2 well-known complaint that Asian immigrants to Britain and their children do not
support England in international sports, and his insistence that such support is a
3
critical test of national identity. See Sen (1994).
4
5
6 References
7
8 Alter, Joseph (2003) ‘The wrestler’s body’, in James Mills and Satadru Sen (eds)
Confronting the Body, London: Anthem.
9
Anand, S. (2003) ‘The retreat of the Brahmin’, Outlook, 10 February.
0
Ananthanarayanan, N. (2002) ‘ICC row brings focus on India’s endorsement-rich
11 players’, Cricinfo.org, 20 August.
12 Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities, London: Verso.
13 Appadurai, Arjun (1996) ‘Playing with modernity’, in Carol Breckenridge (ed.)
14 Consuming Modernity, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996.
15 Banerjee, Sudeshna (2003) ‘Get a woman, but a cricketer’, The Telegraph (Calcutta),
16 10 March.
17 Baucom, Ian (1999) Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity,
18 Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
19 Bhabha, Homi (1984) ‘Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’,
20 October, 28 (Spring): 127.
21 Bose, Mihir (1991) A History of Indian Cricket, London: André Deutsch.
Cashman, Richard (1980) Players, Patrons and the Crowd, Delhi: Orient Longman.
22
Chandler, Joan (1991) ‘Sport as TV product: a case study of Monday night football’, in
23
Paul Staudohar and J. A. Mangan (eds) The Business of Professional Sports, Urbana:
24 University of Illinois Press.
25 Chatterjee, Partha (1998) Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State, Delhi:
26 Oxford University Press.
27 Dimeo, Paul (2001) ‘Contemporary developments in Indian football’, Contemporary South
28 Asia, 10 (2): 252–64.
29 Forbes, Geraldine (1996) Women in Modern India, Cambridge: Cambridge University
30 Press.
31 Greenfield, Liah (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
32 University Press.
33 Guha, Ramachandra (1998) ‘Cricket and politics in colonial India’, Past and Present,
no. 161, November.
34
Guha, Ramachandra (2002) A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British
35
Sport, London: Picador.
36 James, C. L. R. (1963) Beyond a Boundary, London: Stanley Paul.
37 Lelyfeld, David (1996) Aligarh’s First Generation, Delhi: Oxford University Press.
38 Marqusee, Mike (1994) Anyone but England, Delhi: Penguin.
39 Nandy, Ashis (2000) The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games,
40 Delhi: Oxford University Press.
41 Patton, Phil (1984) Razzle-Dazzle: The Curious Marriage of Television and Professional
42 Football, Garden City, N.Y.: Dial Press.
43 Rosselli, John (1980) ‘The self-image of effeteness: physical education and nationalism in
44 nineteenth-century Bengal’, Past and Present, 86: 121–48.
45 Sandiford, Keith (1994) Cricket and the Victorians, Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press.
 Memory and forgetting in Indian cricket 109
1 Sarkar, Tanika (2001) Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural
2 Nationalism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
3 Sen, Ayanjit (2003) ‘Indian females bowled over’, www.bbc.co.uk, 18 March.
4 Sen, Satadru (1994) ‘The peasants are revolting: race, culture and ownership in cricket’,
in Paul Dimeo and James Mills (eds) Sport in the South Asian World, London: Anthem.
5
Telegraph, The (2003) ‘Cacophony in Gandhi cap’, The Telegraph (Calcutta), 21 March.
6
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6 Cricket in ‘a nation
imperfectly imagined’
Identity and tradition in
postcolonial Pakistan
Chris Valiotis

The history of cricket in Pakistan is both fascinating and enigmatic. As an

offshoot of the pre-1947 Indian variant of the game, it has developed from an
insignificant and obscure pastime of mostly urban educated players and endured
any number of obstacles and intrigues to become a commercially successful sport
and a nationally contested dialectic in Pakistani society. This chapter assesses
why an essentially successful international culture of cricket has developed in
Pakistan when numerous internal upheavals and controversies have bedevilled its
domestic game, and why these may in the end have worked to the advantage of
the national team. The history of Pakistani cricket and its significance in the
postcolonial world will be examined under four broad headings: the development
of a specific Pakistani cricket tradition; popularisation and the emergence of the
‘vernacular’ cricketer; the political appropriation of cricket in Pakistan; and, by
way of summary, Pakistani cricket identity in a global space.

The development of a specific Pakistani cricket tradition

Pakistani cricket history cannot be understood without reference to the historical
growth and development of the game in the pre-partition period. It is not a sui
generis outgrowth of Pakistani independence, but a variant of India’s cricket
history that found itself stranded in a new separate, imagined community. The
Muslims that adopted the British game in the colonial era did so, like their Parsee
and Hindu counterparts, for complex motives, but it is reasonably certain that
they did not see themselves as Pakistani cricketers. They shared the general
assumption of the wider Indian community that the unity of the subcontinent was
a given that would continue however the conflict between the British and the
nationalists played itself out. Until the 1940s even the political elite had taken
the integrity and unity of India for granted. Since popular culture followed
political trends at a respectful distance, it is scarcely surprising that the non-
political masses were even more surprised by the extraordinary rapidity of the
endgame of British rule and the suddenness with which the Pakistani option
emerged as a serious possibility than were the politicians of the Congress Party
and the Muslim League. As part of this non-political milieu, most cricketers
thought that their careers would remain bound up with the substantial cricket
infrastructure that they were a part of in India.
 Pakistan: identity and tradition 111
Cricket in colonial India had set out on its own trajectory developing indige-
nous traditions and regional peculiarities devoid of the nationalist ideals of
both the Congress and League. Arjun Appadurai writes, ‘Rather than being a
spin-off of the imagined community of nationalist politicians in India, nationally
organized cricket was an internal demand of the colonial enterprise and thus
required cognate national or protonational enterprises in the colonies (1996a:
99). In other words, the cricket authorities and players of India were indepen-
dently forging their own national sports culture that was inclusive of all ethnic
and communal groups that had taken to the game in the colonial period. This was
consistent with the logic of Indian historical tradition, which offers numerous
examples of communal coexistence. Thus, cricket, like many other popular
cultural enterprises in India, conformed to the Indian mohalla tradition that
provided for the participation of diverse communities – each characterised by
multiple foci of identity – in the wider economy and society.
This is crucial for an understanding of the difficulties that have plagued
the organisation of domestic cricket in Pakistan. Having been embedded in the
framework of Indian cricket, which relied almost exclusively on its domestic
competition in Bombay1 and its imperial and indigenous patrons, Muslim crick-
eters from the regions that became Pakistan found themselves orphaned at
partition. This was because cricket in the colonial era had not itself consciously
been partitioned. Instead, its administrative and cultural links with the rest of
India were severed because of political events that it did not control and that left
it bereft of funds, patrons and organisational structure.
Karachi and Lahore provide good case studies of the problems encountered
by Pakistan’s first cricket organisers. In the colonial period both were by far
the most advanced cricket-playing centres of north-west India, and remained so
after their inclusion within Pakistan. However, the traumatic events of 1947
disrupted and, for some time, impaired the development of the game in both
centres. First, partition adversely affected the established patrons and players of
cricket in both Karachi and Lahore. In pre-partition Karachi, Hindus and Parsees
were the most important local cricketers. Guha writes of the fierce rivalry gen-
erated by the cricket teams of these two communities: ‘the two communities
were rivals in business, in the professions, in politics – and on the cricket field’
(2002: 41). Moreover, partition resulted in the exodus of the city’s majority Hindu
population. In other words, the most influential and established organisers and
players of the local game were lost to Karachi after 1947. Furthermore, the
Muslims from north India who emigrated to the city during the same period had
learned their cricket and honed their playing skills in Aligarh College and the
local competition of that region. Ignorant and disapproving of the cultural
traditions of Sind, they avoided social contact with the local population and
concentrated entirely on setting themselves up as Pakistan’s earliest political
leaders.
The Muslims of Lahore made a very strong and crucial contribution to cricket
in colonial India. Lahore had a vigorous collegiate system modelled on the
educational institutions of Britain. Three of its colleges, Aitchison, Government
112 Chris Valiotis
and Islamia, promoted the disciplinarian approach to cricket and other sports that
they inherited from British muscular Christian educators. Many of the Muslim
cricketers in Lahore were graduates of these colleges. They became competent and
able players; a few of them were selected to play Test cricket for India before
partition. Furthermore, the success of the University of Punjab in winning the first
three national Rohinton Baria Trophy inter-university finals in succession from
1935 to 1937 (Cashman 1980: 85) further attested to the strength of the region.
However, Lahore’s success was equally attributable to its strong Hindu and Sikh
organisational and participational presence. Both these communities were lost to
it after partition, which disrupted cricket in both Karachi and Lahore, leaving it
in a state of disarray in a country that had no historical tradition of political and
cultural unity.
Two years elapsed before the preliminary steps were taken to develop a new
Pakistani ‘national’ cricket culture. The Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan
was established on 1 May 1949 after organisers had met the previous year to
discuss its development and that of a domestic cricket structure geared towards
international acceptance (Kardar 1954: 97; Bowen 1967: 157).2 From its incep-
tion, the national governing body for cricket encountered numerous difficulties
in developing and promoting the game in Pakistan. First, the ICC had rejected
its submission for membership in 1948 and 1950 on the grounds that there
were ‘insurmountable difficulties’ for the new nation to overcome.3 However, in
July 1952 the ICC, on the recommendation of Anthony de Mello, the president
of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), recognised the BCCP’s
right as a national organising body and awarded it full membership (de Mello
1959). Second, the BCCP was not the most efficient and amicable of associa-
tions: intrigue, dispute, power conflicts and lack of unanimity characterised its
earliest meetings (Akhtar 1953) and have continued to do so since.4 Finally, the
indecision of board members and the lack of any substantial funding has left
cricket in Pakistan with a weak domestic structure and few facilities of first-class
standard.
Domestic cricket in Pakistan has encountered many organisational and
structural problems. These range from an initial absence of substantial infra-
structure and funding to a later conflict of opinion over the direction the game
would take and the type of leadership it was to have. Pakistan found itself in
the unusual position of playing official Test matches in 1952 before it had devel-
oped a recognised domestic structure. This frustrated early attempts to develop
the playing talent of local cricketers and inhibited the growth of the game
nationally.
In 1951 an unsuccessful attempt to revive the Pentangular Tournament model
of colonial India was tried, with teams representing the Muslims of Lahore and
those of Karachi, Europeans, Parsees, and a side chosen from minority ethnic
and religious groups. This competition failed to arouse the interest of patrons
and the public, and folded after two years. It was also a strong reminder of many
of the recent communal divisions of the pre-partition period that cricket itself
had condoned. In the 1953–4 cricket season the BCCP organised the Quaid-i-
 Pakistan: identity and tradition 113
Azam Trophy – a regional competition that was modelled on the English County
Championship. It was named after the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali
Jinnah, to legitimise the BCCP’s right to call itself a national body. This was done
at a time when the cult of personality associated with Jinnah was used by any
number of individuals in professional and institutional positions to validate their
organisations as national enterprises (Talbot 2000: 201; Al Mujahid 1981:
424–35).5 The BCCP sought to further justify its national image by making the
head of state for Pakistan its chief patron, thereby associating its position with the
official nationalist discourse.6
The Quaid-i-Azam Trophy has not been able to emulate the success of the
English County Championship or the Australian Sheffield Shield. From its
very inception it lacked funds, suitable playing facilities, and strong regional and
grass-roots foundations. It was also short in duration, and the players were poorly
paid.7 As a result of these numerous obstacles, the BCCP has tried to find an
appropriate structure for this competition, adding, removing and amalgamating
sides even while experimenting with its playing format to include zonal, group and
round-robin matches at different times and in different years. For 25 years, none
of this challenged the dominance of Karachi and Lahore. If anything, the playing
and administrative strength of these two cities was further reinforced in 1975
when private corporations were formally invited8 to develop their own domestic
teams by the Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto government. These company teams were meant
to underwrite the game financially. By the 1990s, company and regional teams
were divided into separate competitions: the Patron’s Trophy for the former and
the Quaid-i-Azam Trophy for the latter, played at different ends of the cricket
season so that regional associations could use the services of the more established
domestic cricketers who were contracted to the country’s largest financial and
commercial industries.
Pakistan’s cricket administrators hope that the post-1990 domestic game will
grow to become truly national and regionally inclusive: the best cricketers will be
financially rewarded by the companies through contracts that in many instances
tie them to long-term career positions, and the regional competition will grow
because of player availability and the strategic spread of talent to all parts of the
country. In the long term it is envisaged that the domestic competition in
Pakistan will comprise regional associations that will have strong commercial and
promotional arrangements with the private sector.9
Several trends can be discerned from the way in which cricket has been
organised and controlled in Pakistan. In the absence of any substantial infra-
structure and resources, authoritarian leadership has been influential in the
direction the game has taken. A small number of mostly senior players and
prominent public and military figures have historically been given a free rein
by the BCCP to develop and promote the structure, culture and symbolism of the
game for themselves. This corresponds with the traditional South Asian pattern
of political authoritarianism and systems of patronage that invest absolute author-
ity in the hands of a few individuals who, for one reason or another, have been
able to win the – sometimes tenuous – support and recognition of constituencies
114 Chris Valiotis
at the local, regional or national levels. Authoritarian leadership and patronage
of cricket is linked with patriarchal socio-cultural norms of loyalty. In this
context, leaders expect nothing less than the unreserved support of those they are
in charge of to facilitate their own personal success and recognition at the
national and domestic levels. In Pakistan the likes of Justice R. A. Cornelius,
Abdul Hafeez Kardar, General Nur Khan and Imran Khan have all, at one time
or another, found themselves in positions where they have exercised complete
control over many cricket issues. Both Kardar and Imran showed their hand at
identifying and selecting players for the national team – many with little or no
formal experience of the game. The successful transition of players from relative
obscurity to international cricket stardom under their respective captaincies
procured for both of them respect and authority within the ranks of cricket
officialdom.
The shortcomings of the domestic game and the subsequent rise of authori-
tarian leadership have left cricket in Pakistan in a precarious organisational
position. The structure of the game is top-heavy, dealing, as it does, with inter-
national issues, and has little capacity for the development of a strong club and
grass-roots culture. Having historically been a less developed cricket region
of colonial India and indelibly attached to its domestic structure and the
BCCI’s organisational umbrella, the game as it developed in Pakistan lacked
the arrangements it needed to successfully negotiate its unexpected removal from
the Indian cultural milieu.10 This saw Cornelius and the earliest members of the
BCCP encourage successful public and private figures to organise cricket clubs
throughout the country to provide a necessary fillip to the growth of the domestic
game. This initiative inadvertently, and unbeknown to the earliest organisers of
the game in Pakistan, engendered enormous administrative and financial intrigue
that has hampered attempts to reform the organisation and structure of cricket in
the country.
In 1980, divisional and city cricket associations were made members of the
BCCP council at the expense of provincial associations. This gave greater power
to the two traditional strongholds of cricket in Pakistan, Karachi and Lahore. This
change allowed both city associations to have one member appointed to the
council for every 65 clubs within their jurisdictional boundaries (Salahuddin
1999). The number of clubs from Karachi and Lahore registered with the BCCP
since the time of Cornelius’s initiative was enormous. Many of them lay defunct,
and in order to prevent their surreptitious representation, or the ‘rise to enrolment
of [other] bogus clubs’, the BCCP was prompted to scrutinise the records and
activities of all clubs claiming active legitimacy. According to Brigadier (retd.)
Salahuddin, this investigation was carried out rather liberally, and failed in its
attempt to identify and remove clubs with fraudulent claims to existence (ibid.).
From 1979 to 1999 no checks were carried out on club activities to ascertain
whether they were still active and playing cricket. In 2000, Salahuddin himself
was appointed as the head of a scrutinising committee to determine which clubs
were active and in existence, and thereby legally authorised by the 22 February
1995 Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) Constitution to participate in elections for
 Pakistan: identity and tradition 115
the council.11 The inability of the PCB to detect and police unscrupulous activ-
ities in its formal structures, and in many instances its assisting in their emergence
and prolongation through policies with little long-term vision, have inhibited the
growth of equitable and accountable institutions for the organisation of cricket in
the country. This has exhausted much-needed resources of energy and capital and
diverted their use from the crucial task of developing the game at the domestic
and grass-roots levels.

Popularisation and the emergence of the ‘vernacular’ cricketer

Broader networks of communication and capitalisation as well as changes in the
education system provided an incentive for more lower- to lower-middle-class
Pakistanis to play first-class cricket. In the immediate post-partition period few
paths existed for the dissemination of cricket in Pakistan. Cricket commenta-
tor and journalist Chisty Mujahid claims that cricket in the 1950s was a ‘social
outing’ for the college and university alumni of both Lahore and Karachi;
they attended matches ‘to be seen’ and to mix with each other. Many of them
organised, or were present at, numerous friendly matches played in Pakistan prior
to, and after, the introduction of the Quaid-i-Azam Trophy.12 However, the
game’s popularity did gradually increase as media technologies promoted the game
more widely.
The growth of newspaper, radio and television coverage has been crucial to
the popularisation of the game. However, it must be stressed that the media’s
role in the popularisation of cricket was gradual, tentative, and often fraught with
controversy and uncertainty. Muslim newspapers were few and they were mostly
located in Delhi and Calcutta before 1947; only two Muslim newspapers13 were
printed in areas included within Pakistan in 1947 (Twenty Years of Pakistan 1967:
539–40). Many other newspapers, mostly owned by Hindus and Sikhs, ceased
operating or transferred their operations to India (ibid.).14 To counter the loss of
its Hindu and Sikh newspaper operators, Pakistan welcomed the addition of
newspapers run by Muslims that were formerly based in India (ibid.).15
Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the newspaper industry in Pakistan
suffered from a scarcity of printing facilities, machine operators and journalists,
as most of these positions had previously been filled by Hindus or Sikhs (ibid.).
Furthermore, in the same period, newspapers were low revenue-generators
because of their low readership levels. Some 86.2 per cent of Pakistanis were
estimated to be illiterate in 1951 (ibid.) – and the figures subsequently improved
only slightly. While large levels of illiteracy existed in the urban centres, the
problem was still more acute in the rural areas. This severely restricted newspaper
sales and provided little incentive for cricket’s popularisation in Pakistan. For
instance, Dawn’s cricket coverage grew as the game in Pakistan became more
significant, though it and The Pakistan Times were read predominantly by the
minority urban elite of Pakistan who had acquired a Western education. Both
papers represented the views of the educated and affluent political and industrial
sectors of society. They were better financed and maintained than the vernacular
116 Chris Valiotis
press. Similarly, the Urdu press had a restricted readership confined to that of
immigrants into Pakistan from India and some sections of the Punjabi elite.
Radio Pakistan began with just three medium-wave stations in Lahore,
Peshawar and Dacca on 14 August 1947. Staff numbers at these stations were
small, and equipment was old, over-used and worn out (Dawn 1950). In July 1951,
Radio Pakistan’s headquarters were moved to Karachi, where a new facility
housed modern radio technology that made it the equal of radio stations world-
wide (Khalil 1951).16 By 1960, Pakistan had radio stations in Lahore, Karachi,
Peshawar and Dacca, as well as Rawalpindi, Hyderabad, Quetta and Multan.17
Radio became an effective mode of communication in a society the majority of
whose people lacked any formal education.
Early cricket commentary had its limitations: it was broadcast exclusively
in English by two staunch proponents of English-language commentary, Omar
Kureishi and Jamshed Marker (Dawn 1975).18 Despite these imperfections,
both Kureishi and the current cricket commentator Shahzad Humayun claim
that commentary in English did facilitate a popular understanding of the game,
and thereby provided a basis for its adoption by other Pakistani communities.
The transmission of cricket matches to those who previously had little or no
knowledge of them came about in two important ways. First, the development of
cheap transistor band radios meant that poorer members of the population could
afford to listen to cricket broadcasts for themselves; and second, radio coverage of
the game was superimposed on traditional village and urban market cultures
where shopkeepers provided a public space for broadcasts. Humayun describes the
growth of a collective community-centred audience for cricket in this way:

[I]n the rural areas . . . access to radio was always there . . . they didn’t have
too many radio sets but still it [cricket] continued to flow to the rural areas.
. . . [In] the urban areas . . . I remember when I was a child listening to radio
commentary; and roaming around the streets of Lahore I could see the shops
with scoreboards and blackboards with [the] latest scores [written on them]
. . . I would say that if radio commentary had not been there, cricket would
not be where it is today in Pakistan.19

Universal cricket parlance and the broadcast etiquette of English-language

commentators such as Kureishi and Marker facilitated the popularisation of the
game in Pakistan. Cricket idioms such as ‘googly’ and ‘howzat’ became familiar
terms (Aziz and Salam 1983: 18);20 and Kureishi’s style and delivery became
a benchmark for succeeding cricket commentators on radio and television21 –
including those broadcasting in Urdu, such as Munir Hussain, Hassan Jalil and
Bashir Khan. The introduction of Urdu commentary contributed to cricket’s
growing popularity. As an adjunct to English cricket commentary, it provided an
additional impetus for the game’s adoption by those who spoke Urdu exclusively.
Furthermore, Urdu’s official validation as the national language of Pakistan, even
in the face of staunch opposition from regional groups, increased its capacity as a
cricket language, particularly as it came more and more into general use.
 Pakistan: identity and tradition 117
By the late 1960s, Pakistan Television began its coverage of cricket matches,
drawing on the knowledge, skills and workers of Radio Pakistan – often recruiting
writers, producers, technicians and commentators. Television provided greater
scope than radio for the popularisation of cricket. In Pakistan, televisual footage
of cricket matches has given to the non-English and non-Urdu speaker a greater
observation of the game’s rules and structure, as well as its subtleties, intricacies,
disputes and outcomes – indeed, it has done the same for those proficient in
English or Urdu.
Television reached the people in much the same way radio had: through
traditional urban and rural market cultures. Instead of turning to radio for match
updates and scores, many shopkeepers purchased television sets and began
screening cricket matches from their premises. Blackboards used as scoreboards
were still maintained for passers-by who had little or no time to sit and watch
games. In this way, customers could see events on the cricket field transpire in real
life and real time, and begin to identify with the nation’s players irrespective
of their ethnic and political affiliations or their disdain for and disapproval of
their political leaders. This process heightened with the development of colour
television and the advent of one-day cricket. The crescent and the colour green
found on the one-day uniform were symbolic representations of nationalism. In
shops or bazaars they reinforced national identity during the telecast of cricket
matches to an audience often at odds with the political vision of their leaders, and
with little empathy or attachment to other ethnic, cultural and sectarian groups
in Pakistan.
With very few exceptions, the cricket that Radio Pakistan and Pakistan
Television have covered is that of the international game. As such, it is the
national team that Pakistanis in bazaars, shops and homes in cities and villages
throughout the country identify with. This may help explain why there is little
community interest shown in the domestic game, even when pertaining to
regional teams. Televised cricket, like radio, has popularised the players and
symbols of the national team, and this has coincided with the nationalist politics
of its leaders. The advent of television coincided with the declining years of Ayub
Khan’s leadership, but this did not stop him from using the medium for propa-
gandistic reasons to attempt to save his political career. Both Bhutto and Zia
were also notorious for using television to underpin their political objectives and
undemocratic policies (Page and Crawley 2001: 53–7).
A lesser but important contribution to the popularisation of cricket in Pakistan
has been the development of a sports goods industry. Sialkot, which lies to the
north-east of Punjab, is the centre of a thriving sports goods industry that dates
back to the late nineteenth century. Sports equipment produced in Sialkot is
exported to numerous countries, mainly Western ones such as the United States,
Britain, Germany and Australia. Pakistanis boast of the craftsmanship of their
sports goods workers, and of the ‘superior’ quality of their wood and tanned leather
(Aslam Hayat 1949). Many of the factories that manufacture sports products were
under the ownership of Hindus prior to partition. These factories have since come
into the hands of Muslims,22 many of them immigrants from India.
118 Chris Valiotis
The sports goods industry provided opportunities for less affluent Pakistanis
to familiarise themselves with cricket, as well as other sports. Many of Sialkot’s
workers were skilled or unskilled lower-class citizens who lacked the finances to
put themselves or their children through college and university. In these circum-
stances it was not uncommon for many children to follow their parents into
the trade. The craftsmanship of the sports goods trade was a skill handed down
from generation to generation; it was not unusual to find numerous members of
individual families working in the manufacture of sports products (Aslam Hayat
1949). Many of the workers learned about the game through their trade; others
still were to learn it from the workers themselves. Over time, and with the early
success of the Pakistani cricket team on the international stage, Sialkot’s sports
goods industries provided an outlet for poorer youth to develop an appreciation
for the game that they might not otherwise have done.
The popularisation of cricket through media outlets and the sports goods indus-
tries and changes in the socio-economic conditions and educational expectations
of Pakistani elites, who shifted their allegiances and occupational preferences
away from traditional professions like that of the army, and cultural pastimes
like that of cricket, and on to the professional services, allowed many lower-class
and predominantly non-English-speaking cricketers – what Richard Cashman
(1994) refers to as ‘vernacular cricketers’ – to play cricket for Pakistan’s national
team. Cricketers began to be recruited from poorer urban areas or small villages
and towns contiguous to big cities such as Lahore to take the place of mostly
educated and affluent players from Lahore and Karachi. This mirrored the changes
experienced in the most traditional of colonial India’s elite professions, the army.
The post-1947 Pakistani army recruits differed from their Sandhurst-trained
predecessors in two distinct ways: first, they mostly came from ‘the small towns
and villages of Central Punjab’ (Burki and Baxter 1991: 7) and were traditional
and more religiously devout in their outlook; and second, they had no prior
historical association with the military and possessed meagre resources, having
accrued little or no material gain from colonial policy (ibid.).23 However, once
they inherited traditional positions of authority through their leadership of the
army, their identity and status began to change. They acquired power and prestige
that ranked them alongside or above the traditional elites of Pakistan.
Pakistani cricket has not transcended the socio-economic limitations that
have affected professions like that of the army. In the past three decades it too
has come to realise that its traditional player market would gradually become
negligible. Those belonging to the network of college alumni steeped in the
traditions of British education, language, and culture were relegated to the role
of onlookers – or at least, critical onlookers, as many of them have over the
years been commissioned to write articles on the state of cricket in Pakistan –
as vernacular players and commercial and industrial patrons replaced them.
The modern Pakistani economy with its gradual shift to urban commercial and
industrial markets has engendered an economic culture at variance with the
traditional military landholding structure, which was intrinsically tied to the
cricket landscape of colonial India and early postcolonial Pakistan. With graduate
 Pakistan: identity and tradition 119
employment shifting to the professional services from the 1970s – and more
recently to the information and communications industries of the home economy
and those of Western industrialised countries through immigration and edu-
cational exchange programmes – domestic cricket players from less privileged
backgrounds have emerged to take their place.
Majid Khan (a Pakistani Test player from 1964 to 1983) believes that the
deterioration of college cricket had as much to do with the neglect shown to sport
and sports facilities by educational authorities from the mid-1960s as it did with
the changing economic milieu in Pakistan. These authorities decided that the
construction of more buildings and classrooms in existing schools and colleges
would accommodate the larger student intake brought about by increasing levels
of affluence in Pakistan. This decision led to a drastic reduction in the number of
playing fields in schools and colleges. Thus, a changing educational philosophy
with its emphasis on preparing students for the professional services offered little
incentive for sports participation. This, according to Majid, led to a shift in the
recruitment policies of domestic cricket clubs, which looked to poorer rural and,
to a lesser extent, urban youth to fill the absence brought about by the virtual
disappearance of sport in schools and colleges.24
Poorer youth played improvised games of cricket in spontaneous settings where
space could be found. Their familiarisation with cricket came from radio and
television broadcasts, which had gradually penetrated previously neglected rural
and urban zones where the game was little known. Their recruitment by club
teams led to changes in the organisation of grass-roots cricket. The school and
college system was replaced by under-age championships. In the latter, young
players were invited to trial for club teams, and the best of them were then sent
off to trial for regional and national under-age teams.25 Of course, the difficulties
of travelling to urban centres for trials, as well as the cost of playing competitive
cricket on a permanent basis, may explain why those closest to urban centres have
made the transition to the domestic game more frequently than those further
away.
There is also much that remains to be said about the flamboyant and improvised
style of cricket that these players develop in their original surroundings and its
significance to the national team. The majority of them encounter formal training
programmes, proper cricket pitches, and suitable attire and equipment when they
first make their way into domestic teams. The village and urban cricket of poorer
youths is far removed from that of the domestic game – and more so from inter-
national cricket. It is an improvised version of the international game, frequently
altering its formal arrangements and rules, and with numerous regional and spacial
variations. The demise of traditional grass-roots cricket, along with a lack of
infrastructure, sustainable coaching programmes, and a domestic competition
that has historically encountered numerous organisational and financial problems,
has meant that vernacular cricketers from poorer backgrounds are given little
opportunity or incentive to alter the playing skills of ‘informal’ village and urban
cricket. The sudden rise from obscurity that many of them make – an outcome of
traditional patronage patterns where senior players with some authority are free
120 Chris Valiotis
to select and recruit players of their choice – has given rise to a distinct Pakistani
style of cricket that challenges the traditional norms of international cricket. This
style of cricket is risqué and flamboyant, and it has coincided with the advent of
the one-day game. It shares much in common with the cricket of other ‘Third
World’ playing nations/teams such as the West Indies (particularly in the 1970s
and 1980s), India and Sri Lanka. The style of cricket played by the modern
Pakistani cricketer is a hybrid of the ‘informal’ indigenous game and the formal
international one, with more of an emphasis on the first. This is why the style of
cricket exhibited by the Pakistani team on the international stage has often been
unpredictable and unconventional.

The political appropriation of cricket in Pakistan

The appropriation of cricket in Pakistan by authoritarian politicians controlling
the state is the contemporary outcome of a political culture based on the myth of
Muslim homogeneity and exclusiveness. The recognition and success given
to Pakistan on the international stage by its cricket players, especially from the
1970s onwards, has encouraged the state’s active involvement in the cricket
affairs of the country. In seeking to tap into the prestige of the Test team and its
‘superheroes’, unpopular authoritarian political leaders have made it their civic
duty to manage the cricket culture. It is, after all, one of the few institutions to
have generated a sense of Pakistani rather than ethnic, linguistic or sectarian
identity and to have thereby validated the Muslim separatist discourse. Political
leaders’ attempt to fulfil the role of patrons and managers is both a symbolic
gesture acknowledging cricket’s internal mass appeal and a political strategy to
procure domestic approval of their authority and vision by associating themselves
with the game. Additionally, it provides the basis for the perpetuation of the
official national discourse and the validation of their established political power
at the domestic level to a larger world audience. The projection of a separate
cricket tradition in support of the ‘two-nation theory’ that validates the need for
the Pakistan project runs contrary to the historical origins and development
of the game in the subcontinent.
From the mid-1950s, civilian and military politicians in Pakistan have involved
themselves in cricket board affairs. Between 1954 and 1963 three of Pakistan’s
earliest political leaders, Mohammed Ali Bogra, Iskander Mirza and General
Muhammad Ayub Khan, became president of the BCCP (Salahuddin 1999).
Thereafter, the first BCCP constitution (1963) recognised the head of state as
its patron. The earliest authorities for cricket, particularly Cornelius, made a
conscious effort to involve the government in the affairs of the cricket board
to validate both the game and its organising body as nationally important. It was
also a way to generate resources, financial and otherwise, which the game and the
board were critically short of at this time. However, active government involve-
ment prior to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s rise to power was at best half-hearted.
On its independence, Pakistan had to deal with a vast shortage of funds (Talbot
2000: 198),26 industry and skilled workers (Robinson 1992: 33–4),27 a severe
 Pakistan: identity and tradition 121
refugee problem, and diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic traditions. Under
these circumstances the politicians of Pakistan in the immediate post-partition
period were preoccupied with developing suitable political and economic
institutions to validate the nation’s existence. The concentration of meagre
resources into these crucial areas meant that a growing number of socio-cultural
activities and pastimes, including cricket, had to fend for themselves. The most
noticeable act of political significance that affected cricket in some way prior to
1971 was the adjournment of India–Pakistan Test matches from 1960–1 until
1978. If anything, the use of cricket as a political instrument in this period came
from an entirely different source altogether.
Crowd disturbances and riots at international cricket fixtures in Pakistan
have occurred regularly. During February–March 1969, the last year of President
Ayub Khan’s political leadership, a three-Test match series against England was
continuously disrupted by opponents of the political regime. The political crisis
that befell the Ayub Khan government in its decline had reached a climax of
sorts on the cricket field in early 1969. Many dissenters and protesters used Test
match venues as a public forum for political agitation against the government.
The socio-political turmoil that afflicted Pakistan on the eve of the Lahore Test
match included ‘railway and dock strikes for wage rises, power blackouts, students’
protests against academic stagnation and financial rigidity, processions, mass
demonstrations flaring into violence, fanatical assassinations, all aimed against
the authoritarian regime of President Ayub Khan’ (Robinson 1972: 91).
The Test match in Lahore and those in Dacca and Karachi that followed it all
lost valuable playing time because of frequent crowd disruptions. Chairs and
debris were thrown onto the playing arena and at police officers. The crowd’s
abuse levelled at Ayub Khan, including the chant of ‘Ayub is a dog’, reached
fever pitch and led to numerous outbreaks of uncontrollable rage (ibid.: 92). In
response to expected disturbances in the lead-up to each of these Test matches,
the cricket board made crucial decisions in an effort to reduce – if not completely
eliminate – their potential to disrupt play and escalate into violence. These
included the selection of Aftab Gul, of the rebel Students’ Action Committee,
in the Test team for Lahore as ‘insurance that riots would not stop the match’
(ibid.: 92);28 and the selection of East Pakistan’s first ever, and only, Test match
player for Pakistan, Niaz Ahmed, in the Dacca Test in preference to the more
appropriate choice, Asif Masood (Noman 1998: 129). These disturbances reached
their apogee during the Karachi Test, when play was abandoned owing to on-field
demonstrations in support of a teachers’ general strike for better wages and
working conditions,29 leaving the MCC team manager, Leslie Ames, to respond
to BCCP president Syed Fida Hassan’s request for the crowd to be given ‘one more
chance’ with ‘The [MCC] team will catch the first available plane to leave for
home’.30
It was under the leadership of Bhutto that cricket was first brought into
the political mainstream. Unlike his predecessors, particularly Ayub Khan,
Bhutto was a ‘populist’ leader who saw himself as a spokesman and democratic
representative of the people, releasing them from the restricted and oppressive
122 Chris Valiotis
rule of authoritarian politicians. In the light of this, Bhutto identified with, and
subsidised, certain popular cultures, particularly sports such as cricket, to procure
the political support and approval of large sections of the population. The estab-
lishment of the Z. A. Bhutto Institute of Sports and Culture was, according to
Shahid Javed Burki, driven ‘on essentially political grounds’ to develop ‘a political
rapport between himself and the people’ (1988: 152). However, like many of
Bhutto’s plans, this project, whose aim was to generate the support of the masses,
was driven by underlying political concerns. Bhutto sought to control a burgeon-
ing national sports culture that was developing links to other parts of the Third
World that were otherwise closed to him because of Pakistan’s membership of
SEATO (the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation) and CENTO (the Central
Treaty Organisation) (ibid.: 153). These were both Cold War treaties organised
by the United States and directed against the Soviet Union. Membership of them
ran counter to the non-alignment principle that was at the heart of the idea of
the Third World. Pakistan’s membership of both treaty organisations, especially
as it was a developing nation itself, acquired for it the disapproval of other Third
World nations.
The growing importance of sport as a symbol of nationhood in the 1970s saw
Bhutto appoint his own government ministers and party members as executives
of the more established sports governing bodies. This created a precedent for his
successor, General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, to do likewise. The sudden need from
the 1970s for politicians to manage the affairs of sports bodies, particularly that of
cricket, coincided with the game’s growing commercial appeal worldwide, and the
influx of a sizeable Pakistani presence in English county and league cricket. The
higher international profile that Pakistan acquired as a result of the changes that
the game as a whole underwent in this period provided a substantial basis for its
national politicians to legitimise their authoritarian positions. The politicisation
and control of cricket gave them international exposure and a national frame-
work that could underpin their political longevity and vision. In other words, the
success of the national cricket team and its international players in English
domestic cricket was seen to justify the national discourse and political process of
Pakistan.
Two of Bhutto’s most important appointments were Kardar, who at the time
was the minister for food and education in Punjab, as the President of the BCCP,
and Abdul Hafeez Pirzada, the minister for education in the Bhutto government,
who was the president of the Sports Control Board. In 1977 the two of them came
to loggerheads over player payment disputes that called for Bhutto’s intervention.
Bhutto sided with Pirzada and this led to Kardar’s resignation. Kardar, a long-time
friend of Bhutto (Kardar 1987: 283),31 was appointed as the head of the cricket
board because of his disciplinarian and meticulous approach to cricket organi-
sation, which was a product of his days as a charismatic leader and ambassador
for Pakistani cricket in the 1950s. His undying devotion and loyalty to the
national team had long been unquestioned and unchallenged. He was seen by
many as being the right person to steer Pakistani cricket back onto the rails after
its disappointments in the 1960s.
 Pakistan: identity and tradition 123
For the first time in its short history the BCCP was given an official head-
quarters at Qaddafi Stadium in Lahore. From here Kardar presided over vast
changes to the domestic game, bringing it into line with professional sport
elsewhere in the world and providing a greater incentive for local cricketers to
continue playing the game. Financial institutions and commercial houses were
given permission to organise cricket teams to revive the sagging state of the
domestic game. However, the steps taken to commercialise the game and improve
player remuneration and career prospects in Pakistan during Kardar’s tenure as
BCCP president (1972–77) were deemed to be insufficient and not on a par with
developments elsewhere in the cricket world by several of its more established
players. This set Kardar on a collision course with the players in question, with
Pirzada, and ultimately with Bhutto.
Kardar had been offended by Imran Khan, Majid Khan, Mushtaq Muhammed,
Sadiq Muhamed, Wasim Bari, Asif Iqbal and Zaheer Abbas over their insis-
tence that Test match allowances be increased to facilitate the loss of income that
they stood to incur when on national team duty. His authoritarian outlook and
obstinacy in the face of this challenge threatened to derail cricket relations
between the players and the establishment. Kardar saw this issue in nationalist
terms, questioning the players’ loyalty to Pakistan, particularly since he felt that
he had done much to improve their lot in the game during his presidency; on
the other hand, the players’ time in England had made them conscious of the
contractual and organisational arrangements of cricket there, where the game was
more lucrative and competitive, its facilities much better and more plentiful, and
the rewards and publicity arising from it more substantial and enticing.
Pirzada’s reversal of Kardar’s decision to reject player payment increases created
conflict within cricket’s administration and in media circles. The press coverage
in the period reflected a universal approval of Pirzada’s actions that stemmed
from the country’s highest office, where the decision to overrule Kardar was first
made, and included many BCCP members alienated by their president’s approach
to leadership, and numerous journalists, who felt that the game in Pakistan
needed to keep abreast of cricket procedures in other parts of the world. On
Kardar’s side stood many old cricket teammates such as Fazal Mahmood and
Munawar Ali Khan, the nephew of the Nawab of Mamdot. Fazal described the
demands of the players as those of ‘Money-sick’ cricketers;32 Munawar, on his part,
described events leading to Kardar’s resignation in political overtones, pointing
to the impropriety on the part of Bhutto as an act of revenge for a ‘betrayal’
by Kardar:

[Bhutto’s decision to overrule Kardar, which had been carried out by Pirzada]
was a sinister political plot, or a classic tale of conspiracy to stab Kardar in
the back, Brutus style, by his old partymen, with the dual purpose of cutting
him to size for the resounding popularity he had gained and as a reprisal for
his quitting the party as Minister in the Punjab Government. It was then
commonly known that Z. A. Bhutto, the all too powerful autocratic ruler of
the time, did not take kindly to resignations from his party, so that it could
124 Chris Valiotis
well be construed as a set-up for Kardar’s gruesome murder through a political
coup of sorts.
(Munawar Ali Khan 2000)

Zia hardened executive control of cricket in Pakistan by appointing retired

generals to the presidency of the BCCP. This was an adjunct to his reforms in
political, bureaucratic, commercial and legal organisations and departments that
placed ‘senior military officers’ in crucial administrative positions of power to
strengthen and consolidate military rule and authoritarianism in Pakistan (Baxter
et al. 1998: 236). His position in relation to the administration of cricket in the
country was similar to that of traditional Islamic civilian rulers in their dealings
with religious authorities (Von Grunebaum [1963] 1970; Coles 1968: 33–76)33 –
a position Zia himself adopted to win the support of Pakistan’s religious clerics.
Zia intervened in the affairs of cricket only when there were disputes to resolve
and diplomatic scores to settle. Otherwise, cricket patrons and players, like the
ulema (Muslim scholar-jurist elite), were free to cultivate their own traditions and
practices so long as they did not clash with the political authority of Zia.
Zia inherited the cricket crisis that arose out of the commercial and professional
challenges that the game’s international authorities and national governing
bodies confronted in the late 1970s. His patience and diplomatic skills were called
upon to resolve the conflict that emerged in domestic circles when the organisers
of the breakaway World Series Cricket competition procured the services of
essentially the same group of players34 who had previously demanded greater
financial rewards for their Test match appearances. Zia was categorically at odds
with Packer’s World Series Cricket and informed Pakistan’s ‘rebel’ cricketers of
this in no uncertain terms. In a meeting he held with Mushtaq, Imran and Zaheer
in January 1978 he questioned the loyalty of the players to Pakistan and advised
them that playing for ‘the highest bidder’ was unethical, particularly when ‘jobs
and other incentives’ were open to them in their home country.35
Under Zia the military presidents of the BCCP were given every chance
to exercise control and leadership in the affairs of cricket. While some of them
proved more capable than others, all were criticised by members of the press, and
cricket players and administrators both past and present. Air Marshal (retd.)
Nur Khan, who had a background in sports administration and corporate manage-
ment with the Pakistan Hockey Federation and Pakistan International Airlines
respectively, was seen to be the most efficient. He and his cricket board secretary,
Arif Ali Khan Abbasi, began commercialising the game through corporate
sponsorship and merchandise agreements with national and regional commercial
organisations. This process reached its apotheosis in the 1990s under the latter’s
treasureship and presidency of the PCB, when sponsorship deals with multi-
national corporations such as Pepsi and Coca-Cola were reached, and when the
cricket board itself was fully privatised.36 However, Nur Khan’s presidency was
volatile and often criticised by members of his own board. Both he and Abassi
were accused of ‘high-handedness’ and numerous financial misdeeds. The BCCP
council disapproved of arbitrary decisions, taken primarily by its secretary, that
 Pakistan: identity and tradition 125
resulted in ‘serious irregularities and misuse of funds’. The council requested Zia
to intervene and bring an end to such practices.37
Other criticisms of the long list of military presidents of the BCCP under
Zia included Kardar’s unflattering remarks concerning Major-General Safdar
Butt’s ability to manage cricket in Pakistan. Kardar wrote to Dawn that the
BCCP

is mistakenly persisting with the notion that enthusiasm can be a substi-

tute for knowledge and talent . . . I should have thought that a Chairman
of WAPDA [Water and Power Development Authority], which demands
whole-hearted attention to meet the challenges of the energy crisis and
arresting the spread of the cancer of waterlogging and salinity of the agri-
cultural life of this country would have kept him [Safdar Butt, who at the time
of his BCCP presidency was also the WAPDA chairman] fully occupied
24 hours of the day.38

Other noted critics of military interference in cricket organisation and game

strategy – a significant issue for cricket players, especially in the 1980s – have
included Imran Khan (1988: 156–68) and Wasim Akram (1998). Both were
critical of the appointment to official positions of individuals lacking knowl-
edge of the game, and both stressed the need for greater regional development
that will promote a stronger community supporter base than that generated by
the restricted popular appeal of a domestic game centred around corporate and
commercial organisations.
Zia’s timely interventions were many and have been referred to as ‘cricket
diplomacy’ by Omar Noman. An example of the political importance that cricket
began to acquire during his leadership – and that of Bhutto before him – was his
constant need to be seen publicly as the chief patron and authority of the game
in Pakistan, particularly when competitive matches against India commenced
again from late 1978. He admonished Pakistani players to be at their best when
playing against the Indian team and rebuked them if they fell short of his expec-
tations. However, when they did well, as they did in wrapping up the 1982–3
home series against India by winning the fourth Test in Hyderabad, Zia was at his
most gracious and benevolent, and showered the team with gifts and words of
praise:

Throughout the present series the Pakistan team showed consistent and
exemplary team spirit, discipline and stamina which deserves the highest
praise of all cricket lovers in the country. On this occasion the whole nation
joins me in extending warmest felicitations to Captain Imran Khan and
members of the Pakistan Cricket Team.39

Zia’s cricket diplomacy was also on show when addressing India’s cricket
players. During the Lahore Test match between Pakistan and India in the 1984–5
home series, Zia commemorated Sunil Gavasker’s 100th test appearance by
126 Chris Valiotis
awarding him a silver tray and a pictorial book, Journey through Pakistan.40 Zia also
made an unexpected appearance in Jaipur, Rajasthan, to watch the second Test
between India and Pakistan in 1987. His visit to Jaipur came at a time of increased
diplomatic tensions between the governments in Delhi and Islamabad, and was
meant to be a gesture of goodwill and of the hope for peace in the region (Noman
1998: 222). This was a politically symbolic trip and an ingenious diplomatic
manoeuvre on the part of Zia. It also showed the level of diplomatic importance
that cricket had acquired in South Asia, especially in Pakistan, by 1987, and the
need for Zia to use it as a forum for political discussion and as a symbol for his
political validation as a national leader.

Pakistani cricket identity in a global space

The idea of Pakistani cricket identity in a global space offers an insight into the
essence of Pakistani cricket nationalism in the context of a global sports environ-
ment. Contemporary Pakistani cricket identity and national cricket culture can
be divided into two broad categories: official Pakistani cricket nationalism, and
Pakistani cricket nationalism from below.
Official Pakistani cricket nationalism is now intertwined with the policy
objectives of the central government. The political appropriation of cricket
has meant that the game has come to underpin the official nationalist discourse
of its ruling authorities. As a result, Pakistani cricket at the international level is
synonymous with its fierce rivalry with India, its assiduous promotion and support
of ‘Third World’ cricket nations, and its advocacy of Muslim assertiveness in the
face of unjust criticisms from Western cricket nations.
Pakistan’s cricket rivalry with India is an example of what John Hoberman
has referred to as ‘sportive nationalism’ (1993: 18).41 Its ruling authorities have
used Pakistani cricket success against India, particularly in the one-day game
(Marqusee 1996: 211),42 to justify their national vision and political legitimacy
to an international audience and to the various regional and ethnic groups
within Pakistan who disapprove of their claims to power. This strategy has been
supported by extensive media campaigns that identify India as the ‘enemy’ while
perpetuating the jingoistic rhetoric of nationalist solidarity. Interestingly, the
notion of national regeneration in defiance of a perceived and contiguous threat
is now reciprocated by Indian politicians such as Bal Thackeray and the Shiv
Sena, who see Pakistani cricket as ridiculing the Indian game and Hindu virility
(ibid.: 212).
In the past twenty years, Pakistan has been proactive in its endorsement and
assistance of ‘Third World’ cricket nations such as Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and
Bangladesh in their pursuit for ICC Test match status. It also strongly supports the
development of the game in Kenya and the Middle East, where many Pakistanis
reside and play cricket, to make cricket more representative internationally. This
stance is also considered a means to redress the strong and conspicuous Western
orientation of the ICC. Pakistan has long resented England’s monopolistic control
of world cricket.
 Pakistan: identity and tradition 127
Pakistani cricket authorities and players have developed religio-cultural
safeguards to shield themselves from the pejorative and defamatory remarks that
Western cricket players and officials have made about their country, playing
facilities and integrity over the years. In response to accusations vilifying the
ethical standards of Pakistani umpires and players for unfair dismissals and match
fixing, and criticism of local hospitality standards, including standards of food,
hygiene and accommodation, the cricket authorities and players of Pakistan
have become self-sufficient and forged their own distinct way of doing things.
One of these ways has been to identify themselves more readily with Islam and
to see themselves as the Muslim representatives of a game controlled by Anglo-
Europeans. However, the ulema continue to distance themselves from the game,
as they have done with many other British traditions.43 Islam as practised by
Pakistani cricket authorities and players is of both religious and symbolic value,
and its purpose is to solidify team unity and cohesion against those who object to
the way in which they organise and play the game.
Pakistani cricket nationalism from below helps provide an anchor for Pakistanis
both within the country and abroad in a postcolonial world of overlapping and
disjunctive global cultural processes where the certainties of the modernist pro-
ject, including clearly defined political, institutional and personal identities, have
fragmented and, in many instances, been made to appear irrelevant (Appadurai
1996b: 32–7, 42–3). Pakistan provides a suitable case study for an examination
of multiple postcolonial identities in the vastly integrated world of the early
twenty-first century, where traditional ethnic and more recently constructed
national identities are but a ‘small fraction’ of the quotidian realities of many in
the world (Werbner 1996a: 1). The problematic of postcolonial realities in the
contemporary world sees many Pakistani nationals and diasporic communities
readily identifying with the Pakistani cricket team even as they disapprove
of authoritarian regimes in Pakistan and the logic of their national discourse.
Much research remains to be done within the Pakistani context itself and that of
the Gulf States and Kenya; however, some preliminary work has already been
carried out on the youth cultures of Pakistani diasporic communities in England
(Werbner 1996b: 98).44This type of analysis will hopefully provide the means for
a better understanding of the concept of identity, national or otherwise, as a term
symbolising a complex set of meanings and permutations, and not one that is
simplistic and rigid in its logic and characterisation. In the context of the global
sports milieu it will offer a more thorough appreciation and understanding of
Pakistani cricket identity as the multi-layered and heterogeneous concept that it
has become.

Notes
1 The premier cricket competition in colonial India was the Bombay tournament. Its
success encouraged the development of replica, though substantially subordinate and
ancillary, competitions in other parts of India. By 1930, Karachi, Lahore and Madras,
among others, had similar communal tournaments of their own.
128 Chris Valiotis
2 Also, Fazal Mahmood, the Pakistani seam bowler of the 1950s and early 1960s, when
interviewed by me recalled the initial meeting in 1948 in the WAPDA building of
Lahore. This meeting was organised by the likes of the Nawab of Mamdot, Justice
Cornelius, Keki Collector – all early cricket board officials – and included Fazal him-
self and other cricketers. The topic of discussion for all assembled was the organising
of an unofficial test match against the West Indies – who were then on their way to
play in India, to impress the ICC panel of its credentials for international recognition
(interview with Fazal Mahmood, Lahore, 31 October 2000).
3 Dawn, 13 June, 1950. The BCCP vice-president responded to this decision by
informing the sitting members of the ICC that ‘We get the impression that we are
not wanted in the world family of cricket’ (ibid.). Members of the English press,
including the Times of London and the Manchester Evening News, were also dismayed
by this decision. A letter to the editor of the latter newspaper commented that ‘[The]
procedural and legislative objections [to Pakistani admission into the ICC were]
. . . unnecessarily insensitive to the feelings of a new dominion. . . . [Furthermore,
Pakistan is a] legitimate member of the ICC [as it] represented an integral part of the
territory previously under the jurisdiction of the board of undivided India which has
now gained full membership of the Conference’ (letter to the editor of the Manchester
Evening News, 18 August 1950).
4 On 15 May 1953, BCCP board members from Lahore representing both Lahore and
North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) elected themselves to the board in the
absence of the members for Karachi and Bahawalpur, who had moments before
stormed out of the meeting because they opposed Lahore’s overarching numerical
strength. (An agreement had been reached between both Lahore and NWFP for the
former to select its delegates as spokespersons and representatives of the latter. In
actual fact, all Lahori delegates came from the one club, Mamdot. This further irked
the delegates from Karachi and Bahawalpur.)
5 The earliest benefactors of political and economic power in Pakistan set out to
consolidate and entrench their authority by increasingly using Jinnah’s name to
rubber-stamp their investments and policies. This extended to educational and other
research-based institutions, commercial ventures, sports competitions and events, and
infrastructural facilities in cities and towns, such as roads, buildings and parks. They
were ably supported by the media.
6 The national discourse of Pakistan was an extension of the two-nation theory: whereas
in the colonial Indian context it had been used to justify the imagined validity of
communal ‘national’ differences between Hindus and Muslims, its postcolonial
variant called for opposition to be shown to India at both the national and inter-
national levels to perpetuate the legitimacy of Pakistan as a nation.
7 Interview with Qamar Ahmed and Chisty Mujahid at the Gabba, Brisbane, 5 January
2000. Qamar Ahmed told me that cricket in 1950s Pakistan was financially in
disarray; few games were played, and there were few incentives for people to play.
Furthermore, Qamar himself, then a domestic cricketer in Pakistan, played on average
three first-class games a season, earning the equivalent of two dollars a day. In one
seven-year period from 1956–7 to 1963 he played only 17 first-class matches.
8 Private teams such as Pakistan Railways and Pakistan International Airlines had long
fielded teams in local championships, but this was not at the request of government,
nor was there a systematic policy to include company teams.
9 Interview with Arif Ali Khan Abassi in Karachi, 25 November 2000.
10 Hassan Shah (the chairman of the organising committee of the BCCP) and K. C.
Collector (the Secretary of the Board of the BCCP) in Dawn, 2 December 1948. The
situation was so critical and unexpected at the time of partition that one solution
offered at the end of 1948 was for India, Pakistan and Ceylon to combine as a single
Test-playing entity, rather as did the West Indies. However, this was at a time when
the organisation of cricket in Pakistan began to gain momentum, and under these
 Pakistan: identity and tradition 129
circumstances the earliest officials of the game in the country began to think it wise
to develop their own playing traditions. Subsequent attempts by the BCCI to poach
Pakistani players in the period when the ICC continued to reject its membership
were met with indignant disapproval by the BCCP and the Pakistani press. Both
ultimately applauded the loyalty of these players for turning down all such contractual
approaches.
11 Interview with Brigadier (retd) Salahuddin at the National Stadium in Karachi during
the third Test match between Pakistan and England in 10 December 2000. At the time
of this interview the findings of Salahuddin’s committee had not yet been disclosed.
Nor, to my knowledge, have they been since. The Constitution of the Pakistan Cricket
Board (22 February 1995) was issued by the Government of Pakistan: the Ministry
of Culture, Sports and Tourism in Islamabad on 16 March 1995. The previous BCCP
constitution was revised and included a name change (it is now the PCB) and
structural modifications that allowed it to be organised and registered as a company.
12 Interview with Chisty Mujahid, 6 January 2000 at the Gabba in Brisbane.
13 The English morning daily The Pakistan Times, and its Urdu equivalent the Nawa-i-
Waqt (both from Lahore).
14 Two that did not were The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and The Sind Observer
in Karachi.
15 These included two Urdu dailies, Jang and Anjam, and the English daily Dawn, all
from Delhi.
16 Previously the Radio Pakistan employees had worked mostly out of tents (Dawn
1950).
17 Radio Pakistan website, www.radio.gov.pk.
18 In relation to this, Kureishi has remarked that ‘It is an English game and therefore the
commentary has to be in English.’
19 Interview with Shahzad Humayun, Lahore, 25 October 2000.
20 Early Urdu commentators encountered difficulties in translating much of the
terminology of cricket. The word ‘googly’ was initially translated literally by Urdu
commentators as dhuke baaz gaind, meaning ‘treacherous, deceitful ball’; later,
Pakistanis of all regional dialects became so familiar with the English spoken popular
idiom of cricket that there was little reason for words such as ‘googly’ or ‘howzat’ to be
translated into Urdu.
21 Shahzad Humayun.
22 Sports Guardian, 1 (4) (September 1951): 1, 18. In 1951, Sialkot exported 95 per cent
of its sports goods. In March 1950, Australia imported sports goods to the value of
£6,833, £834 from Pakistan and £5 from India; in cricket bat sales alone, Pakistan
exported £16 worth to India’s nil. The corresponding figures for September 1950 saw
Australia import £23,851, £315 from Pakistan and £135 from India; Pakistan’s cricket
bat exports were worth £1,407 to India’s £61.
23 There were some exceptions to this: the Arains as a group benefited considerably from
the British.
24 Interview with Majid Khan, Zaman Park, Lahore, 2 November 2000.
25 Ibid.
26 Pakistan received 17.5 per cent of the total assets of undivided India, and lost the fiscal
contributions of Hindu and Sikh entrepreneurs, who had withdrawn some three
billion rupees prior to partition.
27 Robinson (1992) describes how Pakistan at its independence had no governmental
infrastructure and no political figures with a tradition of representing the country as
a single unit, and lost traditional manufacturers, customers and ports at Bombay,
Ahmedabad and Calcutta for its raw materials.
28 This did not prove successful, as riots and other crowd disturbances were noticeable,
particularly on the afternoon of the fourth day, when Pakistan was battling to avoid
defeat.
130 Chris Valiotis
29 The Sunday Tribune, 9 March 1969.
30 Ibid.
31 Kardar writes: ‘As an administrator of cricket I was his [Bhutto’s] favourite. He took
my word as final and would always tell me, “Who knows cricket better than you?”’
However, by 1977 Bhutto was beginning to question Kardar’s authority on cricket and
for the first time took issue with him over his running of the game.
32 Fazal Mahmood in Ahmed (1977).
33 Traditional Islamic civilian rulers recognised the importance of political and religious
institutions working together as an understood compact even though the two kinds
of institutions had different and specific societal duties to fulfil. Thus, political rulers
governed on a consultative basis with the ulema. For their part, the latter were
awarded patronage by political rulers for staying out of politics. These awards included
the appointment of ulema as political advisers, judges under Shariat law, inspectors of
markets, and schoolteachers at various madrassahs.
34 In this case Mushtaq Muhammed, Imran and Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal and Zaheer
Abbas.
35 Dawn, 20 January 1978.
36 Interview with Abassi.
37 Dawn, 10 January 1983.
38 Dawn, 6 February 1984.
39 Dawn, 19 January 1983.
40 Dawn, 18 October 1984.
41 Hoberman writes that ‘sportive nationalism exists, not as an inchoate mass emotional
condition, but as the product of specific choices and decisions made by identifiable
political actors’.
42 Mike Marqusee writes of Pakistan’s one-day dominance over India in a ten-year period
beginning in April 1986 when Javed Mianded hit a last-ball six to win the Austral-
Asia Cup Final in Sharjah for Pakistan. Of 26 one-day matches played, Pakistan won
21.
43 Dawn, 20 July 1983. Dr Asrar Ahmad, ‘a distinguished religious scholar’, denounced
cricket because ‘it paralysed all constructive activity throughout the duration’ of a
game, and its television coverage was ‘likely to arouse an erotic sensation among
feminine spectators’. He, like many other religious authorities, calls for the game to be
banned.
44 Werbner’s article looks at how the hybrid cricket culture of British-Pakistani youth
challenges the family structure and traditional beliefs of the parent culture. British-
Pakistani youth, it is argued, develop multiple identities by borrowing from both
parental traditions and Western popular culture. These borrowings are selective and
together they provide a basis for individual and collective expression in a world of
global exchanges.

References
Ahmed, H. (1977) ‘Fazal says our top cricketers are money sick’, Dawn, 2 October.
Akhtar, M. (1953) in Dawn, 24 May.
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Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press.
Appadurai, A. (1996b) ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, in
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press.
Aslam Hayat, M. (1949) Dawn, 14 February
 Pakistan: identity and tradition 131
Aziz, R. and Salam, A. (eds) (1983) Pakistan Test Cricket 1982–83, Karachi: Sports World
Publications.
Baxter, C., Malik, A., Kennedy, C. and Oberst, R. (1998) Government and Politics in South
Asia, 4th edn, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.
Bowen, R. (1967) in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, Guildford, UK: Wisden.
Burki, S. J. (1988) Pakistan under Bhutto, 2nd edn, London: Macmillan.
Burki, S. J. and Baxter, C. (1991) Pakistan under the Military: Eleven Years of Zia ul-Haq,
Boulder, Cob.: Westview Press.
Cashman, R. (1980) Patrons, Players and the Crowd: The Phenomenon of Indian Cricket,
Delhi: Orient Longman.
Cashman, R. (1994) ‘The paradox of Pakistani crocket: some initial reflections’, The Sports
Historian, 14: 21–37.
Coles, P. (1968) The Ottoman Impact on Europe, London: Thames & Hudson.
Dawn (1950) ‘Propap’, Dawn, 20 August.
Dawn (1975) ‘Goodbye to cricket commentary’, Dawn, 17 February.
de Mello, A. (1959) Portraits of Indian Sport, London: Macmillan.
Grunebaum, G. E. Von ([1963] 1970) Classical Islam: A History, trans. K. Watson,
London: Allen & Unwin.
Guha, R. (2002) A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport, London:
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Hamid Khalil (1951) in Dawn, 29 July.
Hoberman, J. (1993) ‘Sport and ideology in the post-communist age’, in L. Allison (ed.)
The Changing Politics of Sport, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Imran Khan (1988) All Round View, London: Chatto & Windus.
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Kardar, A. H. (1987) Memoirs of an All-Rounder, Lahore: Progressive Publishers.
Marqusee, M. (1996) War Minus the Shooting, London: Mandarin.
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Page, D. and Crawley, W. (2001) Satellites over South Asia: Broadcasting Culture and the
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Political Economy, New Delhi: Sage.
Robinson, R. (1972) The Wildest Tests, London: Pelham.
Salahuddin, Brigadier (retd) (1999) ‘Ad-hocism in cricket over the decades’, Dawn, 18
August.
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Werbner, R. (1996a) ‘Multiple identities, plural arenas’, in R. Werbner and T. Ranger
(eds) Postcolonial Identities in Africa, London: Zed Books.
Werbner, R. (1996b) ‘Our blood is green: cricket, identity and social empowerment
among British Pakistanis’, in J. McClancey (ed.) Sport, Identity and Ethnicity, Oxford:
Berg.
7 Sri Lanka
The power of cricket and the
power in cricket1
Michael Roberts

Cricket is the one single game through which Sri Lanka has performed on the
stage of world sport in consistent and striking fashion. It is now a national pastime
for a sizeable section of the population. But the story of cricket in Sri Lanka or
Ceylon is not one of rags to riches. There are many skeins in the history of the
game in this lovely island, the brilliance and the verve of some moments being
matched by threads sordid, vindictive, factious and topsy-turvy. To display the
seamier side of cricket politics is beyond the capacity of a single historian. But
some glimpses of this facet will be provided here amid the glitter of Sri Lankan
cricketers’ triumph in securing the World Cup at the one-day competition in the
subcontinent in 1996. This essay will not cleave to a chronological line. As this
preamble suggests, it begins beyond the cricket field in the terrain of power set in
geographical space.

Problems of governance and political economy

The cricket scene in Sri Lanka today, as in the past, is a lopsided one. This
imbalance is a product of political economy. Because the island lacks significant
deposits of industrial raw material and because it developed into a modern state
as a plantation economy, its orientation from way back in the 1830s has been
towards the hub of the transport and administrative network, namely the city
of Colombo. Colombo’s dominant centricity was compounded when its port
facilities were transformed from the 1870s onwards to make it a major harbour and
entrepôt. Thereafter, Colombo became the leading city and a hegemonic centre.
All roads, so to speak, led to Colombo. Internal migration flowed in its direction
and virtually all media outlets have been within its confines from the 1850s to the
present day.
Subject to some critical provisos, Colombo’s dominance and pull continue
today – in ways that bedevil the field of cricket. Most of the leading cricketers in
the 1940s and 1950s were from Colombo schools or from two colleges in Kandy
(itself the mini-hub of the hill country plantation economy). But as the increasing
democratisation of politics and the widening of cricketing opportunity enabled
talented lads from the seaside towns of Matara, Galle, Ambalangoda, Kalutara,
Panadura, Moratuwa and Negombo on the one hand and Kurunägala in the
 Sri Lanka 133
hinterland on the other to reach the highest rungs of local cricket,2 the fact
remains that even now all roads lead to Colombo. Budding cricketers from these
towns mostly end up playing for Colombo clubs and living in the Colombo
metropolitan area.
The problem does not lie in the structure of cricket so much as in the character
of Sri Lanka’s political economy. The firms that can recruit cricketers as public
relations faces are all located in Colombo. So are the best clubs: the SSC
(Sinhalese Sports Club), NCC (Nondescripts Cricket Club) and Bloomfield head
the pecking order at the moment, with the Colts, CCC (Colombo Cricket Club)
and Tamil Union next in line. Indeed, most of the clubs in the Premier League
are located in Colombo or its urban fringe.
The two caveats attached to this contention arise from contrasting circum-
stances, the one (A) an outcome of the electoral process for cricket governance,
the other (B) from the history of conflictual politics in the island dating from
the ‘revolution of 1956’, as the electoral shift in that year is sometimes, albeit
controversially, called (M. de Silva 1967; Pieris 1958; K. M. de Silva 1981:
ch. 36; 1998: 47–63, 67–8, 88–93, 305–6).
Let me take Point A first. The leading Colombo clubs may continue to lead the
pack in recruiting a substantial proportion of the top cricketers. However, they do
not make, or dominate, the governing body of cricket, once known as the Board
of Control for Cricket in Sri Lanka (BCCSL), but recently (late 2003) rendered
corporate under the name ‘Sri Lanka Cricket’. From 1948 till 2003 this governing
body was – in normal circumstances3 – elected annually. Once cricket became a
business and a centre of attraction from 1996, its governing positions attracted
entrepreneurs of various types. The voting system gave (gives) even a parlous club
the same voting power as the most famous. With largesse available to the winners
at these elections from 1996 onwards, an American-style spoils system has taken
root in recent years. This has favoured the election of wheeler-dealers and populist
politicians rather than patrician notables ready to dig into their personal pockets.
The outcome has been a regular turnover of supremos every year, with the
roller-coaster changes exacerbated further by periodic crises leading to ministerial
interventions and the establishment of interim committees (in most cases staffed
by honourable men). But created by ministerial fiat, such interim boards have also
been subject to removal every time the sports minister is displaced or has a row
with the chairman of the board. In sum, Sri Lanka has had about five different
regimes over the past seven years! It is a wonder that any cricket tours actually
take place in the midst of all these musical chairs and dodgem games.
A new board usually means a new selection committee. By good fortune,
Brendon Kuruppu, T. B. Kehelgamuwa and Amal Silva remained on the selection
committees, serving through the years mid-1999 to 2002 so that some element
of continuity in fostering players was maintained. The imposition of a new
interim committee under Hemaka Amarasuriya in April 2002 and a new selection
committee led by Guy de Alwis altered matters. The choice of one-day inter-
national (ODI) teams for the tours of England, South Africa and Australia as well
as the World Cup in 2002–3 was a tale of disaster upon disaster. As a result, the
134 Michael Roberts
opportunity provided by favourable wickets and events at the World Cup in South
Africa could not be seized (see Roberts 2002b–d, 2003).
The message here is simple. Since 1996 the process of annual cricket elections,
the politics and rivalries within the domain of cricket, ministerial interven-
tions and the politics outside cricket that impinge on cricket – all these factors
together have made for continuous turmoil. It has hindered long-term poli-
cies in the building of infrastructures and held back the progress of emerging
players. That the Sri Lankan cricket team has continued to be competitive in
such circumstances is something of a miracle and speaks volumes for the pool of
talent available and the wonderful bowling arms of Muttiah Muralitharan and
Chaminda Vaas.
Now to Point B: the cloud over cricket because of political conflict-become-
war. Though the causes are several, one major development arose from the
political transformation through the vote that occurred in 1956. The year 1956
represents the upsurge of two allied forces: first, underprivileged and socialist
forces attacking the privileges of the English-speaking, Westernised middle class
and, second, the vernacular-educated social strata hostile to the dominance of
English-speak. By and large the latter represented the voice of Sinhalese linguistic
nationalism. Though led by a maverick faction of the middle class centred upon
S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike and his Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), this coali-
tion began an assault on the dominance of English through a process that also
enthroned the Sinhala language as the official language and thereby rendered
Tamil secondary.4
One consequence was the alienation of some Sri Lankan Tamils, whose
political demands then escalated. Disenchanted with the political weight they
were afforded, growing discrimination in the government services and unfolding
events, these Tamils began to jettison their Ceyloneseness: by the mid-1970s they
were demanding a separate state, while some Tamil youth set up underground
liberation organisations. Seeking to ‘teach the Tamils a lesson’, in July 1983 some
state functionaries and some populist elements initiated a pogrom against Tamils
residing in the south. This horrendous event was counter-productive: it multiplied
the support for the militant Tamil liberation forces among the Tamil peoples as
well as international bodies. From then on, Sri Lanka has been effectively divided
into two nations. As a hot war developed and moved beyond guerrilla struggles
to a complex military situation wherein the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
(LTTE) have had de facto control of large swathes of territory in the north and
east from 1986 onwards, Sri Lanka became a war-torn state (Narayan Swamy
1994, 2003; Wilson 2000: chs 6, 7, 9).
In effect, little tournament cricket was played in the northern and eastern
reaches of Sri Lanka from the mid-1980s. Indeed, when C. E. Anandarajah,
the principal of St John’s College in Jaffna, organised a cricket match between
his school and the army as a gesture of goodwill, he was assassinated by the LTTE
on 25 June 1985 because they considered the army to be an occupying force and
his act one of collaboration.5 Cricket in Sri Lanka, then, is imbricated with
politics.
 Sri Lanka 135
The war between the Sinhala-dominated state and the Tamils sometimes
impinged on the cities in the south. Indeed, the metropolitan area around
Colombo was a war zone from 1987 onwards. The New Zealand cricket team was
on tour when two bombing attacks occurred, one a horrendous atrocity involving
a car bomb at the Central bus station in the Pettah on 4 April 1987 and the other
an attack on the navy commander’s car by a suicide bomber opposite the hotel at
which the Kiwis were staying on 11 November 1992 (Roberts 2002a; Perera 1999:
517–18).
The political circumstances worsened further when an indigenist and socialist
force known as the Janatā Vimukti Peramuna (JVP, or People’s Liberation Front)
launched an underground war in 1987 intended to oust the ruling United
National Party. The JVP was virtually wholly Sinhalese in composition and its
threat led to what was in effect a civil war in the southern and central heartlands
of the island. In this situation both tourists and international cricket teams
avoided Sri Lanka. The period April 1987 to mid-1992, therefore, was a kind of
hiatus and a distinct setback for Sri Lankan cricket.
In overview, therefore, it will be evident that the Sinhala–Tamil conflict has
resulted in the energies of Tamil youth being lost to the cause of cricket. Let me
qualify this remark by noting that in the era between 1945 and the 1970s few
Tamil cricketers from the Jaffna Peninsula or the eastern regions climbed into the
highest ranks of cricket; indeed, C. Balakrishnan in 1969 is the only instance.
Tamils who achieved success were usually from the schools in Colombo and
Kandy. This outcome was due to infrastructural factors and the Colombo-centred
character of the game in that era.
As the political gulf between Sri Lankan Tamils and the rest of the island
widened from the mid-1970s, moreover, even young Tamils residing in the south-
western regions began to lose interest in cricket. Their focus has been on
educational achievement and jobs abroad. Thus, the Tamil Union has had only
a handful of Tamils in its ranks from the late 1970s. In short, the limited number
of Tamil cricketers in the ranks of international cricketers since, say, 1980 has
been due to the paucity of Tamil cricketers. As for the most famous of them,
Muttiah Muralitharan, he is of Malaiyaha Tamil (‘Indian Tamil’) background
because his patrilineage had its roots among the plantation foremen who moved
into small business. His father was able to initiate a small factory and educate his
sons at St Anthony’s College, Kandy.
The ethnic conflict has had other effects, however. The loyalty of many
Tamils, both those living abroad and those remaining in Sri Lanka, has been
compromised. This is difficult terrain for conclusive verdicts. But Nirupama
Subramaniam’s evaluations and my casual enquiries lead me to the opinion that
whenever Sri Lanka face India, a goodly majority of Tamils in all parts of Sri
Lanka favour an Indian victory. When Sri Lanka face other sides, however, it
seems that local Tamil sentiments are divided: one section of the local Tamil
peoples root for Sri Lanka, but another part, quite considerable, seem to favour
any side playing against Sri Lanka.6 The principle in operation here is simple: the
enemy of your enemy is your friend. No better illustration of this sharpening of
136 Michael Roberts
identity and enmity can be provided than an anecdote from the National
University of Singapore (NUS). Mustapha, a Sri Lankan Muslim lad studying at
the NUS, was introduced to a Sri Lankan Tamil girl at the same campus who
promptly told him, ‘You are our enemy.’ As significant as the statement is the fact
that Mustapha was shocked numb.7
But there is also a faint thread of silver lining provided by cricket amid the
stormy landscape of ethnic hostilities in Sri Lanka. Since peace overtures
commenced in December 2002, cricket has been one of the forms of bridge
building. Some of the schools in Jaffna and Royal College in Colombo have
played each other recently on a reciprocal basis. Janashakti, a leading insurance
firm headed by Chandra Schaffter (a former Ceylon cap and a Tamil), took a team
that included Muralitharan, Kaluwitharana and Ruchira Perera to play a match
against the Jaffna District Cricket Association on 1 September 2002.8 The
Australian High Commission saw to it that the Australian Cricket Board’s
coaches, Buchanan and Nielsen, conducted a coaching clinic on 20 September
2002 in the Jaffna Peninsula9 – that is, the centre of Sri Lankan Tamil culture and
the movement for Eelam. As I have said, cricket in Sri Lanka is imbricated with
politics.

British colonialism, sport and cricket

Cricket did not begin in Sri Lanka with any obvious political ramifications. It was
mere pleasure. For a few British males. These blokes were not tourists. They were
part of the imperial machine that had taken over the island in two bites, 1795–6
and 1815–18, the latter involving the suppression of a massive rebellion in the
hill country regions in 1817–18. As one would expect in such circumstances, the
military establishment was a significant part of the British order at the outset of
British rule in ‘Ceylon’, as the island was called then.
It is likely that it was the military personnel who introduced the game of cricket
to British Ceylon and British India (Perera 1999: 3). That it was part of
recreational activity in the Indian subcontinent is illustrated in an oil painting by
Thomas Daniell of a game on the maidan (open space for recreation) at Madras
about the year 1792.10 Thus far, the recorded data on cricket in Sri Lanka in the
first 70 years of British rule are negligible and we are mostly indebted to S. S.
Perera (1999) for the little that we know.11 The first recorded game was played
between the NCOs and privates of the 97th regiment, and the CCC in November
1832. The CCC, a club for British gentlemen, had been initiated in September
that year, but may have declined subsequently, for it had to be resuscitated in 1863
(ibid.: 26, 28).
The subsequent attractions of cricket for the indigenous elites can only be
understood through attention to its significance for the British ruling class in the
imperial scheme of things. The British in the colonies commanded a large number
of menial workers to service many sports, including hunting, shooting, horse
racing and games of all types. The colonial body of leisured gentlemen and ladies
pursued the full panoply of British games. In taking up more energetic pastimes,
 Sri Lanka 137
moreover, the British believed that they were counteracting the debilitating
influence of a tropical climate (Mandle 1973: 526), while also sustaining the
building of character. Such games as cricket, polo and soccer were, at least by the
mid-nineteenth century, considered symbols of ‘pluck’ and ‘manliness’ (Mandle
1973; Mangan 1981).
Such pastimes called for organisation. They were institutionalised as clubs and
associations (with their ranking distinctions and colour bar). The annual calendar
was arranged to cater for ritual occasions of race meets, sporting events and
ballroom dances, while the urban space was reshaped to cater for such activities.
In enjoying themselves with such gusto, the British ruling class provided a model
for emulation. Their racial arrogance may have been disliked, but most of their
enjoyments proved attractive to the emerging indigenous elites of urban Ceylon.
Such pastimes, whether cricket, cards, carrom and other board games, or soccer
and athletics later on, were FUN
In such a colonial setting, cricket helped induct the indigenous elites into the
Westernised life-ways of their masters. Indeed, it entered school activities in order
to train character in the manner pursued in the best public schools in Britain
(see Mangan 1981). Cricket seems to have been introduced to schoolboys of the
elite government-run school known as the Colombo Academy (which became
the Royal College in 1881) by the Reverend Brooke Bailey in 1832, and St
Thomas’ College figures among records of games in the 1860s. Regular school
encounters do not seem to have commenced till the Royal–Thomian series began
in 1879.12
What is striking, however, about the earliest local cricketers of the 1860s
and 1870s was the degree to which they were drawn mostly from two indigenis-
ing immigrant bodies domiciled in Colombo in particular, namely the Malays and
the Burghers. Malays had served in the Dutch (and Kandyan) armies in the
eighteenth century and were incorporated into the Ceylon Rifle Regiment (CRR)
in 1827. Malay soldiers took to cricket and the community eventually set up their
own club, the Malay Cricket Club, around 1871–2, a year or two before the CRR
was disbanded (Roberts et al. 1989: 102). But most of the club teams of the 1860s
were Burgher in composition.13

Burghers at the cutting edge

As understood in the twentieth century, the term ‘Burghers’ refers to those
believed to be descendants of representatives of the colonial powers, namely the
Portuguese, the Dutch and other Europeans serving the Vereenidge Oost-Indische
Compagnie (Dutch East India Company) and the British.14 The Burghers of
Ceylon had a much greater role in the history of Sri Lanka than the Eurasians and
Anglo-Indians of India did in that country. Residing mostly in urban centres, they
were quickly recruited into the middling echelons of the British administra-
tive order. They found it easier to pick up English and were clearly more attuned
to Westernised life-ways. Their capacities were such that the liberal English
journalist William Digby felt that they could be a bridge between West and East
138 Michael Roberts
and mediate the self-improvement of the island colony.15 Events were to prove
him overly optimistic – not least in the year 1956. However, he was partially
correct. The Burghers were a central force in effectively transmitting the reper-
toire of British sports to the rest of the island peoples. From the 1860s to the
1930s, and even into the 1950s, they were the island’s leading sportsmen in
numerous fields – from angling to hunting, cricket and rugby football.
Their sport was not only fun. It was a kind of politics. However versed in
English-speak and the virtues of Shakespeare, in the mid-nineteenth century the
Burgher middle class found that they were viewed as ‘half-caste’ and ‘natives’.
They began to stress their indigenous stakes. Taking their cue from Mazzini’s
Young Italy movement, a handful of remarkably talented young Burgher lads
established the journal Young Ceylon (1850–2) as a literary engine for what
I would call ‘Ceylonese nationalism’. A few years later this same group was at the
heart of a syndicate that bought the Examiner, a local English-media newspaper,
from its English proprietor so that they could prove that ‘Ceylon has arrived at a
position when her children can speak for themselves.’16
Direct confrontation with British dominion was still not feasible, however,
because it would be treated as ‘sedition’. In this circumstance the cricket field
provided an alternative venue for challenges to white supremacy. The compe-
tition inherent in games was proper, a jolly good show, legitimate. Thus, on 26–28
May 1881 a team of youth assembled as ‘Young Ceylon’ ranged against the CCC
(Perera 1999: 42–4). They lost badly, but the gauntlet had been laid down. The
challenge was renewed in 1882. Then, on 29–30 June 1887 there occurred
a contest between ‘the best eleven European cricketers and the picked repre-
sentatives of the Ceylonese’. This game aroused ‘unusual interest in Colombo’
because it was viewed as a Test match and a test of superiority (Foenander 1924:
157). The Ceylonese team was as follows: Dr Edgar Kellaart (captain), Collin
Kelaart, ‘Banda’ Kelaart, Edward Weinman, ‘Jillah’ Weinman, Oswald Van Hoff,
E. H. Joseph, W. de Fransz, C. Wilkins, Charles Heyn and Patrick Thomasz. It
was a Burgher team (Roberts et al. 1989: 122ff.).
It was also an eleven drawn from the Colts Cricket Club. Formed in 1873
and located in the Pettah, this club dominated the cricket scene during the last
three decades of the nineteenth century. But as the leading schools encouraged
cricket, one saw middle-class men from the Sinhalese, Borah, Colombo Chetty,
Tamil and Moor communities taking up the game. By the 1890s, indeed, the
internal migration of Tamils to Colombo had developed in such proportions that
the Tamil Union CC was inaugurated on 2 December 1899.17 Thus augmented,
the Ceylonese teams during the twentieth century were usually superior to the
sides that the local Europeans were able to pit against them in what was called
(from 1905) the ‘European–Ceylonese Test’. By the 1920s the local Europeans
were being regularly pulverised, and the last match in this series was played in
1933 (Roberts 1985: 425; Foenander 1924: 157–68; Perera 1999: 172–4), by
which time the colony was well on the road to self-determination by virtue of the
new Donoughmore constitution brought into effect in 1931.
 Sri Lanka 139
Sealane and empire cricket, 1900–47
The nationalist lining to some cricket contests should not obscure the fact that
the game was sponsored during the nineteenth century by a number of English-
men. Ashley Walker, a schoolmaster, and George Vanderspar, a businessman, are
identified by S. S. Perera as leading promoters of the game in the late nineteenth
century. The organisational roles were soon taken up by Ceylonese, such as Col.
Dr John Rockwood (Tamil), S. P. Foenander (Bharatha, considered Burgher),
P. Saravanamuttu (Tamil) and E. M. Karunaratne (Sinhalese) of Galle, during
the first half of the twentieth century. When the Ceylon Cricket Association
(CCA) was established on 13 July 1922, Dr John Rockwood became president
while the British businessman O. B. Forbes became Honorary Secretary (Perera
1999: 141; Foenander 1924: 131–3).
The ethnic mix in the CCA denoted by these names is of significance in a
political context in which the Ceylonese middle class was challenging British
overlordship and demanding constitutional devolution – for the early 1920s was
replete with verbal wrangles and political brouhaha.18 Along one dimension, the
trans-ethnic cooperation shows that cricket transcended politics. Along another
dimension it reveals how doors were opened to some Ceylonese because of their
wealth and Anglicised manners. Indeed, the genteel civility of the upper layers of
the Ceylonese middle class in the 1920s had proved a great asset in persuading the
British Raj to transfer a considerable measure of political power by 1927–31
(following the Donoughmore Commission of 1927).
Ceylon’s junction location in the grid of international shipping lanes and its
links with the British upper classes through the plantation trades also encouraged
cricket teams from several parts of the British Empire to tour the island. Among
the many, let me note three contrasting instances: the Reverend E. F. Waddy’s
team of Australians (December 1913 – January 1914), St Peter’s College of
Adelaide (1928) and the MCC at the end of their tours of India in early 1927
and early in 1934 (Foenander 1924: 89–91; Perera 1999: 177–8; Colin-Thome
2003: 83).19
Perhaps the most colourful of these visits was when the MCC, Australian
and New Zealand teams played ‘whistle-stop’ matches over one day when their
P&O ships called at Colombo on their way to or from England. Radio Colombo
(established 1922) transmitted the BBC’s external service broadcast of the famous
Fifth Test at the Oval in 1938.20 Once the Ashes series were renewed after the
Second World War, such radio broadcasts generated legendary fervour among
cricket devotees in Ceylon for a long time thereafter – at least till local heroes
entered the global circuit of cricket. When famous cricketers dropped in at their
doorstep for the whistle-stop games, therefore, enormous crowds were drawn to
the matches. In the result, too, Sri Lanka derived one satisfaction that was denied
to the Indian devotees of the game: they were able to see Bradman bat on their
soil in 1930 and 1948.
For reasons of proximity and affinity, however, the trans-imperial links were
strongest with British India. The first of these friendly encounters, involving a
five-week tour to Bombay to play its Gymkhana sides in 1903, was perhaps the
140 Michael Roberts
most significant. Though organised by the Colts CC, the money required for the
trip (Rs 29,317) was collected by public subscription, while the team included
five players from the SSC, four from the NCC and A. C. Ahmath from the Malay
CC in addition to leading Colts players (Perera 1999: 89–90).
The ‘ecumenical’ character of imperial cricket was illustrated when Tommy
Kelaart and D. L. de Saram were asked to attend the trials to select an Indian team
in December 1903 for a planned tour of England in the summer of 1904, a tour
that did not eventuate (Perera 1999: 90–1). Thirty years later the Maharaj Kumar
of Vizianagram (MKV) attempted to persuade the Indian authorities to include
Edward Kelaart, a marvellous off-spinning all-rounder, in the Indian squad for
England, but failed (ibid.: 164–5). Such trans-national affinities were not surpris-
ing in an era when Indian princes such as Duleepsinhji, Ranjitsinhji, Iftikar
Nawab of Pataudi and Yuvraj of Patiala played for England – that is, the MCC.
The Tamil Union toured Madras in the Christmas season of 1911, 1913 and
1918; the Malay CC toured Bombay in December 1907, while John Rockwood
organised a two-week tour of Bombay in December 1919. This team included one
Malay (Ahmath), two Tamils, five Burghers and seven Sinhalese (Foenander
1924: 106–7, 208–11; Perera 1999: 136–7). As noticeably, the team played four
matches against the Islam Gymkhana, Parsee Gymkhana, Hindu Gymkhana and
Bombay Gymkhana – three ethnic teams and one trans-ethnic. Thereafter, a team
from Bombay made a reciprocal visit and played three matches in Colombo in
1926 versus a European XI, a Ceylonese XI and an All-Ceylon XI. Again, in
1930 MKV promoted an eight-match tour of Sri Lanka by a team that included
England’s Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe as well as the two Nayudu brothers,
C. K. and C. S. (Perera 1999: 152–3, 163–4).
Such exchanges with India, clearly, promoted the game in Sri Lanka. Five
significant moments in this relationship need marking. One: the ‘All-Ceylon’
tour of India in late 1932/early 1933, when the team was led by Dr C. H.
Gunasekara (Perera 1999: 170–1). Two: the invitation extended to Edward
Kelaart to play for MKV’s side in 1930–1, 1933–4 and 1935, the second of these
being against the MCC (ibid.: 164–5). Three: Indian invitations to outstanding
Sri Lankan players such as F. C. de Saram, S. S. Jayawickrema, Pat McCarthy,
George Pereira and M. Sathasivam to play for the Rest of India in the Bombay
Pentangular tournament or the capstone game against the Ranji Trophy cham-
pions (ibid.: 165, 230–1). Four: the tour of Sri Lanka in 1945 by the Indian
side under Vijay Merchant for a set of five matches, including an ‘unofficial
Test’ versus ‘All-Ceylon’. This Test was witnessed by a crowd estimated at 15,000
– an indicator of the popularity of the game in the urban south-west (ibid.:
221–2). Five: the CCA’s trip to Madras to play South India in January 1947, a
triumphant occasion when Sri Lanka scored 521 for 7, with Sathasivam playing
what many considered to be the finest innings ever seen at the Chepauk grounds
up to that date, 215 runs in 248 minutes; and then dismissed the local side for
197 and 200, with R. L. de Kretser (off spin) and L. E. de Zoysa (right arm leg spin)
as main destroyers (ibid.: 229–30).
For all its lustre, cricket in the first half of the twentieth century remained
 Sri Lanka 141
an elite game confined for the most part to the urban centres of the southern
and central parts of the island and Jaffna town in the Peninsula, but supplemented
by the inputs from the British planters as well as British personnel in the main
towns. Highly talented cricketers were emerging from the ranks of all the
indigenous communities. A few families also had the wherewithal to send their
sons to England for cricket and study. Dr C. H. Gunasekara played cricket
for Middlesex (1919–20 and 1922) and S. G. A. Maartensz for Hampshire; while
J. A. de Silva and T. E. Tweed played for Cambridge in 1925–6 and F. C. de Saram
for Hertfordshire and Oxford University in the 1930s. Young de Saram had an
outstanding season for Hertfordshire in the minor county league in 1933, scoring
479 runs in 8 outings for an average of 68.42. This feat earned him a belated place
in the Oxford University XI, where he scored a brilliant 128 out of Oxford’s total
of 218 against Woodfull’s Australian team in 1934.21
By 1945, then, as the end of the Second World War ushered in a new era,
Sri Lanka had a handful of talented cricketers who were capable of performing
well occasionally against the best international sides. This talent was more evident
in batting than in bowling. Sathasivam and de Saram stood out amid this pool
of talent. Derrick de Saram has been described by one of his protégés as ‘the
complete batsman’, one with ‘a granite defence . . . blended with punitive
orthodoxy’ (Gunasekara 1996: 34–5). He made 50 and 122 not out for the Rest
of India versus the Muslims in 1937, and scored masterly centuries for the SSC
when they played Madras and Baroda on their tour of India in 1945 (ibid.: 48–9;
Perera 1999: 165).22 The debonair ‘Satha’ was twinkle-toed, all class and finesse.
Indeed, folklore suggests that Ghulam Ahmed considered him the best batsman
he had ever bowled to and that Worrell thought him ‘the best batsman he had
ever seen’ (Gunasekara 1996: 57). Statistics support the interpretation: before his
classic innings at the Chepauk grounds, he made 101 runs in 1944 for the Rest of
India versus the Hindus (the All-India champions in that year); a masterly 111
runs in difficult conditions against the full complement of Indian bowlers under
Merchant at the unofficial Test match of 1945; and a remarkable 96 runs out of a
total of 153 when the Ceylon side struggled against a visiting Commonwealth
team on a rain-affected pitch in February 1950 (ibid.: 48–9; Perera 1999: 221–2,
165, 229–31, 251–2).
In overview, therefore, one could say that by the second quarter of the
twentieth century cricket had a vibrant place in the hearts of many middle-class
males living in the main urban centres. This was never more evident than on the
occasions when the leading colleges in a city played each other in their annual
blood match. These games attracted large crowds from across the social spectrum
in and around each urban centre. Whether it was Mahinda playing Richmond at
Galle, St John’s playing Jaffna Central at Jaffna, or Trinity playing St Anthony’s
at Kandy, the townsfolk could not but take note of the boisterous activities
generated by roving bands of schoolboys; while older alumni assembled in droves
to consume booze in gargantuan proportions.23 This spirit, so to speak, also flowed
over to the annual Law–Medical match in Colombo, where some of the highest
in the land let their trousers down in festive mood.
142 Michael Roberts
Independence in 1948: towards change
Despite such traditions and the playing talent on hand, Sri Lanka’s cricket stepped
forth into the postcolonial era in 1948 with many limitations. For one, cricket
being a game played with a leather ball, the pool of players was wholly amateur
and largely drawn from middle-class families, though lads from an urban lower-
middle-class background were soon entering the ranks. The working class in the
towns were not strangers to the game. Tennis ball cricket was popular, and the big
matches drew crowds from all the urban strata; and indeed they attracted betting.
Second, little or no cricket was played in the outlying rural hinterlands of the
north-east, north-central, south-east and Uva regions. As a pastime that drew
popular attention, cricket was still limited in its reach and market value. Third,
there were few turf pitches and most of the cricket was played on matting. This
was but one sign of the limited facilities in support of cricket.
The securing of sovereign status by Ceylon in 1948 was accompanied by
an organisational transformation in cricket. The CCA was replaced by the Board
of Control for Ceylon Cricket in June 1948. It was at this moment that the
ridiculous practice of annual elections seems to have been established. But its
problematic potentialities were not felt immediately. At the annual AGM, club
representatives went into a huddle and chose a president by haggling and con-
sensus. Few crises arose, because powerful and/or wealthy personalities had already
put their hands up for an onerous job with few perquisites. The Royal–Thomian
network of influence, moreover, appears to have called the shots. By and large
it ensured that the presidency for many decades rested in the hands of a few
notables from United National Party (UNP) families: J. R. Jayewardene (1952–5),
Robert Senanayake (1957–75), T. B. Werapitiya (1980–1), Gamini Dissanayake
(1981–9) and Tyronne Fernando (1991–4).
Such individuals as Senanayake and Werapitiya sometimes dipped into their
own pockets to assist the cricketing activities. Privilege meant noblesse oblige. This
cabalistic character as well as Robert Senanayake’s long tenure of office ensured
a relative continuity of policy over the years. But such a structure may have
encouraged an element of myopia as well as elitist conceptions of the island’s
cricketing needs between the 1940s and the 1960s. It was not till Gamini
Dissanayake took over the reins in 1981 in a move engineered by Abu Fuard24
that a major change occurred – helped by the achievements of the Lankan
cricketers as well as shifting currents in the global management of cricket.
Tentatively, one can identify several developments that transformed cricket in
Sri Lanka and enhanced its popularity over the course of the years 1948–2000.

1 The beginning of broadcasts in the Sinhala medium around 1967 because of

the initiative taken by Neville Jayaweera in his capacity as director-general
of the Ceylon Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) to broadcast the annual
big match between the former Buddhist denominational schools, Ananda
and Nalanda. He called on Palitha Perera, a former Nalandian cricketer, an
employee in the Sinhala section of the CBC, to take up this task. A whole
 Sri Lanka 143
new vocabulary had to be devised for the purpose, with Dr Vinnie Vitharana
and Karunaratne Abeysekera assisting Perera in this innovation.25 This
breakthrough provided the foundation for Sinhala coverage of international
matches in subsequent years, with Premasara Epasinghe achieving fame in
this work in subsequent decades. These accounts disseminated knowledge
and interest in the game among many to whom it had been quite unfamiliar.
What one sees here, therefore, is the ramifying effect of the socio-political
transformation of 1956 – so that its democratising effects only began to
penetrate the cricket world some 10–15 years later. Though Jayaweera and
Vitharana were solidly middle-class and Western educated, their ideological
leanings were towards the underprivileged; while Perera, Abeysekera and
Epasinghe were from Buddhist schools and typical of the lower-middle-class
strata of the 1950s and 1960s which were the motor force behind the SLFP-
led movement of Sinhala nationalism.
2 The advent of television to the island in 1979 – in colour form, unlike in
India, where early television was in black and white – and TV coverage of
international cricket matches from c. 1982 increased enthusiasm for the
game.
3 Sri Lanka’s success in July 1981 in securing entry to the highest echelon of
international cricket administered by the ICC, an event that calls for further
detail later in the chapter.
4 The subsequent expansion of facilities for cricket as a result of this step and
the initiatives of Gamini Dissanayake and Abu Fuard – a programme that was
materially assisted by the fact that Dissanayake headed a UNP ministry
supervising massive construction works.
5 The gradual widening of opportunity that enabled cricketers beyond those
educated at the best schools in Colombo and Kandy to penetrate the ranks
of the teams representing Sri Lanka. This expansion encompassed individuals
from less prestigious schools at these centres (e.g. Dharmaraja, Thurston) as
well as young men from the towns further afield, such as Kurunägala and
Ambalangoda. Among the classic illustrations of this process has been the
tale of the brothers de Silva, D. H., D. P. and D. S., from Mahinda College
in Galle during the period spanning the 1960s and the 1980s; and the
meteoric rise in the 1990s of Sanath Jayasuriya, a lad nurtured among the
fisher folk in the locality of Matara. Such success stories inspired local interest
and widened networks of influence.
6 The winning of the World Cup in 1996 and the gigantic increase in the
financial coffers of the BCCSL flowing from this event (see pp. 151–3).

Tensions, rivalries, conspiracies

Even in the era before 1983 the elitist character of cricket governance did not
erase the potential for rivalry. Trouble emerged at the birth of the new era. With
Bradman’s team due to play a match in March 1948, it was expected that F. C. de
Saram, captain of the SSC, the most senior player and star, would captain. But
144 Michael Roberts
a close vote (9 against 7) within the selection committee saw the captain of the
Tamil Union, M. Sathasivam, chosen to lead the side. This choice rankled. In the
weeks that followed the Australian match, de Saram and five other SSC players
expressed their displeasure by declining to play for the CCA when selected to
represent Ceylon against the visiting Ranji Trophy Champions, the Holkar
Cricket Association.
This unproclaimed boycott immediately drew a chorus of criticism from a
number of voices, Sinhalese, Burghers and local Britons among them. It says much
about the ethos of the time that ‘ill-mannered’ was one of the charges hurled at
these SSC men. That was not all: in April 1948 the CCA suspended all six players
for a year. However, a rapprochement was soon brought about and the ban was
removed by the new BCCSL in October 1948. The reason was simple: the great
West Indian team was due to tour Sri Lanka shortly. The island could ill afford to
lose its best cricketers – for the SSC had by far the best squad of players at that
time (Perera 1999: 236–41).
Though at face value it would appear that this controversy was motivated by
ethnic rivalry, an unimpeachable Tamil source claims that de Saram was the
logical choice and the displacement was due to Sathasivam’s personal ambitions
and ability to mobilise key support.26 Whatever the validity of this evaluation,
ethnic dimensions were attached to the cricket scene by the cricketing public. For
all Sathasivam’s brilliance as a player, there were elements in the crowd who
teased him with the epithet ‘fifty/fifty’ when he played for Ceylon against Vijay
Merchant’s India XI in 1945; and in 1948 both the Tamils in the side, Sathasivam
and Nagendra, had to endure this bantering abuse.27
The slogan ‘fifty/fifty’ was an eminently political one, indeed a notorious
phrase. In the 1930s the Tamil Congress, led by G. G. Ponnambalam, had argued
that the division of parliamentary seats should be organised so that the Sinhalese
received 50 per cent and the diverse minority communities together made up the
other 50 per cent – so ‘fifty/fifty’ summed up this political programme. In a context
where the Sinhalese made up 69 per cent of the population and where most
people in that period considered the island’s history to be largely a Sinhala one,
the Tamil Congress demand was deemed ridiculous, even by non-Sinhalese. In
short, it was a ‘joke’. But since the Tamil Congress and its demands also served as
an obstacle in the push for complete self-determination, the deployment of the
joke in most contexts, cricket field included, had some bite in it.
The next major controversy over team selection – in 1968 – was rather more
disastrous in its consequences: it is arguable that it delayed Sri Lanka’s ascension
to Test status by 5–12 years. To understand the manner in which some Sri Lankan
cricketers shot themselves in the foot, one has to comprehend the cricketing
circumstances of the early to mid-1960s. Two sets of cricketing achievements
came into play.
For one, by the 1960s several Sri Lankan cricketers had shown their mettle
on the English county circuit. Laddie Outschoorn (Worcestershire, 1946–59)
was an early ‘outrider’, but it was the cumulative effect of performances by
Stanley Jayasinghe and Clive Inman for Leicestershire, Gamini Goonasena for
 Sri Lanka 145
Nottinghamshire (1952–64) and Cambridge University (1954–7), P. I. Pieris
(1956–8) and Mano Ponniah (1967–9) for Cambridge, and Dan Piachaud for
Oxford University (1958–61) and Hampshire that would have impressed English
cricketing circles. ‘Ceylon’ was placed on their map.
Their ability to penetrate the English world of cricket at this point of time is a
little story that demands its little historian. Cricketing talent, of course, was one
requisite. But how did these unknowns from the colonial boondocks break the
ice and get decent trials? Jayasinghe had to do the hard yards in the Penzance and
Lancashire Leagues (1956–9) before making his mark in the Leicestershire
Second XI, though grapevine gossip suggests that Len Hutton’s recommendation
helped him at one point. By 1960 he had cemented his place in the Leicestershire
side. Jayasinghe in turn paved the way for Inman (1960–8). In most of the other
instances, considerable familial wealth, upper-class connections and intellec-
tual capacities enabled these talented young men to make the university XIs.
Goonasena was even supported by a public collection of funds and financial
support from the Sri Lankan government when he entered Cambridge in 1954
after a short spell at Cranwell RAF College (1950). His success made it easier
for the other university men from Sri Lanka who followed, the more so because
he captained Cambridge, performed the double of 1000 runs and 100 wickets in
two county seasons, and was one of Wisden’s Cricketers of the Year in both 1957
and 1959 (Perera 1999: 269).
The other achievements were back in South Asia. Led by Michael Tissera,
Sri Lanka had defeated Pakistan in an ‘unofficial Test’ at home in August 1964
and then engineered a remarkable victory over India at Ahmedabad after bold
cricket in January 1965 (Perera 1999: 298–302).28 Such factors, therefore, may
have induced the ICC to make Sri Lanka an Associate Member of the ICC in
1965 and led S. C. Griffith, secretary of the ICC, to intimate that they were ready
to host the Sri Lankan team in England in 1968.
This was a major breakthrough. But there remained the question of funds. The
island was racked by a severe foreign exchange crisis, while the BCCSL was
impecunious. Though the prime minister was brother to the president of the
Board, the government, harassed by the Communist Party as well as some of its
populist members and the media, refused to release foreign exchange for such
a trivial activity as cricket. Cricket enthusiasts, however, proceeded to make plans
from 1966 onwards and began to collect funds for the tour, in particular by
arranging for the donation of air fares from institutions connected with the tea
trade in London. The 1968 tour was on course.
It was anticipated that some of the stars in England at that time in 1968,
notably Goonesena, Inman, Piachaud and Ponniah, would be part of the team
because of their capacities as well as the saving of air fares. But voices could
already be heard in complaint against this suggestion because it ‘denied’ those
at home opportunities to advance. Suspicions of a conspiracy strengthened when
Abu Fuard engineered a selection committee comprising Sam Abeysekera
(chairman), C. Schaffter, Dhanasiri Weerasinghe and H. I. K. Fernando. The
latter two (and Fuard himself) were Ceylon caps. The next step was when
146 Michael Roberts
Fernando was made captain of the side facing Joe Lister’s team as they toured
Sri Lanka in 1968. The meeting to select the team for the tour of England was
held in April 1968: Schaffter stormed out of the discussion in disgust; the rump
committee proceeded to make Fernando captain and Tissera vice-captain, and
included both Weerasinghe and Fuard, while omitting D. H. de Silva, who
appears to have been part of the ‘conspiracy’.29
Predictably, a storm erupted. The promise of air fares was withdrawn. At an
emergency meeting the BCCSL declared the decisions ultra vires because one
selector was not present. The tour was cancelled. The incidents of 1948 and 1968,
therefore, reveal that it is not only money and big business (post-1996) that
encourage manipulative action. Indeed, stories about the machinations of Abu
Fuard when he was a kingmaker and kingpin in the 1980s are legion.
The attempted ‘captaincy coup’ of 1968 had class jealousies among its inspira-
tions. Here, then, on the cricket scene was a whiff of the 1956 revolution: a tale
of those on the fringes of power attempting to seize the throne. The cricket world
in the 1960s, as in the decades before, was still dominated by the Westernised set
drawn from Christian denominational schools and Royal–Thomian networks.
Though proficient in English, such individuals as Weerasinghe (Ananda) and
D. H. de Silva (Mahinda) represented the elite Sinhala-Buddhist schools, which
resented this dominance.
The sharpness of status/class differentiation in the first six decades of the
twentieth century requires underlining for those unfamiliar with the island’s social
order. Fluency in English speech and sophistication in life-ways were part of status
differentiation and class dominion (see Roberts et al. 1989). Where these assets
were exercised arrogantly, a superior gent would make remarks about the ‘sarong-
johnnies’ and ‘yakoes’ (the Sinhala word for demons, used to denote ‘rustics’ or
‘primitives’). The epitome of this mentality was F. C. de Saram, ‘the most English
of [Sri Lanka’s] cricketers in style, speech and demeanour’ (Gunasekara 1996:
23).30 De saram was a true leader of men who commanded deep loyalty from those
of his sort around him, but his disdain could be monumental. Take the anecdote
about Arjuna Ranatunga’s first encounter – presumably in the early 1980s – with
old man de Saram. As a rising schoolboy star, Ranatunga had been snaffled by the
SSC and was introduced to this doyen of the club. As Ranatunga responded to
the occasion in (presumably halting) English, de Saram looked down his nose and
said, ‘It speaks English.’
This said, one must not take the point too far. By the 1960s, most of the
Royal–Thomian and other elite cricketers had experienced the transition brought
about by the ‘1956 revolution’. Though English-speaking, such individuals as
Darrel Lieversz, T. C. T. Edwards, A. E. De Silva, Buddy Reid, Nihal Gurusinghe
and Michael Tissera were unassuming and amiable men.31 That so many of them
gained representative honours for Sri Lanka was due to their talents rather than
the power of old boy networks.
The nurturing of such talent was in part the cumulative result of good ground
facilities at their schools and the chain of example and inspiration from their elder
peers. In short, heritage had a compounding effect. In the case of St Thomas’
 Sri Lanka 147
College, moreover, this heritage included the exceptional coaching talents of
Lassie Abeywardena at a critical stage, the Under-16 level, over a period extend-
ing from the 1940s to the 1960s. If a single hand is to be discovered behind the
strength of Thomian cricket in the 1960s, it is to this man that we must look.
But he also stands here as a symbol for a long line of coaches, known and
unknown, who have laid the foundations for so many Sri Lankan cricketers. It was
on this foundation that the foreign coaches, including Captain F. C. Badcock and
Learie Constantine early on, and subsequently Garfield Sobers, Don Smith, Peter
Philpott, Dav Whatmore, Bruce Yardley and John Dyson, added their inputs.
Sobers says as much of his coaching stint in 1984:

[w]hat a pleasure it was to coach them . . . when I saw the quality of the
players in the nets for the first time, I couldn’t understand what I was doing
there. Their technique was so good it looked as if they had already enjoyed
the best of coaching.
(2002: 171–2)

No better illustration of the impact of a specific line of coaching heritage

is provided than a glance at the Sri Lankan team that defeated Pakistan A,
virtually its Test side, by 41 runs in a low-scoring match at the Oval in Colombo
on 28–30 August 1964. T. C. T. Edwards, Mano Ponniah, Buddy Reid, Michael
Tissera, P. I. Pieris, Neil Chanmugan, or six out of eleven, were Thomians. Led
by Tissera, three of them (and Lieversz from Royal) were also part of the team
that defeated India at Ahmedabad on 2–5 January 1965. Again, an epitome of this
line of Thomian talent was soon witnessed in the person of Anura Tennekoon, a
technically perfect batsman in classic mould. Unfortunately, Tennekoon, like
Tissera before him, retired from cricket prematurely in 1979 – in both cases partly
because of a conflict between the demands of the game and the demands of their
mercantile firms, itself a sign of the shaky amateur foundations on which Sri
Lankan cricket was structured.
A further illustration of the ‘streams of possibility’ that stood Lankan cricket in
good stead in subsequent decades can be provided by a relatively obscure event
associated with the tour of Sri Lanka by the Hyderabad Blues in 1967, a side that
included Jaisimha, Brijesh Patel and Abbas Ali Baig. Though the Blues defeated
an XI representing the Central Province Cricket Association at Asgiriya (CPCA)
in early April 1967, the CPCA scored 303 in the first innings because of an
impressive 113 runs by Randy Morrell and a scintillating 61 by T. B. Marasinghe
61. Morrell was right-hand opening batsmen and a planter, but had been schooled
at St Thomas’ College – ‘partly made by Lassie’ at the Under-16 level (in the late
1950s), one could say. Marasinghe was from Dharmaraja College in Kandy, a left-
hand batsmen with pulverising strokes tailored elegantly.32
Neither Morrell nor Marasinghe quite made it into the highest reaches of Sri
Lankan cricket because they were residing beyond Colombo and not involved in
premier Sara Trophy sides. This, then, was the difference between the 1960s and
the 1980s and 1990s. It took the changes that I have outlined earlier for provincial
148 Michael Roberts
youth to climb into the centre of things. For all that, the schooling trajectories of
Morrell and Marasinghe in the 1950s and 1960s also mark the lines of promise
that crystallised into a body of talented cricketers in subsequent decades, namely
a solid cricketing heritage in elite Colombo establishments on the one hand and
raw regional talent on the other.
By the 1970s and 1980s, moreover, the elite schools of cricketing talent
were not Royal–Thomian or Christian denominational. The best cricketers were
emerging from Ananda and Nalanda. Bandula Warnapura from Nalanda
succeeded Tennekoon as captain in 1980. Sidath Wettimuny from Ananda
replicated Tennekoon’s perfection in technique and revealed an ability to cope
with all manner of wickets; while the apple of coach Garfield Sobers’s eye in the
1980s (see Sobers 2002: 171) was Arjuna Ranatunga from Ananda, who made
a debut 90 runs in difficult circumstances against the Australians at Asgiriya in
1984, eventually led Sri Lanka to victory at the World Cup in 1996 and stood up
to the Australian umpiring fraternity in January 1998.

Securing ICC Test status

Sri Lanka had been endeavouring to secure full Test status from the ICC from
1975, but been rejected every time. It was the cricketing talent of its players, and
the batsmen in particular, that eventually eroded the conservatism and vested
interests within the ICC establishment and secured full Test status for the country
in July 1981. These talents were first displayed to the wider world in July 1975
when the Lankan batsmen scored 276 runs for 4 in reply to a massive Australian
score of 328 for 5 during their ODI game at the first World Cup in England. Sri
Lanka had confirmed its leading position among the minnows once again by
winning the ICC Trophy for Associate Members for the second time when it was
held in England in 1979; and then went on to defeat India comfortably in the
World Cup of 1979 (Perera 1999: 372–6). These signals were confirmed when
Kim Hughes’s Australian team played matches in Sri Lanka on their way to the
Ashes in 1981. The Australians were matched and/or outplayed in the three one-
day games, while the unofficial ‘Test’ ended in a draw (ibid.: 372–6).
The support of Australian officials and the Australian Cricket Board (ACB)
may have been another critical factor in swaying the ICC. Bob Parish and Fred
Bennett from the ACB seem to have backed Sri Lanka’s claim. Parish was linked
with Prahran CC in Melbourne, where both Owen Mottau and Dav Whatmore
were leading players. Unconfirmed stories suggest that Parish and Sam Loxton of
Prahran initiated a long history of support for Sri Lankan cricket from that club.
And last but not least, there was the advocacy and sophistication of Gamini
Dissanayake, president of the BCCSL, who went to London in 1981 to argue Sri
Lanka’s case and seems to have done so persuasively. The fact that he held an
important ministerial post and had connections with British companies involved
in construction projects for the Mahaweli Development Board under his ministry
may have been another background factor: for the ICC was concerned about the
number of cricket grounds of Test standard and other infrastructural facilities.
 Sri Lanka 149
The years 1981–96
No sooner had Sri Lanka attained elite status and begun playing Tests than its
cricketing ranks were split asunder by the attractions of the South African rand.
The cricketers were all amateurs and were relatively easy targets once the South
African Cricket Union (SACU) decided to extend its sponsorship of rebel tours.
This programme was a retaliatory move on the part of the SACU. The ICC had
excluded South Africa from its ranks in the early 1970s because of the apartheid
policy of its government. Sponsoring rebel tours of South Africa was conceived
by the SACU as a way of undermining world cricket while sustaining South
Africa’s own standards. A body of Englishmen led by the former England captain
Graham Gooch served as its first catch in February/March 1982. Its next
seductions were directed towards the Sri Lankans and West Indians.
Tony Opatha33 acted as the principal intermediary with the Sri Lankan per-
sonnel. While touring India under Warnapura, sections of the team held several
clandestine meetings. The original plan centred on Duleep Mendis (vice-captain)
and Roy Dias, who were the team’s outstanding batsmen as well as close mates.
A day or so before the team was due to embark secretly for South Africa, President
Dissanayake brought pressure to bear on these two and/or offered carrots. In the
event, Mendis and Dias became captain and vice-captain of the Sri Lanka side,
while the rebel squad under Warnapura and Opatha (now vice-captain) left the
island with a pot-pourri of players from a range of clubs, towns and class levels34
to South Africa in September 1982. The tour was a financial flop for the South
African Board, but its cricketers had all the joys to be derived from roundly
spanking the Sri Lankans whenever they stepped onto the field. More to the
point, the 13 Sri Lankan cricketers were immediately deemed pariahs and banned
for 25 years by the BCCSL.35
Needless to say, the capacities of the Sri Lankan cricket team were severely
weakened by these defections – with the loss of their spinning duo of Ajit de
Silva and Lalith Kaluperuma being particularly damaging. While they lost the
majority of their Test matches in the period 1982–96, there were some excellent
performances on occasions, notably (a) in August 1984 at Lord’s, when they out-
played England and amassed 491 runs and 294 for 7 in their two innings, with
three century-makers all told; (b) beat India by 149 runs after declaring in their
second innings at the Oval in Colombo on 6–11 September 1985; (c) beat
Pakistan by 8 wickets at the CCC grounds in Colombo on 14–18 March 1986;
and (d) scored heavily in a high-scoring series in New Zealand in 1992 where
all three Tests ended as draws. What might have been a sweet and marvellous
moment, the game against Australia on 17–21 August 1992 at the SSC grounds
in Colombo, where Australia was on the hop throughout the game, turned sour
during the last session. An unholy collapse by the Lankan batsmen (8 wickets for
37) enabled the Australians to seize victory (by 16 runs) from the very jaws of
defeat.36
Sri Lanka’s cricketing prowess, however, lay in the shortened form of the game.
Its lack of penetrative bowlers counted for less in this domain and its team’s
150 Michael Roberts
attacking batsmanship could pay dividends. As early as 1984, Greg Chappell’s
Australians were put to the sword in all three ODI matches. It is not necessary to
provide a more detailed history of this strand of activity except to mark four
‘moments’ along what can be called ‘the road to Lahore, 1996’.

1 During the World Cup in the Antipodes in 1992, Sri Lanka began the series
with two remarkable victories against South Africa and Zimbabwe in New
Zealand, even chasing a target of 312 runs at Napier on 23 February to defeat
the latter by 3 wickets.
2 In one of the preliminary games during the Triangular Champions Trophy
competition at Sharjah in October 1995, Sri Lanka was confronted by a West
Indian total of some 333 runs, the highest in the history of ODI cricket till
then. They proceeded to score 329 runs in reply and lost gamely after 49.3
overs when Hashan Tillakaratne was caught on the boundary seeking a
winning six.
3 As one of the two visiting sides in the ODI series in Australia in 1995–6, the
Sri Lankans were considered also-rans because the West Indians and
Australians were expected to make the final. They had not read this script,
however. They sneaked and screamed their way to the final post by beating
the West Indies at Perth and the Australians at Melbourne. They may have
lost the two finals that followed, but gave Australia a good run for their
money in the midst of some home-town umpiring and the occasional twist in
TV commentary.
4 This particular ODI series was sandwiched amid the Sri Lankans’ tour
of Australia, itself a landmark because their schedule included three Tests
for the first time. But the tour became another sort of landmark for other
reasons, the wrong ones. The Sri Lankans were subject to unprecedented
psychological warfare from the Australian media, accused of ball-tampering
by a Pakistani umpire on the first day of the first Test and then had to undergo
the traumatic experience of Muralitharan being branded a thrower by Darrell
Hair on the first day of the second Test on 26 December 1995 in what is now
known to have been a pre-considered move. After he was called a second
time at Brisbane,37 he did not bowl again – so that the team’s battles in the
latter part of the ODI series were staged without his aid. It is widely reckoned
that the pressures and experiences of this tour, not least the unrelenting
Australian strategy of verbal intimidation, gave the Sri Lankan cricketers
the necessary steel to withstand all comers during World Cup in February–
March 1996.

The signs were there. It was feasible for perceptive observers, such as Mike
Marqusee and Richard Hadlee, to suggest that the Sri Lankan team were dark
horses and could win the World Cup.
 Sri Lanka 151
The Cricket World Cup, 1996
There was, of course, another factor helping the Lankans. The matches were all
on the Indian subcontinent, mostly away from home, it is true, but on slower,
lower subcontinental wickets for the most part. And then, on 31 January 1996,
the Tigers (LTTE) struck. A truck bomb outside the Central Bank, which
held the island’s gold reserves, devastated the central business district and killed
large numbers of people. The target was a strategic one, the aim being to terrorise
the administrative centre, and the timing was directed against the notion that
4 February was a day of celebration (for the Tamils, it is held to be a mark of
oppression and a denial of their self-determination) (Roberts 1998b).38
The ACB and the West Indian Board quickly decided that their teams would
not play the first-round matches of the World Cup scheduled for Sri Lanka.
Concerns for player safety were paramount, but they also reasoned (correctly) that
the system in place would enable them to reach the second round despite the
forfeit of one match. These decisions were politically myopic as well as unfor-
tunate (Roberts 1998a). The Sri Lankan public and players were denied contests
they were looking forward to. But the forfeits also distributed the top teams over
the subsequent stages of the competition in ways that assisted the Sri Lankan
team.
That granted, the team’s march to victory was a remarkable one, perhaps
matchless. For one, virtually all their victories were comprehensive, and the final
triumph over Australia was comfortable. Second, batsmen 8–11 batted only once
during the whole series, while Mahanama at seven batted only three times. Third,
they scored at 5.99 runs per over and 56.24 runs per wicket and bettered all
previous rates on these scales. Fourth, Aravinda de Silva secured four man-of-
the-match awards, and Sanath Jayasuriya walked away with the award for ‘Player
of the World Cup’ because his strike rate was 131.5 over 100 balls on top of other
specific contributions (Roberts 1998c: 152–3).
Among the cricketing factors that I would pinpoint as the foundation for this
emphatic march to victory are the following:

• the close rapport between Ranatunga and de Silva as captain and vice-
captain;
• Ranatunga’s leadership;
• the experience that all the players had garnered on the international circuit
in the early 1990s and the fact that they had been playing together as a team
since 1992, if not earlier;
• the resolve that had developed, especially after the ‘assaults’ they had
encountered from all sides in Australia in December–January 1995–6;
• the balanced bowling attack, centred upon four spinners suited to sub-
continental conditions;
• a superb batting line-up right down to number seven;
• competence fielding, with Mahanama and Jayasuriya as sharpshooters in the
inner ring;
152 Michael Roberts
• Dav Whatmore’s input as coach, specifically man-management and the
professionalisation of training methods (weight training, nutrition, etc.);39
• Whatmore’s choice of Alex Kontouri as physiotherapist and the transfor-
mation of the team’s fitness levels by this intelligent, hardworking and
approachable man;40
• the fact that basic homework on climatic and pitch conditions at Lahore was
conducted – leading in turn to the unusual, but masterly, decision to field first
because it was expected that dew would hinder the fielding side at night.

Much has been made of Dav Whatmore’s role as coach, and the influence he
had on the side after he was made coach in mid-1995 (see, for example, Nicholas
1996). However, the side was already well equipped before Whatmore’s advent.
That said, his insertion of modern sport science into the preparation of the cricket
team was a significant factor in the mix of forces. Evaluating the relative weight
one should attribute to each factor is impossible without having been a fly on the
wall of the Sri Lankan changing rooms over the years 1994–6; and even such a fly
would be hard put to make precise assessments.

Post-1996 consequences and ramifications

The finances of the BCCSL expanded a thousandfold as a result of the World
Cup victory. Cricket became big business within Sri Lanka and an attractive
investment for sponsors. But as noted above, these attractions and the existing
constitutional scheme generated sharpening competition for posts, debilitating
manipulations associated with a spoils system and organisational instability.
That was not all. Arjuna Ranatunga emerged from the World Cup as Man
Mountain in Lankan eyes. His style of leadership became even more autocratic,
a combination of boss man and walauwwa mahattayā (manorial lord, in Sinhala
mode). When, moreover, Thilanga Sumathipala was elected president of the
BCCSL in 1997, one found an SLFP network at the centre of power, with S. B.
Dassanayake as sports minister41 and Dhammika Ranatunga appointed chief
executive of the BCCSL. By the time the next World Cup came around in 1999,
Arjuna Ranatunga was given the freedom42 to select the team with Duleep
Mendis43 at his side. Some of Ranatunga’s acolytes benefited, as did the old stal-
warts. The side chosen for the series in England was an ageing body of personnel,
with several quite unsuited to English conditions. It was easy to predict that the
side would not secure a spot in the second stage of the contest (Roberts 1999). In
the event, the performance of the team was an utter shambles, accentuated by
poor captaincy, de Silva’s manifest unfitness, and the distance between Ranatunga
and de Silva on the one hand and many of their colleagues on the other. Prima
facie, one can conclude that ‘1996’ had gone to some heads.
Remarkably the ‘1996 syndrome’ continued to cloud judgement in subsequent
years, notably in 2002–3. Thus, in 2002 when specific heroes from the year 1996
produced good scores on the local circuit or in international matches on Lankan
grounds, they were automatically deemed good enough for selection even when
 Sri Lanka 153
the side was slated to encounter early summer conditions in England (Roberts
2002b, d). The ‘disease’ extended beyond local commentators and vested inter-
ests. During the World Cup in 2003 some foreign TV-callers kept referring to the
events of 1996 without any recollection of the disastrous performances in 1999.
Even now, the phrase ‘little Kalu’ denotes explosive innings and an assured place
in the side for this lovely fellow – without reference to the fact that he only played
one explosive hand during the 1996 World Cup and without any evaluation of
his ODI statistics tabulated according to country.
It was precisely because of the cricketing failures of 1999 that the interim
board of mid-1999 under Rienzie Wijetilleke and the selection committee under
Sidath Wettimuny secured Whatmore’s services once again44 and revamped the
composition of the side. This process, however, was arrested by a radical transfer
of the reins of power in March–April 2002. The new interim committee under
Amarasuriya included many of Sumathipala’s men. To judge by subsequent
events, it was designed to pave the way for the ‘democratic’ system of elections to
be reinstated – in effect ensuring that Sumathipala would take office in June 2003
(see Austin 2003). By January 2004 the situation was in flux because of yet other
events outside cricketing terrain.

Social change
Amid this flux, one major transformation in the order of political society, and thus
of cricket politics, can be registered. The ‘class/status’ struggle of the 1940s to the
1960s between the English-educated elite and the vernacular underprivileged
has diminished considerably. English has not been dethroned by the political
platform of ‘Sinhala only’ launched in 1956. It retains its central significance for
jobs and communication, but it now shares this political space with Sinhala
speakers (and with Tamil in Tamil majority districts). The Anglophile pukka
sahibs of the past have passed away, aged or moved abroad. Thus, the inferiority
complex of the mid-twentieth century coursing through the sentiments of those
lacking fluency in English has mostly disappeared. In recent decades, notables
from business, political, media, cricket and other circles speak English on tele-
vision without one hundred per cent proficiency, yet without hesitation. Allowing
for significant exceptions, for the most part the new Sinhala-speaking generations
do not express the type of antipathy to English-speak that one found in the mid-
twentieth century.
But powerful undercurrents of nativist Sinhala nationalism remain. The
strident outcry in recent months against the alleged expansion of Pentecostal
churches has been accompanied by arson attacks on more than 100 churches,
‘mostly Evangelical but a scattering of RC churches as well’.45 This strand of
politics is reminiscent of the anti-Christian campaign that accompanied the
‘revolution of 1956’. Behind all this is the anxiety generated by the military
success of the LTTE and the prospect that they will gain near-total autonomy and
international recognition through the ongoing peace negotiations begun in early
2002. At least three forces embody these tendencies. First, there is an articulate
154 Michael Roberts
coterie of intellectuals known as Jātika Chintanaya (Nationalist Thought).
Second, there is the revamped JVP, an indigenist Marxist force that launched
insurgencies in 1971 and 1987–9 and has now adopted a parliamentary veneer.
Third, there is a wing of the SLFP that remains strongly attached to the values of
1956.
Enter Arjuna Ranatunga the politician. As an MP since December 2001, he is
among the SLFP hardliners. His entry into politics was in familial footsteps: his
father has been a MP since 1989, while his elder brother Prasanna has been a
member of the Gampaha Provincial Council since 1993. The Ranatunga family
itself hails from Gampaha District in the immediate rural hinterland of Colombo.
That Arjuna should cleave to the values and prejudices of the 1950s is hardly
surprising.
Such prejudices also intruded into his cricket politics. As a folktale has it, when
Russel Arnold, an English-speaking youngster from St Peter’s College, gained
entry into the pool of Sri Lankan players in the late 1990s and entered the
changing rooms, Ranatunga ‘welcomed’ him with an acid greeting. Here, then,
was F. C. de Saram turned on his head: the boot rammed home was a Sinhala
boot, the victim someone ‘Westernised’. More significant, however, is the fact
that Ranatunga has been a prominent participant in the cross-party gatherings of
a new coalition, the Patriotic Front, which was set up in September 2003 and has
been described by a socialist critic as ‘an umbrella organisation that brings racists
together’.46 The Patriotic Front also challenges the directions taken by the present
peace process under UN peacekeeping aegis. Such chauvinist moves imply a
return to war – even though that subject is never addressed in their protestations.
In brief, the silver lining arising from the ceasefire of the past two years has
dark clouds threatening it. Instability, alas, has been a feature permeating the
cricketing scene as well as the political scene for many a year.

Notes
1 This chapter has been written at short notice. I have been assisted by the email
responses of many friends. I thank all of them warmly. They are too numerous to list!
Likewise, space limits decreed that citations should be minimised.
2 For those unfamiliar with Sri Lanka, let me note that virtually all these towns are
in the south-western quadrant, while Kandy is in that part of the Central Highlands
adjacent to this segment of the island.
3 Governmental interventions in 1999, 2002 and 2003 saw the creation of interim
committees, so normality was less than usual.
4 English continued to be of importance as a language of communication.
5 Grapevine information. The date is from Hoole (2001: 406).
6 Ms Subramanium is a Tamil from India who was a correspondent in Colombo for
different Indian newspapers throughout most of the 1990s. I also tapped the views of
three-wheeler drivers based on one street in Wellawatte (a Tamil quarter, by and
large) whom I use regularly when visiting the island. This ‘cricket test’, needless to say,
is not full proof. It is a really a guesstimate on everyone’s part.
7 Information transmitted during email correspondence on other matters in late 2003.
8 ‘Murali appearance puts Jaffna into a spin’, Daily News, 3 September 2002, on the
Internet.
 Sri Lanka 155
9 See Daily News, 30 September 2002, on the Internet.
10 Cricket Match in India is the title of this painting (information from Ismeth Raheem,
who has a booklet called ‘Images of early history of cricket in Ceylon and south India’
awaiting publication).
11 As one would expect in a book of such magnitude, one chances upon errors in Perera’s
book. It follows that I may be repeating some errors whenever I deploy his material.
12 In the first match in 1879, English schoolmasters also played. But from 1880 this series
featured only the respective schoolboys (Perera 1999: 38–41). Also see Wijesinghe
(2004).
13 Data supplied by S. S. Perera and incorporated in appendix 11 in Roberts et al. (1989:
239).
14 The Burghers included a far higher proportion of British descendants than is popularly
recognised – because some British personnel, especially those widowed, married
resident European descendants (that is, Burghers) as well as Sinhalese and Tamils. For
greater detail, see Roberts et al. (1989).
15 Digby believed the Burghers could be ‘a medium of civilisation’ and a bridge between
West and East. He argued his case strenuously for the European descendants in India
as well as Ceylon. See Digby (1877; 1879, vol. I: 6, 23–4) as well as Roberts et al.
(1989: 48–9).
16 Letter from Lorenz to R. Morgan, 14 March 1859, in the Lorenz MSS, RAS Library,
Sri Lanka. For elaboration of this argument, see Roberts et al. (1989: 58–61, 127–9,
140–75).
17 The first club formed by the migrant Tamils in Colombo was the Lanka Sports Club,
established in November 1895 (Perera 1999: 73), but it must have declined. For the
Tamil Union, see (Foenander 1924: 59–65).
18 See de Silva (1981: chs 27, 28), especially details on the political manoeuvres of
Governor Manning (pp. 390–5). Also note the strikes and labour agitations of the
period 1919–29 described by Jayawardena (1972).
19 St Peter’s College Magazine, 1928. See also Foenander (1924: 89–91), Perera (1999:
177–8) and Colin-Thome (2003: 83).
20 Email memo from Neville Jayaweera, 16 January 2004.
21 This paragraph is based on Perera (1999: 135–6, 151, 174–6), Gunasekara (forth-
coming) and Gunasekara (1996: 24–5).
22 It was only after the game against the Hindus at the Bombay Pentangular in 1944
that someone remarked that Sathasivam was ineligible to play because he was a
Hindu.
23 For a hilarious account, see Levine (1996: 36–7). Perhaps the juiciest tale is that a
tipsy old gent told this British lass that what she saw before her eyes was ‘a hangover
from the British days’.
24 Fuard is a Sri Lankan Moor who was educated at Wesley College. An outstanding
off-spin bowler who could bat, he played for Wesley and various clubs and represented
Sri Lanka in the 1960s. He was a dominating figure in the BCCSL administration in
the 1980s and still wields influence from his home. For other comments, see the text
that follows.
25 Email memo from Neville Jayaweera, 16 January 2004 and Perera (1999: 193–4).
Commentaries in Tamil are now interspersed amid English and Sinhala accounts; but
this may be a recent development.
26 Email note, 19 January 2004: ‘Absolutely no ethnic angle, just that Satha was a man
whom everybody loved to hate. They loved him for his cricket and hated him for
everything else.’
27 Information from Neville Jayaweera, who, as a Thomian schoolboy, was in the crowd
and admits – to his ‘shame’ in his own words now – to being one of those participating
in this joking abuse.
28 I have also profited from conversations with Mano Ponniah.
156 Michael Roberts
29 My account is based on Perera (1999: 320–6) as well as conversations with several
cricketers from that era. The consensus is that Fuard and Weerasinghe were the
driving forces behind the takeover bid, though one individual at the centre of things
also identified D. H. de Silva as part of the scheming. H. I. K. Fernando was from
St Peter’s and Fuard from Wesley, and both were senior to Tissera in the Ceylon squad
when he was made captain.
30 In the description that follows, Channa Gunasekara affirms that de Saram ‘was
likewise the most nationally oriented in bearing’ and that he had the capacity to laugh
at himself.
31 Personal knowledge, mostly in and around the cricket fields.
32 News cuttings and information conveyed by Morrell in Sydney and my memories of a
set of cricket trials in Kandy and Peradeniya in the late 1960s in which I participated.
33 Opatha represented Sri Lanka at cricket between 1973 and 1979, and may have
established links with South African cricket during his coaching stints in the
Netherlands.
34 From the Lankan side that had toured India in 1982 Madugalle, Sidath Wettimuny
and Asantha de Mel were not approached or declined to join.
35 This account is based on Chesterfield (forthcoming) and Perera (1999: 415–18).
However, the published details are skimpy and inadequate. Note that the ban on the
cricketers was rescinded in early 1990 (Perera 1999: 416).
36 Details from Perera (1999) and www.cricketarchive.co.uk/Archive/.
37 By both Emerson and McQuillan, sometimes when he was bowling leg-breaks. It is
therefore significant that the ACB’s umpiring committee chose Emerson and
McQuillan to stand together at Adelaide Oval on 23 January 1998.
38 For the Tamil’s self-perception of themselves as a ‘nationality’, their claims to self-
determination and other facets of their political history, see Roberts (1999b: 34–7),
Nesiah (2001), Wilson (2000) and de Silva (1998: 119–58, 297–332).
39 This point has been refined in conversation with Sidath Wettimuny, who was part of
the team’s official entourage during the World Cup. Whatmore is not a coach who
works a great deal on technique.
40 This point was impressed on me by Sidath Wettimuny (telephone chat, 20 January
2004) who noted that ‘the players swear by him [Kontouri]’.
41 Dassanayake and Sumathipala have been a ‘partnership’ of sorts for some time.
When Dassanayake and a few other Ministers became unhappy with their leader
Chandrika Kumaratunga’s political moves in 2002, Sumathipala negotiated their
crossing over to the UNP and thus assisted the victory of the UNP-led coalition in
late 2002. This step consolidated the split between Sumathipala and the Ranatunga
clan – a clash that appears to have originated earlier from affairs internal to cricket
administration.
42 ‘Arjuna was given the freedom to make his moves as he had a wealth of experience
like no other player in the business,’ said Sumathipala in May 1999 in a reference
to the situation in 1995, but which we can reinterpret to be the line he took in
early 1999 (interview with Channaka de Silva for the Sunday Times World Cup
Supplement, 16 May 1999).
43 Former Sri Lankan captain and chairman of selectors in 1998–9.
44 Whatmore did not continue as coach of Sri Lanka beyond 1997 because he received a
lucrative offer from Lancashire, while the BCCSL was, typically, prevaricating in
preparing a new contract (possibly because some cricketing personalities had their
own aspirations?). His readiness to return to the lion’s den of Sri Lankan cricket
politics in mid-1999 was due to his Sri Lankan patriotism. It was also facilitated by
Skanda Kumar’s trip to Manchester and Whatmore’s trust in the personnel of the
interim committee under Wijetilleke.
45 Email memo from Neville Jayaweera, 17 January 2004. Jayaweera notes that only
a fraction of these atrocities have been reported in the newspapers. For a brief note
 Sri Lanka 157
on the attack on St Michael’s Church at Katuwana, Homagama, see Daily News, 16
January 2004. Also see K. M. de Silva (1998: 88–93).
46 Email note from Ananda Wakkumbura, 1 February 2004. Note that the Sı̄hala
Urumaya (Sinhala Heritage Party) is not an affiliate of the PNM. Also see www.
pnmsrilanka.com.

References
Austin, Charlie (2003) ‘Sumathipala as new president: hero or villain?’, Wisden Cricket
Comment, 8 June 2003, www.cricinfo.
Chesterfield, Trevor (forthcoming) ‘The politics of isolation: South Africa’s rebel era’, in
M. Roberts (ed.), Essaying Cricket, Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications.
Colin-Thome, David (2003) ‘A bat, a ball, a herb’, in Sri Lanka Cricket, England vs Sri
Lanka, 2003, Colombo: Sri Lanka Cricket.
De Silva, K. M. (1981) A History of Sri Lanka, Delhi: Oxford University Press.
De Silva, K. M. (1998) Reaping the Whirlwind: Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Politics in Sri Lanka,
New Delhi: Penguin Books India.
De Silva, Mervyn (1967) ‘1956: the cultural revolution that shook the Left’, Ceylon
Observer Magazine Edition, 16 May.
Digby, William (1877) ‘The Eurasians as leaven in India and Ceylon’, Calcutta Review,
64: 180–208.
Digby, William (1879) Forty Years of Official and Unofficial Life in an Oriental Crown
Colony, Being the Life of Sir Richard F. Morgan, Madras: Higginbotham.
Foenander, S. P. (1924) Sixty Years of Ceylon Cricket, Colombo: Ceylon Advertising &
General Publicity Co.
Gunasekara, C. H. (n.d.) ‘My cricket in England during the early twentieth century’, in
M. Roberts (ed.) Essaying Cricket, Colombo: forthcoming.
Gunasekara, Channa H (n.d. [1996]) The Willow Quartette, Colombo: Sumathi Publishers.
Hoole, Rajan (2001) Sri Lanka: The Arrogance of Power. Myths, Decadence and Murder,
Colombo: Wasala Publications for the UTHR.
Jayawardena, V. K. (1972) The Rise of the Labor Movement in Ceylon, Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press.
Levine, Emma (1996) Cricket: A Kind of Pilgrimage, Hong Kong: Local Colour.
Mandle, W. F. (1973) “Games people played: cricket and football in England and Victoria
in the late nineteenth century’, Historical Studies (Australia) 15: 511–35.
Mangan, J. A. (1981) Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Narayan Swamy, M. R. (1994) Tigers of Sri Lanka, Delhi: Konark.
Narayan Swamy, M. R. (2003) Inside an Elusive Mind. Prabhakaran, Colombo: Vijitha Yapa
Publications.
Nesiah, Devanesan (2001) ‘The claim of self-determination: a Sri Lankan Tamil
perspective’, Contemporary South Asia 10: 55–71.
Nicholas, Mark (1996) ‘Australian downfall plotted by one of its own’, Daily Telegraph, 18
March, p. S14.
Perera, S. S. (1999) The Janashakthi Book of Cricket, 1832–1996, Colombo: Janashakthi
Insurance.
Pieris, Denzil (1958) 1956 and After, Colombo: Associated Newspapers of Ceylon.
Roberts, Michael (1985) ‘Ethnicity in riposte at a cricket match: the past for the present’,
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 27: 401–29.
158 Michael Roberts
Roberts, Michael (1998a) ‘Fundamentalism in cricket: crucifying Muralitharan’, in
Michael Roberts and Alfred James, Crosscurrents: Sri Lanka and Australia at Cricket,
Sydney: Walla Walla Press.
Roberts, Michael (1998b) ‘Avoiding Lanka: Australia and the World Cup’, in Michael
Roberts and Alfred James, Crosscurrents: Sri Lanka and Australia at Cricket, Sydney:
Walla Walla Press.
Roberts, Michael (1998c) ‘The World Cup on field and newsprint’, in Michael Roberts
and Alfred James, Crosscurrents: Sri Lanka and Australia at Cricket, Sydney: Walla
Walla Press.
Roberts, Michael (1999) ‘Seaming turfs: the lottery of the World Cup’, Lanka Monthly
Digest, World Cup Supplement, May, pp. 17–18.
Roberts, Michael (2002a) ‘Bomb blasts and cricket’, Sunday Observer (Sri Lanka), 26 May
2002.
Roberts, Michael (2002b) ‘Choosing our cricketers: the 1996 syndrome’, The Wicket.com
and www.ozlanka.com.
Roberts, Michael (2002c) ‘Await embarrassment? Sri Lankan cricketers in Australia’,
www.ozlanka.com, 13 December.
Roberts, Michael (2002d) ‘ODI teams. Messy selections’, www.ozlanka.com, 21 December.
Roberts, Michael (2003) ‘Shortcomings in Sri Lanka’s team at stage one, World Cup’,
March, Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications.
Roberts, Michael, Ismeth Raheem and Percy Colin-Thomé (1989) People Inbetween,
vol. 1, The Burghers and the Middle Class in the Transformations within Sri Lanka,
1790s–1960s, Ratmalana: Sarvodaya Book Publishing.
Sobers, Gary (2002) My Autobiography, with Bob Harris, London: Headline.
Wijesinghe, Mahinda (2004) ‘The longest uninterrupted match in the world’, Sunday
Leader (Sri Lanka), 8 February.
Wilson, A. J. (2000) Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism: Its Origins and Development in the 19th
and 20th Centuries, London: Hurst.
8 One eye on the ball, one eye on
the world
Cricket, West Indian nationalism
and the spirit of C. L. R. James
Tim Hector; compiled and with editorial
commentary by Stephen Wagg

Editor’s foreword
I began putting this book together in the spring of 2001. Tim Hector was one of
the last authors to be recruited and I felt quietly proud when he came to the
telephone, somewhere on the island of Antigua, and said that he’d write the
chapter on West Indies cricket.
Tim Hector was widely, and rightly, regarded in the Caribbean as the inheritor
of the intellectual and political mantle of C. L. R. James. Like James, Hector was
a Marxist and polymath who wrote copiously about politics, culture, literature,
art and cricket. He also edited the Outlet newspaper on Antigua and led the
radical opposition to the Bird family dynasty that has governed the island since
independence.
After his initial acceptance I was unable to contact Tim Hector again. This
was principally because he was undergoing open heart surgery in the United
States. Sadly, he died in November 2002 (Stewart and Chamberlain, 2002). Later
I resolved, with the approval of his family and executors, to compose a chapter
from his own writings. To do this I have culled a good deal of material from Tim’s
website, Fan the Flame. Most of what follows appeared on that site between 2000
and 2002.
The chapter is therefore is expressed largely in Tim Hector’s words, but I have
selected the words, configured them and linked them with editorial commentary,
so ultimate responsibility for this essay is, effectively, mine.

The house still stands with its bird’s eye view of the world in miniature,
in Tunapuna, which allowed C. L. R. James to keep his eye both on the ball
and on the world, at one and the same time.
(Tim Hector, 2001)

Introduction
Tim Hector wrote copiously on cricket and West Indian nationalism and he
always placed Caribbean cricket culture in the context of imperial settlement and
160 Tim Hector with Stephen Wagg
of the racialised oppression that the British Empire brought with it. He wrote in
April 2000:

The myth that the English planters and merchants brought cricket with
them as part of their colonising baggage should now be laid to rest. The
culture they brought, in these small islands, where they were very few in
number, was the culture of terror. The terror of a terrified minority faced with
an overwhelming majority, not as human beings, but as fearful even fright-
ening property, listed along with the mules, horses and asses in the planter/
merchant inventories. . . . Cricket came not by way of the planters. But by
way of the English military which sought to repel Napoleon’s conquering
forces in these islands. These English soldiers, wrote the very fine historian
Professor Hilary Beckles ‘entertained themselves with bats and leather
balls within garrisons while taking respite from bowling cannon balls at
the French’. When the colonial wars of conquest ended it was replaced, so to
speak, by contests off the field of play between the English merchants and
planters and their white employees, and their white military protectors.
(‘The OECS in time, space and sports’, FtF 21 April 2000: p. 2)

In the first of his two-volume history of West Indian cricket, Beckles talks of
the emergence of black cricketers in the Caribbean of the nineteenth century; this
he calls ‘a popular cultural transracial expression’.

The desire of coloured and black communities to play cricket their own way
seemed to have grown in direct proportion to the white elite’s determination
to establish it as the exclusive sport of the propertied, the educated and the
‘well bred’.
(1998a: 4)

Hector, like his mentor C. L. R. James, always saw this development as a gesture
of self-emancipation in a context broader than the Caribbean or the British
Empire. It was, for him, an expression of Pan-Africanism. ‘Cricket and Pan-
Africanism met overtly’, he observed in 1998, ‘in the 1895 English tour of the
West Indies under Slade Lucas.’ This stimulated the work of Marcus Garvey,
‘who followed cricket throughout his life’ and ‘must have had no small effect on
C. L. R. James, then 22, who was to write one of the great anticolonial tracts, The
Case for West Indian Self-Government in 1932. . . . The same C. L. R. James was to
write the first History of the Pan African Revolt in 1934’ (Hector 1998: 49–50). This
perspective caused Hector later to reflect on the whole relationship between sport
and black people:

[Both] colonialism and racism deny the humanity of black people. Therefore
through sports black people assert that: To win is to be human.
In other words, the official view, widely accepted that black people see
sports as a vehicle, practically their only vehicle to fame and fortune, I did
 West Indian nationalism and C. L. R. James 161
and do not accept. On the contrary, a more plausible view was that since we
were losers, and therefore given to the blues and the consequent sorrows of
the spirituals, sports offered the avenue, perhaps the only clear avenue, to
assert a new style different from the established style in the first place. And
in the second stage, arising out of the first, not only a new style, a black style,
but to win in black style, as opposed to the oppressor’s style, which was and
is hegemonic, is to be human.
(‘Why do blacks big-up in sports at this point in time?’,
FtF 28 August 1998: 1)

Sport, in other words, was a means to a positive self-identity for black people;
it was ‘self-humanising’, as Hector saw it. And Hector never lost sight of the
achievement of West Indian cricketers, especially in the second half of the
twentieth century. Then, for a 15-year period (1980–95), a succession of teams
from these small and economically undeveloped islands became acknowledged as
the world’s finest exponents of the formerly imperial game. Hector was keen to
remind his readers of this when, during the late 1990s, Caribbean cricket culture
became beset by low morale and public recrimination among players, officials and
commentators:

Unprecedented is this fact in world sport. No other people for so long –

a decade and a half – so completely dominated an international sport.
Especially when it is understood that this dominance, this excellence, was
produced based on a small, a tiny, a minuscule population of 5 million souls.
The smallest cricketing nation in the world, was the greatest!
In the light of that all-important and radiant fact, no one, just no one, and
no circumstances, however dire, not even 10 consecutive brownwashes, or
whitewashes, could ever get me to berate a West Indian cricket team. Never
happen.
(‘Lara, the captaincy and West Indies cricket’),
FtF, 16 January 1998, pp. 2–3)

Elsewhere, Hector proudly contrasted the success of West Indies cricket, which
‘represents the genius of the West Indian people’, with the minute villages that
spawned some of its leading players:

No cricketer from any other country has come from a village as poor
as Curtley Ambrose’s Swetes, or Stuart Williams’ Gingerland, or Richie
Richardson’s Five Islands, or Chanderpaul’s one-phone-village in Guyana.
Yet against all odds, these cricketers make it up, and over, from under. Not
just on the national stage, but on the world stage.
(‘Cricket is More Than Meets the Eye’, FtF, 20 February 1998: 4)

The path towards this historic cultural achievement was, as Hector always
recognised, paved with heroism. In this he liked to cite not only the great West
162 Tim Hector with Stephen Wagg
Indian Test players, but pioneers such as ‘Sir’ Sidney Walling, whose early exploits
made later triumphs possible. Hector lovingly recounts the story of how in 1920,
at the age of 13, Walling used his only white shirt and trousers to play cricket for
Antigua Grammar School. In doing so, he defied his devout mother, who had
decreed that these clothes were for church on Sunday. She flogged him for this
transgression, but supported his cricket career thereafter. Sidney Walling went
on to become the first black man to captain a West Indian territorial team when
he was appointed to lead the Antigua side in 1934. Walling (who was also made
Post Master General in 1953) was thus, as Hector pointed out, one of the first to
challenge, through cricket, Kipling’s notion that men such as he came from ‘sullen
peoples / Half-devil and half child’ (‘“Sir” Sidney Walling – the Quintessential
Antiguan. Part 1’, FtF, 5 September 1997). (The first black West Indian cricket
captains were, as Hector later pointed out, selected on the smaller islands, such as
the Leewards and the Windwards – Hector, 1998: 54.)

Those two little pals of mine: cricket and the struggle for
Caribbean nationhood
In 2000, Hector summarised the progress toward black captaincy and political
emancipation as follows:

By 1842, not ten years after the abolition of slavery, the Trinidad Cricket
Club was established. By 1891 there was an intercolonial tournament
between Barbados, Jamaica and British Guiana, now Guyana. By 1897 a team
of nine black men and two white men represented Antigua against MCC.
The whites, small in number in the Leewards, were declining cricket-wise,
though not in the economy, and blacks were taking over in cricket, in
Antigua, even before the 20th century!
From the very beginning cricket in the West Indies exposed with near
exactitude the social relations of the islands. Originally the whites, the
owners, ‘the gentlemen,’ batted. The black plebeians were at first bowlers,
ground attendants, who bowled often without shoes, let alone boots. Later
the brown skin or black middle class produced a few good batsmen who
challenged the English planter/merchant class and toppled them from their
batting pedestal.
CLR, as always, and undoubtedly the finest sociologist of cricket, expresses
the social development with astonishing fidelity. CLR wrote:

Between 1900 and 1939 the development of West Indian society

improved the status and conditions of the coloured middle class with
effective organisation of cricket as a national expression. In addition
to clubs, exclusively white [Antigua Cricket Club (ACC) in Antigua,
Queens Park in Trinidad, Pickwick in Barbados, and so on] with perhaps
a few coloured men of distinction the brown skinned middle class
also formed their own clubs [St John’s in Antigua, Maple in Trinidad,
 West Indian nationalism and C. L. R. James 163
Spartan in Barbados, etc.]. So did the black middle class. In time the
black plebeians also formed their own clubs [Rising Sun and Rivals in
Antigua, Shannon and Stingo in Trinidad, and Empire in Barbados, with
the Barbados Cricket League (BCL) completing the picture]. These
divisions (not always in every island iron-clad) were not only under-
stood but also accepted by players and populations alike. All these clubs
played in club competitions and not infrequently a white member of the
Legislative Council or President of the Chamber of Commerce . . .
would be playing amiably for his club against another most of whose
members were black porters, messengers or other similar social types.
Cricket was therefore a means of national consolidation. In societies
very conscious of class and social differentiation, a heritage of slavery, it
provided a common meeting ground of all classes without coercion or
exhortation from above.

And, continued CLR James, ‘Though for a long time in the West Indies the
value of the services and the authority of [white] men like H.B.G. Austin was
unquestioned, cricket was a field where the social passions of the colonials,
suppressed politically, found vigorous if diluted expression.
There are few passages in West Indies history, which so concisely and so
precisely sum up the movement and development of our sojourn in time and
place under the stars.
(‘Will we continue to be annihilated and humiliated?’,
FtF, 1 December 2000, pp. 2–3)

Thus, Caribbean cricket, like cricket for long periods back in England, was a
social theatre in which the classes mixed in comparatively relaxed circumstances.
Since this meant mingling of the ‘races’ also, it was possible in West Indian cricket
for black expertise to be pitted against white. Cricket became linked to notions
of black struggle in the 1930s. Cricketers such as Learie Constantine began to
question white leadership of the national team (Beckles 1998a: 52–6) and cricket,
along with strikes and politically triggered disturbances, became part of what Tim
Hector identifies as a ‘[n]ationalist upsurge’ and a ‘revolution from below’ during
1937–8 (1998: 53).
After the Second World War, cricket helped to spur the final push for
independence in the Caribbean territories and to strengthen support for some
kind of confederation, under the banner of West Indian nationalism, of these
territories once independent. A milestone, in this regard, was the West Indies’
first Test victory on English soil, at Lord’s in 1950, and their subsequent winning
of the series of that year. As Hector recognised over fifty years later:

[T]his cricket in 1950 was a social metaphor for political history. In 1948,
West Indian leaders, ‘convinced that each separate territory was not a viable
economic entity’ met at Montego Bay to decolonise the English-speaking
Caribbean by uniting in a Federation. Nothing else would do for these
164 Tim Hector with Stephen Wagg
separately economically non-viable territories. They were prepared to get
rid of the old colonial masters. The West Indies, in a manner of speaking,
being the only place in world history created by genocide and by colonialism,
were rejecting both and affirming its own authenticity. The majority of the
West Indian population, African and Indian, had no previous or indepen-
dent history in these islands. Colonialism created us. Now in 1948 we would
venture forth as a Federation of islands, rather than be deranged by foaming
channels. So in 1948, after the historic upheavals by the mass of the popu-
lation against colonial rule in 1938, the West Indian leaders met to create
a new nation out of former slave colonies. Nothing of the like had ever
happened in the world before, save in Haiti in 1804 where slaves declared the
first independent Black Republic in History, and the United States and
France in particular systemically reduced Haiti to penury, because it dared to
be black, proud and free.
It follows logically that the West Indian team victory in England in
1950 according to the remarkable Michael Manley in his History of West
Indies Cricket [(Manley 1988)] was more than a sporting success. It was the
proof that a people was coming of age. They had bested the masters at their
own game on their own home turf. They had done so with good nature, with
style, often with humour, but with conclusive effectiveness. Rae, Stollmeyer,
Worrell, Weekes, Walcott had made hundreds to the delight of thousands
and to establish the foundations upon which victory was to rest. The victory
itself was produced by ‘those two little pals of mine’, Ramadhin and
Valentine.
Indian and African spinners were ‘pals’ not only for Lord Kitchener [a well-
known calypso singer] but for all the English-speaking Caribbean.
I beg to note too that an Afro Indian spin pair had spun West Indies to an
historic victory ‘over the masters at their own game on their home turf.’ Afro-
Indian unity as a metaphor in cricket was vital to West Indian success in
politics and in particular Federation. Cricket had shown the way.
(‘More than talent is required’, FtF, 10 May 2002, pp. 2–3)

Hector had in 1997 paid particular tribute to Ramadhin and Valentine. Drawing
on the work of American academic Michael Eric Dyson (Dyson, 1993) he
reflected:

Dyson argues most credibly, that the nature of oppression of blacks in the
United States produced in ‘African-American cultural practice the ability
to flout widely understood boundaries through mesmerisation and alchemy,
a subversion of common perceptions of the culturally or physically possi-
ble, through the creative and deceptive manipulation of appearance.’ The
important thing was for blacks to go beyond the established limits.
I could and do argue here that Ramadhin applied the same ‘mesmerisation
and alchemy’ to his bowling, which made it impossible for Englishmen to
‘pick’ him. It seemed as if, by mesmerisation and alchemy, Ramadhin bowled
 West Indian nationalism and C. L. R. James 165
the off-break and the leg-break with the same action. But, and this is crucial,
the sub-soil, the cultural unconscious, so to speak, from which Ramadhin
came, East Indian indenture, was essentially different from that of Afro-
Americans. Simultaneously, Valentine, had developed orthodoxy to its
Zenith.
(‘How does Michael fly?’, FtF, 21 March 1997, pp. 2–3)

The West Indies’ historic victory had been achieved, however, under a white
captain – the Barbadian John Goddard. As support both for independence and for
the appointment of a black captain grew, the West Indies cricket authorities stood
firm:

The West Indies Cricket Board of Control, then anti-nationalist and repre-
senting the powerful planter-merchant class, appointed two tour managers,
N. Pierce and Cecil de Caires, each with equal authority for the 1957 tour of
England. It was a management recipe for friction and disaster.
Then sticking to the formula of the white captain, since according to the
logic of the rulers, whiteness alone could lead, John Goddard who had not
played against England in 1954 at home, nor Australia in 1954–55 at home,
was brought back as player-manager for the first West Indies tour to New
Zealand in 1955–56, and re-appointed captain in 1957 at age 38. Worrell
who was vice captain against Australia in 1955–56 was relegated to player in
1957. These shenanigans, all performed in the unstated service of racism, no
doubt had its effect in the rout of the West Indies in 1957 in England.
(‘It is the West Indies that is in peril, NOT West Indies cricket’,
FtF, 12 December 1997, pp. 2–3)

West Indies lost to England three times in their tour there of 1957, having also
lost in Australia in 1953 and 1954–5.
The first black man to captain West Indies was Frank Worrell. Worrell, a
middle-class Barbadian and graduate of the University of West Indies, had already
captained a Commonwealth side in India during the winter of 1951–2 and been
vice-captain of the national side. Hector reflected later that

a tremendous campaign led by C.L.R. James and in which Worrell himself

participated, so much so, that he was referred to as a ‘Cricket Bolshevik,’
toppled the white leadership in West Indies cricket. This overt racism in
West Indies cricket crashed like Stalin’s statue in Budapest had done just
before. With Worrell’s ascent to the captaincy West Indies cricket appeared
in its own true colours, shorn of racism for the very first time.
(‘Cricket is more than meets the eye’, FtF, 20 February 1998, p. 2)

But Hector was careful to look beyond ‘race’ when appraising the significance
of this event. Worrell, he suggested, brought discipline and sound strategic
thinking:
166 Tim Hector with Stephen Wagg
In that independent style, West Indian batsmen often played with dash and
panache. The idea of strokeless West Indian batsmen seemed a contradiction
in terms, and a definite affront to our own independent style. Sometimes we
were cavalier in extremis.
And then came 1960, the first Black captain was appointed and Worrell
changed all that. The cavalier was replaced by the consistent, without any
loss in the desire to put opposing bowlers to the sword. Gone was the cavalier
individualist approach. But the panache remained. Sobers and Kanhai
embodied what can really be termed the satyric passion for the expression of
the natural man, bursting through the restraints of disciplined necessity. Both
Sobers and Kanhai showed the creativity of the great Jazz musicians in their
marvellous improvisations, which improvs in Jazz were the innovation in 20th
century music. European classical music was all disciplined necessity though
tinged with romanticism.
(‘Will we continue to be annihilated and humiliated?’,
FtF, 1 December 2000, pp. 1–2)

This strategic awareness was often lost on (albeit sympathetic) observers,

and Hector gently rebuked the (white) English cricket writer Scyld Berry on this
score:

[I]t is passing strange that whenever black men penetrate some field,
overcoming racism, or white supremacy, always it is said we bring ‘light,
excitement and energy,’ never intelligence and knowledge. I want to suggest
to you, dear reader, that it is a habit of mind, a mind-set, a way of seeing the
world, fostered by the Welfare State and before that, the imperial state. The
same was said of the Brazilians in football. It is a mind set. A setting of the
mind which states that one race, and only one, possesses a monopoly of
intelligence and expertise.
However, when the white captain in cricket was firmly in place, West
Indians did not and do not like to admit that racism existed and still
dominates their life. Only CLR James, Learie Constantine and Worrell had
the courage to speak out about it. West Indians do not like to deal with the
racism which shaped their historical life, and still determines it.
(‘Cricket is more than meets the eye’,
FtF, 20 February 1998, pp. 2–3)

Worrell, Garfield Sobers (a working-class black Barbadian and virtuoso cricketer),

Rohan Kanhai (a Guyanese batsman of Indian descent) and others effectively laid
the foundation for the prolonged period of West Indies dominance of world
cricket from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. This dominance, as Hector always
argued, had huge political significance in the Caribbean, and beyond.
 West Indian nationalism and C. L. R. James 167
High tide: cricket, West Indian nationalism and the black
diaspora
First and foremost, successive generations of West Indian cricketers were nation-
alists who saw the West Indies team as a flagship for independence and nascent
nationhood. For Tim Hector, and others in the vanguard of this movement, it
therefore carried the hopes of many for a successful federation of Caribbean
nations after independence. The West Indies Federation, which briefly united ten
island territories in the English-speaking Caribbean, lasted only from 1958 and
1962 and did not, in any event, grant full internal self-government. Although
supported by the British government (on the grounds that it would make for
administrative efficiency and economic strength) and by Caribbean labour unions
(who thought it would speed the arrival of self-rule), federation had been opposed,
historically, by the white planter class on each island. It broke up largely because
the governments of its two biggest constituent islands – Jamaica and Trinidad –
judged that they would be more prosperous by seceding (Rogozinski 2000: 321–3).
Looking back, forty years on, spokespeople for the Caribbean left, such as Tim
Hector, tended to regard the great West Indians sides of the 1970s and 1980s as
the only lasting expression of federation:

It took Sobers’ incredible all-round abilities, Worrell’s unequalled leadership,

Andy Roberts’ scientific method, Holding’s poetry in motion, the wizardry of
Lance Gibbs and Malcolm Marshall’s pyro-technics to establish the West
Indian personality in the international arena free of past encumbrances. Free
at last! In a Federal State, created by all three races namely, African, Indian
and European, in cricket, though not in economics and politics.
(‘How does Michael fly?’, FtF, 21 March 1997, p. 5)

‘Our politics,’ Hector wrote on another occasion, ‘pales into insignificance against
our cricket. Our economics fares even worse. In science and technology we have
done little of note. In literature and music alone, do we have achievements
matching our cricketers’ (‘It is the West Indies that is in peril’, FtF, 12 December
1997, p. 1).
Among all the West Indian cricket heroes thrown up by this period of
dominance, Hector singled out the Antiguan Vivian Richards, who captained
the side throughout the 1980s. Here Hector addressed Hilary Beckles’ well-known
division of West Indian cricket into three paradigms. Beckles has suggested that
the history of West Indian cricket divides roughly into three epochs, each seen
as a paradigm because it carried with it a specific set of assumptions. These three
periods were defined, respectively, by colonialism, nationalism and globalisation
(see particularly Beckles 1998b: 1–30). Hector differed politely with Beckles over
Richards. Beckles suggested that Richards typified the second, nationalist
paradigm. Hector perceived a greater political significance in his fellow Antiguan.
Viv, he argued, straddled all three paradigms. He set out his case in March
1998:
168 Tim Hector with Stephen Wagg
Says Beckles in his illuminating and ground-breaking piece.

Richards, then, was undoubtedly a highly developed product of the

second paradigm in West Indies cricket. The first paradigm was that
of the nineteenth century in which cricket was the instrument of
colonial exclusion, used by white elite society to distance itself from the
black majority. By the 1930’s this model was under attack and the rise
of the three W’s, Weekes, Worrell, Walcott, against the background of
Learie Constantine and George Headley signalled the rise of the second
paradigm. During the 1950’s and 60s cricket became hinged to the
process of anti-colonial reforms and the movement to independence.
The political project – rise of nation states and cricket as a symbol of
West Indian liberation – grew hand in hand and together accounted for
the ideological positions taken by Viv on a number of issues.

This is an amazing historical schema. And like all philosophical schemas it

is what it yields that matters. And I am going to surprise you. Marvellous as
Hilary Beckles is here, I beg to disagree.
Viv undoubtedly represents the first paradigm, as well as the second, and
in my view, the third unstated by Beckles.
Viv was a representative of the first paradigm, in that he was the embodi-
ment of Leewards exclusion from first class cricket and Test cricket. His was
the passion of the excluded announcing himself on the world stage, at long
last, after long and merciless exclusion. If size, smallness of size was a factor
in that exclusion, then the grandeur of his efforts, would lay that to rest, with
Andy Roberts’ feats having served as fore runner.
Viv represented the second paradigm. The anti-colonial paradigm.
He himself said the issue ‘was quite central for me, coming as I do from the
West Indies at the end of colonialism. I believe very strongly in the black
man asserting himself in this world.’ If this is not Aimé Cesairé’s negritude,
the overcoming of inferiority, the overcoming of colonial subordination,
the assertion of our natural and acquired abilities, without apology to those
who had a vested interest in our continued marginalisation and irrelevance,
except as cheap labour in their foreignising and globalising schemes, then
negritude has no meaning.
And now to the third paradigm. Viv was not a Rastafarian, but he wore
his Rastafarian sweat band on all the Test grounds of the world as a state-
ment. He himself said that ‘It was perfectly natural for me to identify, for
example, with the Black Power Movement in America, and to a certain
extent with the Rastafarians. I cannot say that I ever reconciled myself totally
to Rastafarianism.’
The point was and is, that Viv saw the Rastafarians as downtrodden
sufferers, who had dared to be different, in that they broke sharply with
English colonial mores, which had at first been enforced, and then adopted
in the Commonwealth Caribbean. As such, the Rastas human rights were
 West Indian nationalism and C. L. R. James 169
constantly violated, with the silent approval of the silent majority. Viv could
not abide that.
Viv knew that the Caribbean could not be the wealthiest country in
the world. Nor the most dominant. It could not encircle the world with
military bases and weapons of mass destruction. We could not be more than
bit players in modern world trade. But in Antigua, there had emerged in Viv’s
youth and maturation, the third paradigm, a Movement, of which his eldest
brother Donald ‘Donnymitch’ Richards was a founder. This Movement held
that we could, with a new system of social ownership and control, become a
model to the world, in terms of human development, in a society with the
most advanced Human Rights, not as abstract declaration of the Rights of
Man where some were more equal than others. But as concrete manifestation,
where every race and class finds an equal place, freed from racial and class
oppression. That position went well beyond American Black Power. It
manifested itself, though originating in Antigua, in the Grenada Revolution
only to be destroyed by Old World Stalinism.
Viv in 1993, was to put himself on the line, when he observed in Antigua,
the police firing tear-gas rockets into an unarmed crowd, on what became
known here as Terror Thursday. He at once joined the protesters, bringing
his enormous prestige to bear, in defence of human rights. And too, against
those who felt that power and authority conferred on them the right to
suppress and repress, to sedate and humiliate. All that repressed and humil-
iated was Viv’s mortal enemy. He wanted a New World in the new world,
freed from governor and governed, but one in which the people in council
owned and controlled a region.
It was the same spirit which manifested itself in Viv’s duels with
[Australian fast bowlers] Lillee, Thompson and Pascoe; [Indian bowlers] Bedi,
Venkat and Chandra; [English bowlers] Willis, Old and Underwood,
[Pakistani bowlers] Imran Khan or Abdul Qadir. It was old, it was new.
It cannot be separated from the old colonial exclusion which led to the
Leewards exclusion. It cannot be separated from the naïve nationalism,
which said put the colonialists out, run up a flag, and sing the anthem, in
the same old, same old order, and all will be well, if not swell. It cannot be
separated from the new regionalism, which saw new forms of social ownership
and economic organisation — hence the improvisation or ‘a hitting across
the line’ in Viv’s batting – as the key to a regional society of the most
advanced Human Rights, freed from racial oppression and social humiliation,
with the people in council, going well beyond ancient Greek democracy.
That is the Third paradigm, laid down by the Movement of which his brother
was a founder like this writer.
Viv bristles at any form of insularity. . . . As the great artist he embodied
and personified the new in the womb of the old. The great artist, which any
super batsman is, and which he undoubtedly was, represents both the past and
present in a new future.
(‘The spirit of excellence’, FtF, 20 March 1998, pp. 3–4)
170 Tim Hector with Stephen Wagg
This crystallises Hector’s view of the James legacy. The federation had foundered
and the nationalist dream had lived on principally through cricket. But in their
cricket, Caribbean people had shown each other, and the expropriated black
people of the world, the best of what they could do. The team had been a
continuing metaphor for the West Indian nation and, at its zenith, it had been
led by a proud black man from the periphery even of Caribbean society (the
marginal island of Antigua). This man mastered the white man’s game while
playing it his own way and he enjoined all black people to do likewise. In doing
so he straddled the worlds of colonial subjection, nationalist struggle and the
striving of small countries in the bleak, deregulated global marketplace. Beckles,
whose intellectual differences with Hector on matters of West Indian cricket
seldom seemed to be substantial, wrote later:

Caribbean social scientists are in general agreement on one point at least.

That the excellence achieved in the region’s cricket culture, masterfully
demonstrated in the two decades that came crashing down in 1995, repre-
sents one of the finest expressions of efficient human resources mobilisation
since the fulfilment of the national independence agenda.
(1999: 81)

After the fall: the crisis in West Indian cricket

Hector, like Beckles and others, sought to explain and to address the decline in
the team’s fortunes and, with it, the apparent unstiffening of the sinews of West
Indian cricket nationalism:
First, some history was needed, to provide perspective. There had, after all, been
previous occasions when darkness had followed the dawn. For example, despite
their triumph in England in 1950, the West Indies went on to incur a series of
heavy defeats during that decade. During this period, Hector recalled, the team
‘were as soft as pap’ (‘It is the West Indies that is in peril . . .’, FtF, 12 December
1997, p. 3).
Nor was Hector sympathetic to the argument, canvassed in several quarters,
that cricket had been superseded by basketball as the Caribbean’s favourite sport.
Cricket would remain a West Indian thing. Once again he cited history in support
of his argument:

Cricket and cricket alone provided the medium in popular sports, through
which we could take an English institution, and transform it, re-create it in
our own image and likeness and stamp our personality on it, liberating our-
selves from impositions which the heavy weight of centuries had re-inforced
with the limitation of spirit, vision and self-respect . . .
. . . It is for that reason that I am convinced that no amount of basketball
can dethrone cricket. A mode of expression, of national expression, is not
created by chance or by whim. It is the product of history and historic
striving, conscious and unconscious. Michael Jordan ‘flies’, Vivi Richards
 West Indian nationalism and C. L. R. James 171
‘hits across the line’, each expressing his particular genius, in their own
specific mode of national expression. Cricket is ours, not basketball.
Our participation in basketball is, in the main, a celebration of the new
universality created by Michael Jordan – the first truly global sportsman.
(‘How does Michael fly?’, FtF, 21 March 1997, p. 5)

But there were clear and acknowledged difficulties. The West Indies lost
heavily to Australia at Sabina Park in Jamaica in 1995 (when West Indies were
bowled out for 51). They lost to Kenya, a country with negligible cricket pedigree,
the following year. The successor to Richards as team captain, Richie Richardson,
had been scapegoated and Brian Lara, the most talented Caribbean cricketer
of the new era, was frequently at odds both with his teammates and with the
West Indian cricket authorities. Hector saw the problems but was reluctant to
lay responsibility for them at the door of individuals. ‘There is a West Indian
tendency’, he suggested in January 1998, ‘to level downwards. A crab-in-the-barrel
syndrome, bred and fostered by plantation slavery and plantation colonialism,
which mutilates, militantly, against any and every exceptional achiever, especially
when born to the humble’ (‘Lara, the captaincy and West Indies cricket’, FtF,
16 January 1998, p. 5).
Besides, for Hector, the root of the present difficulties lay primarily in the
material circumstances of the Caribbean islands in the colonial and postcolonial
eras. These circumstances must be confronted.

Our economies are externally controlled, managed and directed be it in

oil, natural gas, bananas, bauxite, sugar or tourism. The same people do not
campaign against that external control. So it is. So it was. So it has been. So
it must not always be. Our cricket too, has been externally dependent. That
is a shocker I suppose. The West Indies cannot support its own cricketers,
professionally. That puts it baldly and clearly. Our cricketers are dependent
on English Leagues, or English County Cricket, and for a time, Packer, to
survive professionally. Even now after oil booms, bauxite booms, tourism
booms, we cannot find a sponsor for our own first class domestic competition!
A game, which encapsulated a way of life, is withering on the vine. Even
in the age of Television financial windfalls for cricket, we see less and less
cricket, on television, and more and more U.S. basketball and even U.S.
Football, and by the time we get to the Superbowl I suspect more interest will
be generated in that, than even Test Cricket.
That in itself speaks volumes. We are more interested in the activities of
the alien Other than in our own. That cannot be disputed. A population is
being made to accept that the ways and sports of the Other are far more
important than their Ways and their Sports. A people are being [led] down a
blind alley by spineless leaders.
I want to be more emphatic. In 32 weeks in Bangladesh of telecast time
8 hours were devoted to cricket. In South Africa over the same 32 weeks,
there were 23 hours of major cricket. Over the same period in Jamaica, in
172 Tim Hector with Stephen Wagg
Trinidad & Tobago along with Barbados there were 21⁄2 hours, of live cricket,
combined. No one bothered with Antigua & Barbuda. That is accepted as
the American outpost.
I hope you are getting the point. Traditionally we have a lot of interest in
cricket. Actually that interest is being undermined systematically as well as
constantly. What is ours, is not on our TV. The major means of electronic
communication alienates us further, in an alien controlled society . . .
. . . To be succinct, West Indian Test cricket has been largely, superstruc-
tural. That is not rooted in Shannon, Empire, Spartan, GCC [Georgetown
Cricket Club] in Guyana or Melbourne in Jamaica or Rising Sun in Antigua.
Now we have to put our cricket on a self-sustaining basis, rooted in the Clubs,
with the best games televised across the region, showing the up-and-coming
players. That way, we strike the ultimate blow against our own insularity,
which has been structured, geographically, economically, and not least,
politically, to our external detriment.
And now I end, with the greatest of them all, C.L.R. James, of course.
He wrote in 1966 this: ‘The West Indies Cricket Board of Control has
always been sustained by clubs in each territory which are lineal descendants
of the old aristocratic clubs of the plantocracy and commercial magnates.
Their services in West Indies cricket, all proportions strictly guarded, can
legitimately be compared to that of MCC in Britain.’
That, true then, is no longer true. The plantocrats have gone, and the
new industrial or commercial magnates, mainly American, are least of all
interested in cricket. The cricket clubs then have faltered. And, without
English County cricket, will continue to falter, if Clubs do not become the
nursery of West Indies cricket.
But, the plantocrats have gone, and the new alien magnets are not native,
but globalising Americans.
(ibid. pp. 1, 6–7)

Not that this would be easy. Hector sensed and often identified a demoralisation
in the Caribbean, brought on by the depredations of global trade and financial
bodies. The term ‘structural adjustment’ appears in a dozen or more of his essays
for Fan the Flame. This term is now widely accepted as a euphemism for pro-
grammes, usually framed by the International Monetary Fund, which entail
‘the liberalization of foreign exchange policies, the devaluation of national
currency, anti-inflation programmes based on credit restriction, reduction in state
expenditure, wage controls and the ending of price controls’ (Grugel 1995: 182).
But there was hope.

I should pause here too, to remind that the dominance of West Indies cricket
began in 1977 and precisely the point that Jamaica was structurally adjusted
and put under the thumb of IMF surveillance, or if you prefer external
impositions. Trinidad and Tobago went the way of structural adjustment in
1988, Guyana was next. Barbados followed the same course in 1991.
 West Indian nationalism and C. L. R. James 173
Yet it is precisely at this point 1977 as the West Indies slid into structural
adjustment that the West Indies in the same 1977 became dominant in world
cricket after its 5–1 drubbing at the hand of Australia in 1976.
(‘Crisis in society and cricket –women to the rescue’,
FtF, 25 June 1999, p. 4)

Nevertheless, Hector did not underestimate the impact of these programmes on

West Indian society and thus on its cricket. They had brought, he argued, a
culture of fear:

‘Structural adjustment totally undermined all of our nationalist assumptions,

about ‘we’ being as good as ‘Them’ and therefore holding our own, indepen-
dently, in good times or in bad. It is responsible for the gangster behaviour in
our society at top and bottom. We, at top and bottom, are holding on to
nothing. Everything has been adjusted and undermined. Hence ‘the culture
of fear.’
(‘How can I be insular to say Sir Vivi deserves better?’,
FtF, 10 March 2000, p. 5)

So, structural factors – and, more specifically, the ravages of ‘structural adjustment’
– were the key to the crisis in West Indian cricket. But one individual failing on
the part of the players Hector was not prepared to forgive. In 1998 the West Indies
test players staged a strike and refused to travel for their forthcoming series until
they received more money. These players and their manager, Clive Lloyd, perhaps
the chief architect of the West Indies’ period of dominance, received a stern
rebuke. For a West Indian team to demur on the threshold of its first visit to a
South Africa now under black government was a betrayal:

When Vivian Richards, refused $1 million US to play cricket in apartheid

South Africa, I felt that as the son of poor parents from tiny Antigua
and Barbuda, and a citizen of the Caribbean, Vivian Alexander Richards,
like Anderson Montgomery Roberts before him, had made an imperishable
statement, that not by money alone do people live, but by their faith in
human freedom. Freedom as the free and full development of the human
personality freed from race, class and gender domination. How comes it
now that on the first tour of a West Indian cricket team to a free South
Africa, where the great Nelson Mandela rules, the tour was beginning in
utter disgrace, a wild-cat strike over, not present, but future fees. It seemed to
me that the entire West Indies team, Manager Clive Lloyd, former captain
Courtney Walsh, all lacked a sense of occasion, a sense of history, a sense of
the defining role of cricket in a Caribbean civilisation.’
(‘This cricket fiasco and South Africa’, FtF, 6 November 1998, p. 1)

Few among the leading Caribbean spokespeople would have dissented from this.
But the debate about the way forward, led by Beckles, Hector and others, mostly
174 Tim Hector with Stephen Wagg
assumed that contemporary West Indian cricketers now knew little of the
nationalist tradition, and maybe cared less. Lara, Hooper and the others wanted
the best deal they could get as sportsmen in the global marketplace. Where to go
from here?

The future of West Indies cricket: the appliance of science?

Beckles, among West Indian nationalists, has led the way in trying to reconcile
West Indies cricket culture to the exigencies of the global economy. In this regard,
he has written, there must be better marketing, and full use should be made of the
expertise and facilities of the University of the West Indies. This latter provision
would cover the scientific aspects of the task as well as the political and historical
contextualising of it. Young Caribbean cricketers must be taught the importance
of their own political heritage (see particularly Beckles 1998b). Science – the
application of computer technology, sport psychology, nutritional advice, and so
on – has been an important part of the argument. Beckles calls, for example, for
captains, managers and specialist players to be equipped with databases and for
information technology and data processing to become central to West Indies
cricket preparation. Art, he argues, has been replaced by science in the twenty-
first-century game.
For those of the nationalist/pan-Africanist intellectual tradition, this has not,
ultimately, been an easy circle to square. Could a skill that expressed the virtuosity
of Caribbean – and, by extension, all – black people really be enhanced by
computer programming and the analysis of statistical data? Hector, in essence,
believed that it could: ‘Acquired abilities through the application of science to
West Indies cricket is a vital need’, he wrote in April 1999 (‘Crisis in cricket?
Or crisis in society? Or both?’, FtF, 2 April 1999, p. 4). A few months later he
observed:

Coaches provided by the WICB [West Indies Cricket Board], will work with
coaches in each territory on a uniform approach. The Cricket Committee
supervises this cricket programme, the coaching, the practice sessions, the
preparation of the players in each territory. The science of the game, in which
we are lacking, will be developed. What is required for fitness in cricket, what
is the optimum level of nutrition, how to develop concentration, how to react
and to respond to mental or psychological pressure, and more important how
to apply pressure, how to regain lost form, etc, etc, all this and more will be
worked upon by the West Indies Board Cricket Committee, with a branch in
each territory working with the local Association.
Let me be empirical here. Watching the current rounds of our Busta
Competition, I saw most of the teams still at the old, out-dated level. The
water breaks were bottled water breaks. No player was being supplied with a
nutritious drink to restore lost energy. As energy and oxygen levels sank,
concentration lapsed or collapsed.
(‘Dear Mr President’, FtF, 11 February 2000, p. 3)
 West Indian nationalism and C. L. R. James 175
But science, Hector soon realised, would be no good unless it was allied to the
democratic and civic enthusiasms that had fired James movement for indepen-
dence and nationalism through cricket. Brian Lara, he argued, had had periods of
estrangement from the West Indian side

not because of any personal weakness. But, because neither the working class,
or if you prefer, the lower-middle class into which he was born, nor the
society in general could give him any sense of direction, any sense of purpose.
A purposeless society cannot produce purposeful cricket.
What Sobers, Kanhai, Richards, Kallicharan and Lloyd, Greenidge and
Haynes inherited from the nationalist movement, its sense of commitment
to overcoming our lowly place in cricket and the world of production and
achievement, was undermined and lost as Lara and Hooper succeeded the
past greats. It is not Lara and Hooper’s fault. I repeat, a purposeless, struc-
turally adjusted society, cannot produce purposeful cricketers.
(‘Will we continue to be annihilated . . . ?’, FtF, 1 December 2000, p. 5)

Moreover, when an actual coach – ex-West Indian test cricketer Roger Harper
– delivered his (no doubt, scientifically endowed) report on West Indies’
unsuccessful tour of England in 2000, Hector was scornful. Harper, ‘highly
certificated’ as Hector wrote, ‘and meeting all the academic vanities, which
substitute themselves for real achievement’ (ibid., p. 5) had, in his report,
lamented the lack of grit and determination particularly on the part of his
batsmen. Hector, in his riposte, called for socialism and a return to the spirit of
resistance typified by James and those who, like himself, had carried the torch
thereafter on the various islands:

Harper’s method, alien to the West Indian temper, and independent style
is to ‘graft’, ‘occupy the crease’ and ‘play within our limitations’. This is proof
of our batsmen structurally adjusted. Improvisation, when set, to get on top
of good bowling, is gone, dead and buried.
Fredericks method, like Sobers, like Kanhai, was to fight fire with fire,
to improvise in order to release ‘limitations’ placed on them, and not ‘to
occupy the crease’ to set bowlers. But to occupy, to unsettle bowlers. It is
this reversal of method, this decline and fall, which Harper represents,
though certified. He himself was a grafter, whose bowling action collapsed
without remedy, as Sir Gary Sobers so pointedly reminded. Finally, and a
point which escapes Harper altogether in his ceaseless empiricism, losing
himself in the labyrinth of detail, and therefore seeing all trees and no forest,
is this: A people who have seen all their leaders from William Bramble in
tiny Montserrat to Norman Manley in larger Jamaica opt for some form
of socialism, and then by 1988 all their successors had by osmosis adopted
for neo-liberalism without the people being aware of this sea change,
this absolute betrayal had bothered, bewildered and belittled the people of
the Caribbean while governing meant swaying and ducking, rather than
176 Tim Hector with Stephen Wagg
hooking all the bouncers hurled at the government and people by the First
World; who saw their leaders destroy their best hope, a Caribbean nation,
and then rewarded the very Destroyers with longevity in office; who saw these
very leaders make deals with the racist Klu Klux Klan; saw their leaders
connive to send arms to racist South Africa or the narco-terrorists in the
Medellin Cartel; saw their leaders plunder Bauxite and the wealth of Guyana,
reducing it to a shambles; saw their leaders when ‘money was no object’
and unemployment was still high, propose to spend hundreds of millions
on air-conditioned horse stables; or joined with America to harass their own
Grenada Revolution which overthrew the Gairy–Mongoose-gang democ-
racy; who connived with America and Britain to have Cheddi Jagan freely
and fairly elected removed from power, and then approved the CIA
provoking race riots in Guyana; and then the IMF structurally adjusted the
entire West Indies into the margins, definitely lost the will to struggle, to be
committed to any goal or any new arrangement of society.
How then do we expect our cricket team to struggle when we ourselves
have lost the will to struggle, and seek only to collaborate or to succumb.
Such will be ‘annihilated in humiliation’ to use Coach Harper’s very own apt
determination.
(ibid.: p. 6)

This, then, is James’s, and Hector’s, political legacy. The struggle for the
dignity and self-determination of the people of the English-speaking Caribbean
goes on. Cricket, in the past the principal flagship of this struggle, can again
become a beacon of West Indian nationalism. To do so it must avail itself of all
academic and professional assistance. But the answers cannot lie solely, or even
primarily, in the seminar room or the computer suite. The defining context must,
as always, be political contention – in the parliaments, in the villages and out on
the streets of the Caribbean itself.

The prefacing quotation is taken from ‘CLR James, the Contemporary World
and World Revolution. Part 1’, which was placed on the Fan the Flame website on
12 October 2001. It’s on page 1.

Acknowledgements
I should like to thank the executors and family of Tim Hector, Conrad Luke,
Outlet newspaper, and Jon Gemmell, who commented on the first draft, for help
in the preparation of this chapter.

References
Beckles, Hilary (1998a) The Development of West Indian Cricket, vol. 1, The Age of
Nationalism, Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press; London: Pluto
Press
 West Indian nationalism and C. L. R. James 177
Beckles, Hilary (1998b) The Development of West Indies Cricket, vol. 2, The Age of
Globalization, Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press; London: Pluto
Press.
Beckles, Hilary (1999) ‘The strife of Brian’, in Rob Steen (ed.) The New Ball, vol. 2,
Edinburgh: Mainstream.
Dyson, Michael Eric (1993) Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Grugel, Jean (1995) Politics and Development in the Caribbean Basin: Central America and the
Caribbean in the New World Order, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.
Hector, Tim Fan the Flame website: http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Hector, Tim (1998) ‘Pan-Africanism, West Indies cricket and Viv Richards’, in Hilary
Beckles (ed.) A Spirit of Dominance: Cricket and Nationalism in the West Indies, Kingston,
Jamaica: Canoe Press/University of the West Indies.
Manley, Michael (1988) A History of West Indies Cricket, London: André Deutsch.
Rogozinski, Jan (2000) A Brief History of the Caribbean, New York: Plume Books.
Stewart, Lucretia and Chamberlain, Greg (2002) Tim Hector: Obituary, Guardian
(London), 26 November.
Part III
Cricket in the Old Country
9 Calypso kings, dark destroyers
England–West Indies Test cricket
and the English press, 1950 –1984
Stephen Wagg

The fellows from Brixton will be a help at the Oval . . . that is a home fixture for
us.
(Clive Lloyd, West Indies cricket captain, July 19841)

This chapter is about the ways in which Test cricket between England and West
Indies was represented on the sports, and other, pages of the British press during
the second half of the twentieth century. It is thus inevitably also about the shifts
in the political relationship between Britain and the Caribbean and about the
corresponding ebb and flow of public discourse apparently occasioned by these
shifts. It was conceived and written with three important assumptions in mind.
First, for most British people during this period, cricket and cricketers were very
likely their principal sources of knowledge of the Caribbean: the ‘West Indies’
were, for the most part, a nation only in white flannels, and the main means
of understanding this ‘nation’ and its people was through representations of the
men who wore these flannels and of their activities. Second, the political rela-
tionship between Britain and the peoples of the English-speaking Caribbean
altered radically during the time in question. In 1950, Britain still held colonies
in the Caribbean and welcomed West Indian migrants to the United Kingdom as
bearers of dual nationality. By the 1980s, successive Acts of Parliament had long
since withdrawn this welcome, access to British citizenship had been severely
curtailed, and the presence in British society of Caribbean and Caribbean-
descended people had been widely redefined as baleful (see, for example, Fryer
1984: 373–99; Sivanandan 1982: 101–40). (The notorious ‘Tebbit Test’ of 1990
– see my chapter with Tim Crabbe (Chapter 10) in this book – was just one way
in which this impinged upon, or was played out within, cricket culture.) Third,
for most of the time in question the West Indian team were the undeclared world
champions of the sport of cricket. Various writers (notably Manley 1988; Beckles,
1998; and Hector in Chapter 8 of this book) have noted the paradox (and
the outstanding achievement) of the emergence from these small islands of
a succession of world-class teams during a time of growing postcolonial strife, both
at home, with mounting poverty and inter-island political rivalry, and in the
erstwhile ‘mother’ country.
182 Stephen Wagg
The chapter assesses the extent to which, and the ways in which, these factors
were reflected in reportage of West Indian cricket (chiefly, matches between
England and West Indies) on the pages of the British sports press. While I review
a range of papers in their coverage of the watershed Test at Lord’s in 1950,
I concentrate thereafter principally on The Times, the Daily Express and the Daily
Mail. The Times was chosen because of the popular view (reliable, in my
judgement) that it in part reflects British ruling-class thinking – in this instance,
on sport, wherein cricket is always accorded a high place, and on home and
colonial affairs. The Express and the Mail were also selected for the prime
place that they afforded to cricket and for their anticipation of their assumed
middle-/lower-middle-class suburban readership on matters of ‘race’, ethnicity
and migration. ‘Race’, as Jack Williams has argued, ‘was at the heart of cricket
throughout the twentieth century’ (2001: 1). Here the Express and the Mail might
be expected to be blunt, but nevertheless more nuanced than the British tabloids,
which from the 1960s onwards were in progressively more heated pursuit of a
younger, more working-class and celebrity-oriented audience and were likely to
be less concerned with cricket than with other sports. The coverage of most, but
not all, of the Test series contested by England and West Indies between 1950 and
1984 is considered here.

Friends of mine? Lord’s, 1950

When the West Indies beat England for the first time in a Test match, at Lord’s
cricket ground in June 1950, the islands from which their players had been
recruited were all still colonies within the British Empire. Moreover, the British
government of the time – the Labour administration of Clement Attlee, which
had first gained office on a huge popular mandate in 1945 – was minded that they
should remain so. Indeed, although the Labour Party’s annual conference had in
1942 accepted a ‘Charter of Freedom for Colonial Peoples’ – calling for democracy
in colonial territories, based on indigenous institutions, communal land owner-
ship and the nationalisation of all natural resources – it had the following year
nevertheless adopted a statement drafted by Arthur Creech Jones that ‘for a
considerable time to come these peoples will not be ready for self-government’
(Fieldhouse 1984: 84–5). The Empire had not even been mentioned in Labour’s
manifesto of 1945 and, once in government, Labour ministers remained
convinced that Britain’s continued status as a world power should be bulwarked
by its imperial possessions (Saville 1993: 96–9; Callaghan 1993). Moreover,
the colonies are seen by historians to have subsidised Britain’s comparatively
high standard of living in this immediately post-Second World War period
(Fieldhouse, 1984: 96). While the territories of the West Indies were among those
deemed ‘most ready for self government’ (ibid.: 85), Labour contented itself, in
the Caribbean as elsewhere, with the encouragement of regional groupings – as at
the conference at Montego Bay, Jamaica, in September 1947, chaired by Creech
Jones, by then Colonial Secretary. The Colonial Office was also mindful of
growing opposition to British rule and of the part played in this opposition by
 England–West Indies and the English press 183
emergent trade union movements in the Caribbean. It hoped nevertheless to
encourage ‘responsible’ trade unionism and to ‘contain the demagogues and wild
men’ (Saville 1993: 97).
It is not surprising, then, that West Indies’ massive defeat of England (by 326
runs) at Lord’s in 1950 should be greeted with magnanimity and unthreatened
paternalism on the pages of The Times. West Indies, observed a Times editorial on
30 June, had had their triumphs before, but

yesterday was their finest hour. They have handsomely laid An All England
XI low at Lords. JOHN GODDARD and his men have made a new mark
in cricket history. To win by 326 runs at the headquarters of cricket, in
spite of the brave English recovery led by WASHBROOK on Wednesday,
puts these West Indians for good among the great ones. There have been
giants before in West Indian cricket – GEORGE CHALLENOR, LEARIE
CONSTANTINE and GEORGE HEADLEY, each of them among Wisden’s
best through the ages. This is the first West Indian team to bring the promise
of so many fine cricketers to full fruition.
Only patience and the dourer experience of more sober cricketers have
been lacking before. This time the West Indians mixed the elements right.
Under GODDARD’s long-headed leadership West Indian cricket has come
of age. There will no doubt be a calypso about it all. Perhaps it has already
been composed by the knot of gleeful islanders on the stand behind the sight-
screen, with their cries and calls, their songs and music sounding pleasantly
strange in the Lords hush. It will be sung as a battle-honour wherever West
Indians bat and bowl.
(p. 7)

Fifty or more years on, the subtext to this tribute is clear enough. The West Indies
are imperial children come partially of age. In their cricket they have now wedded
adult sobriety to boyish enthusiasm. The instrument of this marriage has been
John Goddard, the white captain of a largely black team. All this has taken place
within the framework of the imperial family, currently under no apparent threat.
This notion of imperial self-assurance is strengthened on another page (p. 4) of
the same issue, where only fleeting mention is made of the England football team’s
defeat by the United States in the World Cup finals in Brazil: ‘Probably never
before’, writes the Times correspondent, ‘has an England team played so badly.’
E. W. Swanton in the Daily Telegraph expressed a similar magnanimity. ‘There
could be no possible question of the justice of today’s result,’ wrote Swanton after
the Lord’s Test (Daily Telegraph, 30 June 1950, p. 3). Later, reflecting on the final
Test and a series victory for West Indies, Swanton also cautiously endorsed the
more expressive Caribbean way of appreciating cricket:

As at Lords the final scenes were enlivened by the impromptu, spontaneous

rejoicings of the West Indies supporters and again the law brought them
184 Stephen Wagg
sternly to heel. We could well have borne another calypso and a few hand-
springs, for it was a victory handsomely and sportingly earned.
(Daily Telegraph, 17 August 1950, p. 3)

Other newspapers, however, while still generous in their praise of West

Indies cricket, were anxious also to apportion blame to the vanquished and to
raise doubts about the state of the British nation-in-its-sport. The Daily Express
coverage, for example, is neatly weighted in this regard. On 30 June 1950 its front
page carries the unconcealed disgust of ‘Express Staff Reporter’ at England’s
football defeat in Brazil: ‘US footballers – who ever heard of them? – beat England
1–0 in the World Cup series yesterday. It marks the lowest ever for British sport.’
Next to this condemnation is a photograph of a black man in a trilby hat play-
ing his guitar in celebration of the West Indian cricket victory at Lords. The
accompanying text reads, ‘[T]he West Indians had won their first Test match in
England. . . . And when West Indians celebrate they sing and dance. Calypso at
Lords! The Turkey Trot on the hallowed turf! “Outrageous, sir”, said an old
member. “Just outrageous.”’ Here, mindful no doubt of its lower-middle-class
constituency, the paper symbolically plays off one object of suburban resentment
(the sensuous black man) against another (the MCC toff, born to privilege, with
his ‘hallowed turf’ and affronted cry of ‘outrageous’).
Elsewhere in the same edition Pat Marshall pays tribute to Goddard and his
team: ‘And a big hand for those 20 year old spinners Sonny Ramadhin and Alfred
Valentine for capturing 18 England wickets between them. These two must be
ranked as world class’ (p. 6). Two pages earlier, the Express makes a brittle attempt
to have fun with the calypso form. The Opinion column (p. 4) contains this verse,
headed ‘Eclypso’:

The West Indians have beaten England at cricket

And even the English critics can’t put it down to the wicket
Instead they will say that the English team stinks
But maybe the West Indians are better than anyone thinks

This is perhaps a limp and friendly parody of the calypso composed at the game
by Lord Beginner in celebration of ‘those little pals of mine / Ramadhin and
Valentine’ (Phillips and Phillips 1998: 95–103).
During the series, Ramadhin and Valentine bowled 790 out of the 1,115
overs sent down by West Indies and took 59 of the 77 wickets taken. It is possi-
ble to argue that the key role in England’s defeat of the guileful art of spin, as
opposed to the overt physical power of the Caribbean fast bowlers, helped to
minimise any alarm that West Indies victory might raise in the ruling circles of
English cricket. This angle was certainly noted by Alex Bannister in the Daily
Mail. Beneath the headline ‘Nice work, skipper Goddard: BETTER SIDE, AND
NO ARGUMENT’, Bannister observes that the ‘irony of England’s downfall
is that it was not brought about by the much-vaunted speed battery, but by two
20 year old “unknown” spin bowlers’ (30 June, p. 7). In the summer of 1950,
 England–West Indies and the English press 185
generous praise for the West Indies cricket team was the norm on the English
sports pages, but, as I suggested earlier, space was occasionally found for the
attribution of blame and the sounding of national alarm bells. After Lord’s,
Charles Bray in the Daily Herald, alone and obliquely, raises the spectre of class
in the English team, calling for the dismissal of England captain Norman Yardley
(an amateur) and his replacement with his fellow Yorkshireman Len Hutton
(a professional) and only latterly allowing that ‘West Indies deserve the highest
praise for their decisive and magnificent victory’ (30 June 1950, p. 6). And, at
the conclusion of the 1950 series, Frank Rostron in the Daily Express is notice-
ably more concerned with English shortcoming than with Caribbean prowess:
‘England’s cricket reached its nadir yesterday afternoon when West Indies, with
a degree of simplicity bordering on the farcical, took the rubber (the first one they
have won here) by three matches to one’ (17 August 1950, p. 6).
The most enduring press image of this Test series is probably in the Daily Mail
(27 June 1950), which carries on its front page a photograph of West Indies
wicketkeeper Clyde Walcott with a broad smile. The image, with text from
Bannister to the effect that Walcott has ‘the widest grin in cricket’, confirms the
dominant depiction of West Indies as essentially happy-go-lucky characters, with
an attendant band of revelling supporter-minstrels recently resident in the English
capital – all cheerful members of the British imperial family.

Flying bottles and the ‘colour question’, 1954

The first public signs of discord in this family to appear in the English press came
in 1954. England visited the Caribbean in January of that year for a Test series.
The Times during this period carries a number of matter-of-fact reports (‘Great
victory over Jamaica’, 7 January, p. 9; ‘M.C.C. morale high’, 14 January, p. 3 . . .)
but, as if sensing the need for reassurance among its readers on the matter of social
and political stability on the islands, in mid-February it prints the following
reflections on Caribbean society by the Archbishop of York:

Island impressions: sunshine and shadows in the West Indies

The loveliness of the islands, their history and the friendliness of their people
are the chief impressions carried away by most visitors. There is another
aspect of the islands. In different degrees in each island there exist the
problems of colour, nationalism, poverty, malnutrition, unemployment and
bad housing.

Colour problem
It can be said of the colour problem that it has been practically solved. . . .
Nationalism is found in most of the islands. The coloured people wish to
manage their own affairs and they are rapidly doing so. Already a great part
of the administration is in their hands. But desire for self-government is
186 Stephen Wagg
combined with devoted loyalty to the Queen and with the wish to remain in
the Commonwealth. But the electorate needs further education before com-
plete self-government can be granted with safety; it is very illiterate . . .
The greatest and most general of all the problems is poverty. With the
possible exception of Trinidad, where the oil fields and the pitch lake
supplement the revenue from sugar and citrus, the economic position of the
colonies is doubtful and insecure . . .
. . . I made many inquiries about the threat of communism. In British
Guiana it is serious. Throughout the Indies there was strong approval of the
action the British government had taken, but there is still much tension, with
the possibility of further trouble . . .
. . . The coloured people are instinctively religious. They throng the
churches and are most reverent in their worship.’
(15 February 1954, p. 7)

The action mentioned by the archbishop had been taken the previous year when
the Conservative government of Winston Churchill had suspended the Guianese
constitution and imposed martial law in the colony, following an election victory
by Dr Cheddi Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party. Churchill told the Conservative
Party conference of 1953:

Her Majesty’s Government are not going to allow a Communist State to be

organised within the British Commonwealth. Our friends can take that as a
definitive statement, and our enemies can attach to it all the importance that
I think they should.
(quoted in Carr, 1999: 183)

A fortnight after the archbishop’s guarded assessment, The Times reported,

almost in passing, an incident at the third Test at the Bourda cricket ground in
Georgetown, British Guiana, under the heading ‘West Indies need 45 runs to
avoid follow-on’ and the sub-headings ‘Bottles in the outfield’ and ‘Incident
follows giving out of local player McWatt by (replacement) umpire Menzies’: ‘It
is reported that W. S. Jones, President of the British Guiana Cricket Association,
had suggested to England captain Len Hutton that he take his players off the field,
but that Hutton had refused’ (1 March 1954, p. 10). Later, on 25 March, The
Times carries a statement from Sir Errol Dos Santos, president of the West Indies
Cricket Board of Control, apologising for crowd behaviour in the Caribbean on
this tour and suggesting that Hutton had prevented an ‘ugly scene’ by staying on
at the Bourda (p. 8).
However, on the pages of the Daily Express and the Daily Mail an altogether
more fractious tour is being portrayed and considerably more doom-laden
inferences drawn. As early as 14 January, Frank Rostron reports in the Express that
Karl Nunes, president of the Jamaica Cricket Association, has protested
unofficially about the behaviour of MCC players – in particular, the questioning
of umpires’ decisions. Hutton, it’s suggested, has had a quiet word with fast bowler
 England–West Indies and the English press 187
Fred Trueman about this. ‘I am a lover of England and an admirer of English
cricket,’ says Nunes. There is also visible impatience with England’s performance
against West Indies: the following week a dyspeptic headline announces ‘Pathetic
England flop in 35 mins’ (22 January 1954, p. 8) and the clearly accusatory
‘Five England ducks’ following England’s defeat in the second Test match at
Bridgetown, Barbados.
Reaction to the Bourda disturbance in the ‘suburban’ British papers may be
interpreted in part as a reaction both to these further on-the-field setbacks for the
England team at the hands of the West Indies and to the growth of nationalist
feeling on the islands. Trevor Bailey, Hutton’s vice-captain on the 1954 tour, later
recalled his irritation with white West Indians and expatriate Englishmen who
told MCC players that they had to win: ‘Their reason was that their life would
not be worth living if the West Indies were victorious because it would disturb the
balance of power, or, as a Victorian would have put it, “make the natives uppity”’
(Bailey 1986: 186). On 2 March the Daily Mail ran an article by cricket corre-
spondent Alex Bannister on page 4. Titled ‘Is this cricket?’, like the Archbishop
of York’s earlier observations in The Times it invokes the ‘colour question’: ‘Ever
since the M.C.C. went to Bermuda as a stepping-stone to the West Indies tour
the colour question with its political background has followed them around
like an evil shadow.’ ‘The English players’, he adds, ‘have been shocked by the
intensity of anti-British feeling here’, and they ‘are counting the days until they
can come home’. Bannister talks of violence in Jamaica and floats the question of
whether the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) were ‘behind the bottle-throwing
incident’. A picture of Hutton accompanies the article. He has his bat under his
arm and is pulling on his batting gloves, ready for action. Beneath the photograph
is the caption ‘LEN HUTTON When told: “This bottle throwing is getting ugly.
You should come off the field”, replied “No, we want another wicket or two this
evening”.’
Here Hutton stands, ultimately, for the West – he is the no-nonsense British
subaltern dealing laconically with excitable colonial subjects. Little has been said
directly about West Indian cricketers in the coverage of this tour, but their
homelands are now depicted as places where angry and intemperate people live –
places where the safety of a cricket match, a key benchmark of ‘civilisation’, can
no longer be guaranteed. Moreover, there is a more visible impatience on the
sports pages with British failure, defeat at sport, with British rule now openly
challenged, being seen increasingly as a threat to national self-confidence.

The last calypso?, 1963

The West Indies came to England in 1957 and were soundly beaten in the Test
series. The cricket correspondent of The Times reflected that he had expected ‘a
great deal more determination’ from these ‘popular, cheerful cricketers’:

For the crowd, though, the days were rather hollow. Massacres are never fun
to watch and this was nothing else. But Englishmen since the war have had
188 Stephen Wagg
their share of seeing their own side badly beaten. Indeed, when Goddard first
brought a team here seven years ago the boot was on the other foot.
(26 August 1957, p. 4)

The West Indies were back in England in the summer of 1963, under the
captaincy of Frank Worrell. Worrell was the first black man to be given the job
on a permanent basis and was the consummation, therefore, of an important
element in the nationalist struggle in the Caribbean. The series of 1963 was
judged by some at the time to be the best Test series they had ever seen. This
section principally discusses coverage of that series in the Mail and the Express:
here, as ever, the rhetoric is more expansive and less guarded than that of the
broadsheet press.
In early June, articles by Alex Bannister in the Daily Mail are at pains to stress
the respectability of members of the West Indies team. On 6 June he reports that

Senator Frank Worrell of the Upper House of the Jamaican House of

Representatives, BSc graduate of the University of Manchester, Warden
of the University College of the West Indies has, in his more familiar role of
Test captain, the simplest of plans to beat England.
(p. 16)

The following day, readers are informed that opening batsman Conrad Hunte is
giving all his tour earnings to the conservative Christian campaigners Moral
Rearmament. Bannister, apparently no longer anxious about the ‘colour question’,
is clearly satisfied that the team is under educated and moderate-minded lead-
ership, although he laments the lack, early on in the tour, of the cavalier batting
of old. After day 1 of the first Test, the West Indies are 244 for 3, with the devout
Hunte 104 not out. ‘Certainly, apart from Kanhai’, observes Bannister, ‘it was not
calypso style’ (7 June 1963, p. 16).
On 10 June the Mail columnist Ian Wooldridge, beneath the headline ‘Cricket
wins back its crowd appeal’, refers to West Indies fast bowler Wes Hall as a
‘cheerful executioner’. There are two important significations here. One is of the
West Indies as potential saviours of a commercially threatened game in a world
of diversified leisure options. The other is of the Caribbean fast bowler as still
unequivocally within the tent of acceptable cricket practice. This judgement
is shared by Crawford White of the Daily Express, who, reporting on the first day
of the first Test, calls on readers to ‘salute the courage of England’s new opening
batsmen, John Edrich and Mickey Stewart for the way they stood up to the
bumper fire of Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith’ (Daily Express, 7 June 1963, p. 18).
This remains the dominant view throughout the summer, although in the minds
of some cricket reporters of the ‘suburban’, ‘middlebrow’ press this acceptability
has become open to question by the end of August. This can be seen, in
retrospect, as another watershed. On 11 June the Mail is derisive of England’s
performance in the first Test, as shown in its headline on page 16 claiming
England to have been ‘out – bowled – batted – fielded – thought’.
 England–West Indies and the English press 189
Nearly a fortnight on, the Daily Mail of 24 June carries a photograph of five
cricket captains – England’s Ted Dexter (Radley and Cambridge), Richie Benaud
of Australia, Worrell, the white South African Jackie McGlew and Indian
aristocrat the Nawab of Pataudi – enjoying a drink together in a pub near Lords.
This an image of postcolonial harmony, with key Commonwealth nations
in cricket, bonded across class and ‘race’. (It is worth remembering that South
Africa’s apartheid system was fully entrenched at this time and that the partici-
pation of its whites-only team in Test cricket was virtually unchallenged within
world cricket governance. Some protestors had, however, greeted the South
African cricket party that arrived for a tour of Britain in 1960, a few weeks after
69 black demonstrators had been killed by police in the Sharpeville township near
Cape Town in March that year (Gemmell 2004: 120).)
The second Test at Lord’s found these cricket writers trying to balance crucial
considerations – the threat of West Indian fast bowling, British heroism, the joys
of membership of the international cricket family, and so on – as never before.
The England batsman Colin Cowdrey has had his wrist broken by a ball from Hall.
Wooldridge employs the vocabulary of ‘Trench war!’ to describe prospects for the
final day: ‘The superb second Test is no longer a fiesta. Today’s six-hour last act
will be trench warfare, with England facing the most ruthless barrage in world
cricket.’ The language here stresses primarily the excitement expected from this
finale and, despite the evocation of the First World War, it imputes no malign
intention to England’s opponents. On the same page, Bannister considers closely
the morality of the West Indies fast bowling:

Worrell ends the violent spell

Wes Hall bowled some of the most violent and frightening overs ever seen
on any ground in the Second Test at Lords yesterday. Though I do not think
he was guilty of persistent intimidation, umpire Eddie Phillipson could have
been justified in giving Frankie Worrell, the West Indies captain, a hint to
put a brake on the short pitchers. In one ugly over in which Colin Cowdrey
was felled, there was not one ball of normal length. But it is difficult to define
which are bumpers or deliveries of intimidation . . .
Bumpers and short pitchers – which can be far more dangerous – are
common tactics for fast bowlers in the West Indies to defeat their good
pitches.
(Daily Mail, 25 June 1963, p. 12)

This assessment tentatively identifies a problem, but deliberately falls short

of accusing anyone of wrongdoing; indeed, in conclusion, it contextualises the
practice of bowling short by saying that it’s only to be expected in West Indian
circumstances – ‘their good pitches’. In the Express, the aggressive, New World
voice of ex-Australian Test cricketer Keith Miller is more forthright. Referring to
the incident in which Cowdrey has fractured his wrist, Miller asks, ‘Should Hall,
bowling from the pavilion end under a leaden sky, have eased his pace? Certainly
190 Stephen Wagg
not. This is a Test match and Test matches are fought bitterly.’ Crawford White,
on the same page, while more circumspect, is similarly loath to indict the West
Indian fast bowlers:

[T]he ball that hit Cowdrey was the eighth successive delivery pitched short
of a length. I do not blame Hall. His job was to blast out the England
batsmen, and a terrifying sight he was as he set about it. I do blame the Lords
authorities for not providing sight screens at the pavilion end.
(Daily Express, 25 June 1963, p. 16)

The final day of the Test is generally accepted to have featured fast bowling
from Hall that was every bit as formidable as on previous days, but press reports of
this day are nevertheless couched primarily in terms of the grit of the home side
in resisting this bowling and do not question the legitimacy of the bowling itself.
England have held on for a draw in circumstances that evoke popular images of
English heroism. These images are rooted in class and masculinity. The resistance
of England’s batsmen has been led by the Yorkshireman Brian Close, who has
batted for nearly four hours and taken much of Hall’s bowling on his body. Vice-
chairman of England selectors Doug Insole accentuates the masculinity of Close’s
performance when he says, jokily, that, of the ten bruises Close received, ‘[h]e
rubbed only one – when he was hit in the groin by Hall’ (Daily Mail, 26 June 1963,
p. 16). Cowdrey, a privately educated Southerner from Kent, perceived as effete
by many northern cricket people, has come out to bat in the final over with his
arm in plaster, in order to save the game for England. On the front page of the
same edition of the Mail Wooldridge describes it as ‘the most fantastic over Lords
has ever seen’.
On these sports pages, England and the West Indies are now seen to be engaged
in some epic struggle that draws heavily on preferred national myths. When
England win the third Test and Fred Trueman takes seven wickets in the West
Indies’ second innings, the Mail affectionately adapts Caribbean popular imagery
to announce ‘Trueman collapso’. Wooldridge styles Trueman as a diffident
English working-class hero: ‘At 3.05 pm . . . Trueman was taking his hat from
umpire Laurie Gray and walking off like a plumber who had just fixed the pipes’
(Daily Mail, 10 July 1963, p. 12). During the next Test, at Leeds, Wooldridge
describes the dismissal of West Indian batsman Garfield Sobers as ‘a great warrior’
going ‘gloriously to his doom’ (Daily Mail, 26 July 1963, p. 14) and on the 29th
the same paper quotes the chairman of the England selectors, Walter Robins, as
saying that ‘this is now the greatest Test series I have ever known. If you can say
that, then does defeat matter?’ (p. 10). The following day Wooldridge notes that,
although it was clear that there would be little play on the final day, 20,000 people
have nevertheless paid to watch it. The West Indies, he observes, are ‘now rightly
one up with one to play’. ‘In the meantime,’ he suggests, ‘English batsmen should
not seek to excuse their frailties’ by doubting the legitimacy of West Indian fast
bowler Charlie Griffiths’ action (p. 9). This view is vigorously endorsed by Miller
in the Daily Express, also on 30 July (p. 11).
 England–West Indies and the English press 191
By the end of the series the determination on the part of the ‘suburban’ press
to claim these matches as a collective symbol of postcolonial amity is plain.
Crawford White’s headline back in early June had described the West Indies as
‘Calypso cricketers’ (Daily Express, 7 June 1963, p. 18) and, on the pages of the
Express and the Mail, calypso cricketers is what they remained. There were some
caveats. Wooldridge points out that, in the final Test, ‘England have had to
withstand as frightening a blitz of bumpers and bouncers as an Oval crowd has
seen for many a cricket campaign’, and on the same page the veteran populist
sports writer J. L. Manning calls for more courage on the part of umpires in dealing
with ‘the unfair fast bowling that threatened to be the only unpleasantness of
this very good series’. ‘English cricket’s acceptance of world-wide condemnation
of Jardine’s bodyline in 1933 should’, argues Manning, ‘have been the end of the
problem. It is curious to note that Australian and West Indian cricketers are
willing to drift back to the bad old days when the ball was the thing you aimed at
the batsman’s head.’ The word ‘savagery’ appears as a sub-heading, although not
in Manning’s text (Daily Mail, 23 August 1963, p. 4). This implies, perhaps, that
it was not used by Manning in his original copy, but was added, for effect, by a
sub-editor.
Generally, though, there is a will to retrieve the apparent spirit of 1950 when
London’s new Caribbean settlers had, along with their team, intimated to uptight
white English cricket watchers that the game could be fun. ‘The Test series that
has made cricket live again ended yesterday,’ wrote Wooldridge, whereupon

The crowd came down the grey, old ground to chant and cheer the captains.
An hour later they were still there. That is what they thought of the series
that closed last night in victory for the West Indies, defeat for England and
triumph for the game itself.

On the same page, Gerard Kemp notes how at the Oval the sky had been ‘filled
with hats, cushions, briefcases, even shoes’ and celebrates the tea interval
performance of ‘Mr Carlton Constantine from Trinidad [who], wearing a string
vest, bright orange shirt and black bowler, demonstrates with his furled umbrella
how Rohan Kanhai hit a six’. ‘Two Englishmen stroll by in city suits,’ notes Kemp.
‘One says: “It’s all quite, quite unbelievable.”’ And J. L. Manning reflects:

What was unique about this summer was that West Indian crowds seemed to
have achieved as much as Frank Worrell’s players. They stopped Test cricket
becoming exclusively the white man’s war-game and turned it into something
everyone could enjoy.

(All the above quotations are from the Daily Mail of 27 August 1963, p. 12). An
editorial in The Times is similarly confident of a cultural shift in the making:
‘Thanks to the West Indians, fresh air and light have moved over the face of
cricket in England. Our visitors have reminded us that cricket is a game to be
played seriously and skilfully indeed, but always for fun’ (The Times, 27 August
192 Stephen Wagg
1963, p. 9). But the most unbridled intervention here comes from Peter Black,
best known as the television critic of the Daily Mail, who contributes an article in
late August based on his experiences at the Oval. It’s entitled ‘We had a rough
day yesterday – my guilt complex and I’, and it’s accompanied by a cartoon by
Illingworth in which a beaming black West Indian cricketer is striking a ball
labelled ‘RACIALISM’. ‘I’d say there are 5,000 West Indians here’, writes Black,

to judge from the blobs of darker colour in the crowd; and they spread
a partisan joy and bustle that Tests haven’t imparted in England since the
1953 series against Australia . . .
These people have been maltreated for 300 years in their own islands,
which they left because the exploiters had flogged the economy to death.
They had to change a hot sunny island for a cold, damp one which didn’t
want them anyway. They’ve been conned, fleeced, badgered, misunderstood,
patronised and insulted to the last – and this must be the hardest to bear –
out of ignorance as much as hostility.
As workers, they have been tolerated only as long as they accept generally
second rate status. . . . By doing the pinks this good turn [of invigorating
Test cricket] the browns must have let quite a bit of the poison out of racial-
ism. And the claims for cricket as a kind of international marriage bureau
suddenly make more sense.
(Daily Mail, 23 August 1963, p. 8)

On the face of it, this article seems extraordinary. It appears in a right-wing

newspaper whose readership and editorial stance had often been antagonistic to
migrant groups. Moreover, with independence for the islands either achieved or
accepted in principle and the demand for labour receding, anti-immigration
politics in Britain had just begun to make an impact at national level: the openly
discriminatory Commonwealth Immigration Act had been passed the year before
(see Layton-Henry 1992: 70–99). However, a certain kind of imperialist pater-
nalism still commanded support in ruling circles in Britain – Enoch Powell, for
example, later the self-appointed leader of the racist, anti-immigration lobby in
Britain, had voted against the 1962 Act (see Foot 1969) – and this paternalism
probably encompassed many of those running, or writing about, British cricket
at the time. The article, along with the other euphoric commentary in these
newspapers, is also, in retrospect, absurdly optimistic about ‘race’ relations, both
within cricket culture and beyond. This was clear by the middle of the following
decade.

Please keep off the grass, 1976

By the mid-1970s, tensions within the British colonial family are apparent from
the cricket reports of the English sports pages. In April 1976, during a Test match
between the West Indies and India in Kingston, Jamaica, India manager Polly
Umrigar accused West Indies fast bowler Michael Holding of intimidatory
 England–West Indies and the English press 193
bowling: ‘Holding bowled three to four bumpers in every over, and that’s
intimidatory. This was not in the true spirit of the game. It was almost like war
and the whole charm of the game is being lost.’ The Indian captain and spin
bowler Bishen Bedi added, somewhat without originality, that this ‘was not
cricket’ (The Times, 24 April 1976). This controversy was, of course, noted on
sports desks in England, where West Indies were due a few days later. Pat Gibson
of the Daily Express was among the press pack that met them and announces that
in the forthcoming series:

[T]he slightest sign of weakness against the short pitched ball will be
exploited to the limit of the law. No one said it in so many words but this was
the clear message from manager Clyde Walcott and skipper Clive Lloyd when
the dark destroyers flew into London yesterday.

Walcott tells the cricket reporters: ‘India are suspect to pace’. He adds:

I don’t think we are known to be hostile in our cricket, but we may be a

little harder now. These days are tough and you have to play hard if you want
to win. If a fast bowler is not allowed to bowl bouncers the games loses
something. He is not trying to hit the batsman, but to get them out.
(Daily Express, 5 May 1976)

Three weeks later the same paper carries an analysis of Holding’s action, which
is photographed in five stages. Although the article (by Malcolm Folley) has
the ambiguous title ‘Anatomy of a demon’, far from marginalising Holding, it links
him, in technique, to English cricket culture: veteran coach Alf Gover likens him
to Fred Trueman (Daily Express, 28 May 1976, p. 20). Elsewhere in the same issue,
James Lawton calls for Brian Close to be restored to the England team. ‘Certainly’,
he asserts, ‘I cannot think of anyone better qualified to deliver a meaningful “V”
sign to the theory that English cricketers have lost the heart to fight’ (p. 24). This
is plainly atavistic talk, calling up the spirit of 1963 in a time of national cricket
emergency. The West Indies pace attack must be met with English masculine
resolve, and Close, the mythical man-who-stepped-into-the-breach in the equally
mythical series of 13 years earlier, will provide it. Close, however, is now 45 years
old and last played for England in 1967. Three days later, with Close’s selection
confirmed, Times cricket correspondent John Woodcock observes:

Mingled with one’s respect for Brian Close, the iron man of English cricket,
who has been called upon to play in the first Test match against West Indies
starting at Trent Bridge on Thursday, is a greater feeling of despair that it
should have been considered necessary to choose him.
(The Times, 31 May 1976)

Here Woodcock recognises the futility of reaching for the imagined national
glories of the past. (I say ‘imagined’ because some cricket people thought Close’s
194 Stephen Wagg
batting at Lords in 1963 had been tactically inappropriate. Certainly Worrell told
the Daily Mail so at the time – see ‘Close failed you’, 26 June 1963, p. 16). Indeed,
there is a notable attempt, during this summer, on the part of Woodcock and
others, to come to terms with the decline in English cricket’s competitiveness and
the corresponding growth in the West Indies’ power. This is done, for the most
part, within a paradigm of admiration for Caribbean cricketers and a good-
humoured exasperation with English failure. There are clear attempts to maintain
the ‘calypso consensus’ of the previous decade but, by August 1976, especially in
The Times, this consensus is plainly beginning to dissipate.
On the eve of the first Test match, Michael Holding goes down with glandular
fever. Woodcock is laconic in anticipating the effect of this on a contest widely
expected to be uneven:

The England players heard the news that Michael Holding was out of the first
Test match on their car radios as they converged on Trent Bridge yesterday.
No wonder they were in high spirits when they came out for practice in the
afternoon. . . . I believe we will have a less acrimonious match without
Holding, not for any personal reason, but simply because less blood is likely
to be drawn. Holding’s lovely rhythm will be very much missed, by all but the
English batsmen. He is a great sight and to West Indies a great loss.
(The Times, 3 June 1976)

The generous and gentlemanly tone of this tribute clashes, however, with noises
now being made in other parts of the forest. Three weeks later The Times prints
an article by Marcel Berlins telling how Eddie Phillipson, one of the umpires in
the Lord’s Test of 1963, denies being told by the then chairman of the England
selectors not to no-ball Charlie Griffith for fear of racial tension and a possible
riot in London (The Times, 24 June 1976, p. 4). (Walter Robins, the chairman in
question, and Sid Buller, the other umpire, are both now dead.) The claims have
been made by Fred Trueman in his book Ball of Fire (1976) and he writes to
reassert them on 28 June (p. 15). It is perhaps significant that this accusation is
investigated, and re-presented, in The Times, where it might previously have been
thought ‘poor form’, and not in the Mail or the Express, where it might, con-
versely, have been expected to get a sympathetic hearing. As a further reminder
of the changed politics of migration and ethnicity in England, on the front page
of the same edition Robert Parker reports that in Leicester, where the proportion
of New Commonwealth immigrants is the highest of any British city, the racist
National Front has more support than anywhere else in the country.
While Trueman and others are revising history, the cricket writers of the
Express, dominated by ex-England Test players, are simply lamenting that it
cannot be repeated: there will be no return to the thrilling cricket and apparent
cultural exchange of 1963. When England have been dismissed for 71 in the third
Test at Old Trafford, Pat Gibson writes, ‘as the Caribbean drums beat out their
triumphant message in the Manchester gloom, the scoreboard made its own sad
comment on England’s despair’ (Daily Express, 10 July 1976, p. 14). The following
 England–West Indies and the English press 195
day, in the Sunday Express, the former England batsman Denis Compton calls for
a stiffening of sinews in the national side: ‘England, please end this humiliation
of complete surrender to the West Indies’. He notes in passing that Holding has
been warned for intimidation by umpire Bill Alley, but stresses the huge gulf in
technique and determination between the two teams:

It must be a great temptation to these fast bowlers to give our batsmen more
than a fair share of these deliveries because of our pathetic method of dealing
with them. . . . In contrast, when the West Indies batted it was like using pea
shooters against tanks.
(Sunday Express, 11 July 1976, p. 27)

The next day another ex-England player, Jim Laker, notes that Holding has
received a further warning and he warns darkly of ‘open warfare’ (Daily Express,
12 July 1976, p. 14), but his colleague Pat Gibson mocks such talk in his praise for
the West Indies in the following Test:

All the nasty things they were saying about the West Indies fast bowlers at
Old Trafford could have been applied to their batsmen yesterday. Only this
time they were superlatives. Talk about intimidatory bowling! It was little
short of intimidatory batting. The Caribbean cavaliers treated England’s full
strength attack with utter contempt in the Fourth Test.
(Daily Express, 23 July 1976, p. 16)

Five days later, Gibson celebrates this ‘magnificent Test’ that has ‘ended as a
Caribbean carnival at Headingley’ (Daily Express, 28 July 1976, p. 16).
No doubt to their credit, Gibson and the other Express writers do not yet
register the turning of cricket’s political tide against West Indies and their
exuberant supporters. The Times, however, does. On 22 July the paper reports that
the International Cricket Conference

last night gave full backing to umpires in an effort to control the use of
bouncers in Test matches. Secretary of M.C.C. Jack Bailey says: ‘Now this is
a matter for the West Indies. I could not guarantee what they are going to do
tomorrow [in the fourth Test at Headingley]. What happens next is up to
member countries with players under their control. All individual countries
now have a duty . . .
(p. 11)

A fortnight later The Times notes the deliberations of the Test and County
Cricket Board (TCCB). The TCCB will ask Clive Lloyd to appeal to West Indies
supporters to cut down the noise at the fifth Test at the Oval: ‘The Board after
their meeting said they were very concerned at the noise which at times they
considered could be intimidatory’ (7 August 1976, p. 15).
196 Stephen Wagg
In his reporting of this match, the Express’s Gibson is still accentuating the
positive. The expressiveness of West Indian supporters has been curtailed, but the
man from the Express meanwhile welcomes one of their heroes into the pantheon
of great batsmen:

They silenced the Caribbean drums at the Oval yesterday but they could do
little about the Caribbean beat and absolutely nothing about that magical
rhythm of Vivian Richards’s bat. On his way back to the dressing room he
passed the bust of W. G. Grace in the Oval Long Room and I hope it smiled
at him. Because in all the years since the good doctor was playing, Test
cricket has never known scoring like this.
(Daily Express, 13 August 1976, p. 16)

On 14 August, however, West Indian supporters came onto the field of play
after Holding had taken the wicket of Tony Greig, England’s South African-
born captain. In the Sunday Express the following day, Compton accused them of
‘trampling on the wicket and leaving beer cans and other debris all over the field’
(15 August 1976, p. 24), and on the Monday, Gibson condemns this ‘loutish
stupidity’ (Daily Express, 16 August 1976, p. 13).
On the English sports pages of this year, then, there have been vain appeals
for a return to the English cricketing courage of a mythical past and a continued
and optimistic use of the vocabulary of carnival and calypso. There has been
frank admiration for West Indian exponents of the art of fast bowling, an admi-
ration plainly not shared by cricket’s English-dominated legislature. There are
clear signs, however, that, once again at the behest of administrators, the cheery
black folk who in 1950 and 1963 taught stiff white spectators to party are being
redefined as louts and worse. Their drumming is no longer perceived as the
welcome soundtrack to a joyous event; it is seen as intimidation.

The bombardment has only just begun: the 1980s

England and the West Indies played four Test series during the 1980s. The first
two series of the decade were in 1981, in the Caribbean, and in 1984, in England.
(England returned to the West Indies in 1986 and the West Indies played in
England in the summer of 1988. All the series of the 1980s were won by the West
Indies, but it is principally the first two that lie within the scope of this chapter.)
In the early 1980s the immigration to Britain of black Caribbean people became
virtually impossible under the British Nationality Act of 1981 (Layton-Henry
1992: 191–8), which confined British citizenship, and therefore right of residence,
to those with an historic family connection to the United Kingdom – a definition
overwhelmingly favourable to whites. Indeed, following Tony Greig (born in
Queenstown, South Africa, and given his England debut in 1972), a number of
white South Africans, born to British migrants, were granted British citizenship
in order for them to play cricket for England: Allan Lamb, for example, born in
Cape Province, who first played for England in 1982, and Chris Smith, born
 England–West Indies and the English press 197
in Durban, who received his first England cap the following year. Meanwhile,
riots convulsed a number of areas of black settlement in British cities in the
early 1980s, beginning with the St Paul’s area of Bristol in 1980 and Brixton in
south-west London in 1981. Relations between British black people and the
police became deeply problematic (see Keith 1993). Press reportage during
the Test series of 1981 and 1984 in The Times and the Daily Express generally
unites around a number of themes: the characterisation of the Caribbean as a
place where disorder reigns and politics intrudes into sport; frequent reference to
the continued ‘bombardment’ of the British batsmen by West Indian fast bowlers,
the legality or appropriateness of which is sometimes questioned; the presence of
black people in Britain, although a connection is almost never drawn between
British black people (and their obvious discontent) and the West Indies cricket
team; and (very occasional) nostalgia for colonial times. I now consider each of
these themes.
In mid-January 1981, England’s tour manager, Alan Smith, secures agreement
from the West Indies board that extra time will be played ‘should a Test be held
up by anything other than the weather’. ‘There is obvious concern with any series
in the Caribbean’, continues the Times correspondent, ‘that crowd disorder could
disrupt a match – as it did twice on the 1967–68 tour’ (The Times, 17 January
1981, p. 17). A month later, John Woodcock reports from the first Test at Port of
Spain, Trinidad, that ‘the first full scale riot of the tour’ has been ‘only narrowly
averted’ and the pitch has been interfered with overnight (The Times, 14 February
1981, p. 17). In the Express, Pat Gibson claims that damage to the pitch, appar-
ently inflicted because Trinidadian player Deryck Murray has not been selected
for the match, has been acknowledged only ‘after pressure from myself and other
pressmen’ (Daily Express, 14 February 1981, p. 44). This is a classically post-
colonial image, in which cheating and factionalised former subjects still have to
be taught fair play by a vigilant representative of the former imperial power.
Later that month a Times editorial responds angrily to the refusal of the
government of Guyana to admit the England player Robin Jackman, who has
played cricket in South Africa in defiance of a world ban on sports links with
apartheid. The paper says the call for Jackman to leave Guyana is an ‘insulting
demand’ and compares it to the refusal in 1968 of the South African Prime
Minister John Vorster to admit the England cricketer Basil D’Oliveira, born
a ‘Cape Coloured’ but by then qualified to play for England. ‘On the issue
of personal liberty Britain cannot give way, even if cricket suffers’ (The Times,
27 February 1981, p. 15).
On 11 April, in the fifth and final Test at Kingston, Jamaica, the England
batsman Graham Gooch scores 153. Woodcock stresses that while Gooch has
compiled his innings, police have been ‘present in strength’ to keep anti-apartheid
demonstrators at bay (The Times, p. 15). When the England party arrive back in
London, The Times include a statement by tour manager Smith that cites the
political impasse in Guyana as a mitigating factor in the team’s lack of success:
‘The death of Ken Barrington [Smith’s assistant manager] and the trouble in
Guyana were severe blows and the bad weather didn’t help. We all felt the tour
198 Stephen Wagg
had to go on despite what happened in Guyana’ (20 April 1981, p. 11). Here,
the MCC and The Times render a matter, defined in the Caribbean as one of
‘race’ and politics, simply as a regrettable obstacle that came the team’s way. It is
equated with naturally occurring mishaps (the death of the assistant manager and
the bad weather) and has, runs the strong implication, been borne with typically
English fortitude. (Five years later, on 28 February 1986, with the English cricket
team once again struggling to cope with West Indian fast bowling, the Daily
Express will use its front page to demand that the party be brought home, rather
than go to Trinidad, where ‘insults and humiliations’ are being planned for
England’s cricketers by ‘anti-apartheid zealots’.)
At the culmination of a series of five Tests in England in 1984, all of which
have been won by the West Indies, the Express correspondent Colin Bateman
revisits the now well-worn journalistic theme for these occasions: West Indian-
spectators-on-the-field-of-play. Once again their intervention is seen as
troublesome, but this time there is a ‘human interest’ angle. The thoughtless West
Indian supporters have spoiled an England’s cricketer’s day: ‘Jonathan Agnew’s
Test debut for England ended in fear yesterday as the West Indian celebrations
turned to a chaotic carnival at the Oval . . . he was attacked as hundreds of fans
charged onto the field’ (Daily Express, 15 August 1984, p. 36). Noticeably, the
language has become more damning still. In 1950 and 1963, West Indian
supporters celebrated; in 1976 they made intimidating noise and left debris; now,
in 1984, they ‘attacked’.
During the early 1980s (and for years to come), English cricket correspondents
had to find ways to render the central fact of these encounters: the superiority
of the West Indies fast bowlers. Sometimes they did so by challenging the legiti-
macy of this bowling. Reporting from the England tour of 1981, for instance,
John Woodcock observes of the fast bowler Colin Croft that he ‘quite frequently
breaks the return crease with his back foot in the delivery stride. By the laws of
the game, this is a no-ball’ (The Times, 17 February 1981, p. 10). And when
England batsman Andy Lloyd has been struck on the head by a ball from Malcolm
Marshall in June 1984, Woodcock once again draws attention to the rules of
engagement:

All right, he made the crucial mistake of taking his eye off the ball and it
was not an out and out bouncer. At the same time this may be the moment
to spell out the law: ‘Umpires shall consider intimidation to be the delib-
erate bowling of fast, short-pitched balls which by their length, height and
direction are intended or likely to inflict physical injury on the striker’. The
italics are mine and the wishes of the law-makers are as unmistakeably clear
as they are widely ignored.
(The Times, 15 June 1984, p. 20)

There is also, from time to time, the implication that the West Indies are
now bullying lesser opponents. On one occasion in the 1984 series, the umpire
‘Dickie’ Bird, according to Pat Gibson, ‘considered five bouncers in two overs was
 England–West Indies and the English press 199
overdoing the brutality’ (Daily Express, 18 June 1984, p. 30). Here the word ‘bru-
tality’ appears not as an accusation, but as an assumption – something that we all
‘know’. Ten days later, Gibson applauds Chris Broad’s innings of 55 for England:
‘He for one was clearly not going to be intimidated by the likes of Joel Garner and
Malcolm Marshall’ (Daily Express, 29 June 1984, p. 34). At still other times there
are expressions of boredom and nostalgia. By March 1981, John Woodcock was
saying of the four West Indian fast bowlers:

It makes for painful batting and, because of the monotony of it, for tedious
watching. No longer can England’s batsmen look forward with much
enthusiasm to playing in a Test match. When it comes to putting on all the
protective gear available the fun goes out of it. . . . The best thing for cricket
in general – even, in the long run, for West Indian cricket – would, I believe,
be for the four fast bowlers syndrome to be sent sky high by a strong batting
side in consistently good form on consistently good pitches.
(The Times, 27 March 1981, p. 12)

Sometimes the ‘politics’, in the form of fallout from the continuing controversy
over cricketing relations with apartheid South Africa, is invoked as a mitigating
factor in the enduringly one-sided nature of these contests. On 19 June 1984,
Woodcock laments in The Times:

Indeed, if the sport were boxing and not cricket, the Board of Control would
say that on no account must these same protagonists be allowed back in the
same ring. That is how much of a mismatch it seemed. . . . Most of the
experienced players on whom the England selectors might like to call, in an
attempt to strengthen the side, are still banned [following a ‘rebel’ tour of
South Africa in 1981; see Gemmell 2004: 163–78].
(p. 26)

Beyond this, there is an acknowledgement of Caribbean prowess. England

competed, wrote Woodcock, for example, of the second Test of 1984, ‘[b]ut in
the end Richards’ genius and Lloyd’s experience told’ (The Times, 30 June 1984,
p. 27). However, this often goes, once again, with a questioning of English
attitude and technique:

England’s batsmen must overcome a mental barrier if they are to keep this
series alive. Their technical problems against a formidable West Indies attack
are caused as much by psychological complexes as any real shortage of the
ability to cope.
(Jim Laker, Daily Express, 27 March 1981, p. 46)

With scarcely a flicker of defiance, England lost the Third Test against West
Indies, sponsored by Cornhill, and the series with it. . . . Congratulations to
[the West Indies] on their victory. They have done with high skill and the
200 Stephen Wagg
dash that comes so instinctively to them what they came here for. England
would benefit, I believe, from a more animated attitude from [captain David]
Gower. When his own shoulders sag, so do the side’s.
(John Woodcock, The Times, 17 July 1984, p. 25)

As England slumped to a fourth humiliating Test defeat, Peter May

[chairman of England’s selectors] was posing the most critical question of the
summer. . . . Do we try hard enough?
(Ken Lawrence, Daily Express, 1 August 1984, p. 36)

Here England’s cricketers and their failures become a metaphor for a nation in
(widely unacknowledged) decline. This metaphor has an enhanced resonance
because of cricket’s historic designation as the imperial game, gifted to its colonies
by Britain at the height of its power in the nineteenth century (Stoddart
and Sandiford 1998) and because the public culture of Britain during this period
has been characterised by a hubristic nationalism. This expressed itself, among
other things, through the prosecution of the Falklands War by the prime min-
ister, Margaret Thatcher, and her subsequent claim, in a landmark speech at
Cheltenham racecourse in 1982, that the war had banished fears ‘that Britain was
no longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world’
(Barnett 1982: 47). The manifest failure of English cricket to maintain the ‘Great’
in Great Britain when taking on the West Indies occasionally prompted the
evocation of earlier, more palatable defeats, sustained with dignity within
the imperial family. In June 1984, John Collis of The Times seeks out Sonny
Ramadhin, now landlord of a pub in the Manchester area, where he has lived
since his triumphs of 1950. These triumphs, along with those of his fellow spinner
Alf Valentine, are ‘surprising to recall’, remarks Collis, ‘[a]fter a decade of wall-
to-wall fast bowling.’ Ramadhin will only partially concur: ‘It’s all fast bowling
now. But it’s not genuinely fast. Even Marshall – he’s not as fast as Wes Hall or
Roy Gilchrist’ (The Times, 29 June 1984, p. 24).

In conclusion: calypso kings to dark destroyers; smiling

settlers to enemies within
Reading through these sports pages of the British press, one is, from time to time,
struck by the juxtaposition of references, implied or otherwise, to British people
of Caribbean origin and the (often critical) coverage of events in the cricket
world. In the spring of 1981, for example, Pat Gibson in the Daily Express wrote
of how the ‘tall, graceful Jamaican’ Michael Holding ‘sprang straight for England’s
jugular . . . striking [England batsman Geoffrey] Boycott a glancing blow on the
helmet’ (18 February, p. 36), while two weeks later the same newspaper, on its
front page, carried a story headlined ‘Police injured in clash with demo blacks
RAMPAGE OF A MOB’. The article refers to a demonstration by West Indian
people in London following the death of a number of young Caribbean people
in a fire in New Cross, south London, back in January. It refers indignantly to
 England–West Indies and the English press 201
‘an organisation calling itself “The Campaign against Racism in the Media”’.
The symbolism here would not have been lost on many black observers, in
either London or the Caribbean: while the Thatcher government’s Nationality
Act is passed and Britain’s inner cities burn, the fast bowler known in the
game as ‘Whispering Death’ who, like many Jamaicans, probably has relatives
or friends settled in the United Kingdom, rattles the helmet of the avowed
Thatcherite Geoffrey Boycott (Wagg 2003–4). Two weeks after The Times refers
to the ‘insulting demand’ of the Guyanese government that an England player
leave their country, the same paper reports that the EEC Commission is
examining the UK government’s Nationality Bill to see if it contravenes the
European Convention of Human Rights (The Times, 14 March 1981, p. 13). For
England’s sports journalists, the politics of ‘race’ and the transaction of cricket
matches take place in separate, if parallel, social worlds. Only occasionally, and
perhaps unwittingly, do they suggest a connection. For instance, John Woodcock
is clearly attempting to be ironic when he writes from the Caribbean in 1981 that
‘newsmen from England “here for the bullets” must be surprised to find that the
only provocative material in the local press takes the form of letters from
Birmingham and London’ (The Times, 9 April 1981, p. 10). Four days later,
Woodcock reports that

The only effective protest against Jackman’s presence in Jamaica has been
made so far by Holding when yesterday morning he was finishing off
England’s first innings. . . . After greeting Jackman with a bouncer, he hit him
two stinging blows on the left hand.
(The Times, 13 April, p. 10)

Many a true word, as the saying goes, has been spoken in jest. On the front page
of the same issue, the Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, announces an inquiry
into the riots in Brixton.
Thus, over a 35-year period in England, press and public discourses about
the cricketers of the Caribbean and the people who cheered them were subject
to a good deal of change and nuance. There was no absolute change from one
definition of Caribbean cricket folk to another; nor can it be said that the
objective behaviour of West Indian cricketers or their public did not itself change
during that time. But whereas in the 1950s and early 1960s these people were
often said to spread joy and win respect wherever they went, in the 1980s they
frequently became people who played to win, dropped beer cans and demanded
that political agreements (such as the ban on sport link with South Africa) be
honoured. The reasons for these shifts in vocabulary seemed to lie in the changing
political relationship between the British state and its former territories in the
Caribbean. New political and sport circumstances provoked different recourse to
particular rhetorics – although these rhetorics (of calypso king, dark destroyer, and
so on) were not themselves new. All this accords quite closely with the notion
presented by Peter Hulme of ‘stereotypical dualism’ (1986: 49–50; see also Hall
1992), whereby numerous characteristics are collapsed into one simplified figure
202 Stephen Wagg
that stands for a whole people, and this stereotype is then split into ‘good’ and
‘bad’ sides – carefree revellers, for example, as against mean-spirited bowlers of
bouncers or parties to political riot. These ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sides are then deployed
as is thought appropriate.

Note
1 The Clive Lloyd quotation that prefaces this chapter appeared in The Times on 1
August 1984 on page 21.
I should like to thank Kathryn Dodd, Jon Gemmell, James Hamill and Dil Porter
for help in the preparation of the chapter.

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Stoddart, Brian and Keith A. P. Sandiford (eds) (1998) The Imperial Game: Cricket, Culture
and Society, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
 England–West Indies and the English press 203
Trueman, Fred (1976) Ball of Fire: An Autobiography, London: Dent.
Wagg, Stephen (2003–4) ‘Muck or nettles: men, masculinity and myth in Yorkshire
cricket’, Sport in History, 23 (3): 68–93.
Williams, Jack (2001) Cricket and Race, Oxford: Berg.
10 ‘A carnival of cricket?’
The Cricket World Cup, ‘race’
and the politics of carnival
Tim Crabbe and Stephen Wagg

Every four years, the cricketing world takes a step back from its globetrotting
agenda and settles in one centre for the game’s ultimate carnival – The ICC
Cricket World Cup. In 1999, England will host the party. For just six weeks in May
and June 1999, cricket’s greatest roadshow will travel through England, Wales,
Scotland, Ireland and Holland and become, in the words of Prime Minister Tony
Blair, a focus for ‘national pride, international co-operation, happiness, heartache,
excitement and triumph’. The theme for the 1999 Cricket World Cup will reflect
the excitement and vibrancy of the one-day game and the colourful ‘new faces’ of
cricket – international, cosmopolitan and, above all, fun. The 1999 Cricket World
Cup will, indeed, be ‘A Carnival of Cricket’ – with this application form you too
can join the Carnival.
(England and Wales Cricket Board 1997)

Who should they cheer for now? Marketing English cricket

after ‘Tebbit’
This adoption of carnival imagery by the England and Wales Cricket Board
(ECB) to market the World Cup of 1999 was savagely ironic. International
cricket had grown out of the British Empire (Holt 1989; Searle 1990; Marqusee
1994; Beckles and Stoddart 1995), where it had been, among other things, a site
of struggle on which colonial peoples, especially in India and the Caribbean,
sought to beat the British at ‘their own’ game (James 1994; Bose 1986, 1990;
Cashman, 1980). After the Second World War, various Test-playing colonies
successively accomplished this aim and did so with their own styles of cricket.
None was more spectacular in this regard than the West Indies, where cricket
culture was most obviously touched by elements of carnival.
Little (see Stephen Wagg’s chapter in this book, Chapter 9) was made by
the British press of England’s first defeat by the West Indies (at Lords in 1950),
but since the 1960s English cricket has been widely perceived to be in crisis
and increasingly characterised by malign and gloomy introspection. English
cricket officials and commentators were wont by the 1980s to view the ex-colonial
teams with suspicion and hostility: the ‘real quick’ fast bowlers of the West Indies
were seen as ‘intimidators’ (see McLennan and Savidge 1996), their Pakistani
 The Cricket World Cup, ‘race’ and carnival 205
counterparts as ball-tampering ‘cheats’ (Oslear and Bannister 1996), and so on.
Most importantly, in this context, an inward-looking nationalism entered English
cricket discourse, bringing with it a preoccupation with ‘the enemy within’.
Within cricket there were mutterings about ‘too many overseas players’ in the
county championship (McLennan 1994), while in 1995 the prestigious Wisden
Cricket Monthly gave an obscure malcontent called Robert Henderson a platform
from which to argue that the England team was failing because too many of its
members were born abroad (Henderson 1995). Beyond the game itself, in 1990
the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit invoked an image of black cricket
lovers from all over south London flocking to the Kennington Oval to see the
West Indies play England. ‘Which side’, he had asked in sinister fashion, ‘do they
cheer for?’ (Marqusee 1994: 137). (For a full account of this affair, see Marqusee
1998.) Furthermore, throughout this period the banners, drums and improvised
percussion beloved of many West Indian cricket fans were banned from English
test grounds.
Yet it was precisely these cultural symbols that the ECB sought to mobilise
in the context of the Cricket World Cup of 1999. The headline on the tour-
nament’s ticket application form was ‘A carnival of cricket?’ accompanied by a
caricatured image of an African-Caribbean man with brightly coloured shirt and
beaming smile. The use of the language of carnival in this context is concerned
with promoting and utilising the notion of ethnic diversity. In short, carnival is
invoked as a ‘non-British’ cultural signifier in a call to Britain’s ethnic minority
communities to become involved in the spectacle and ultimately to buy tickets
for matches. While young white people were included in the publicity materials,
it was unambiguously black people, and particularly black men, who appeared
most prominently in publicity material. At the media launch, steel bands and
calypso music were provided, to add weight to the message, although, pointedly,
there were no pictures of Asian-English cricket fans: for advertising purposes, only
Caribbean people can signify carnival and carry its connotations of spontaneous
amity and social integration (Cohen 1993: 129).
In many ways the reliance on the terminology of carnival as a metaphor for
racial diversity missed the point, since in the main, we suggest, it was the British
Asian community, rather than the steel bands and the sound systems associated
with Caribbean carnival, that was central to the tournament’s success. While
seeking to be inclusive in its appeal, the tournament publicity utilised a largely
discredited and narrowly defined appeal to multiculturalism (see Gilroy 1987,
Solomos 1998) which was completely divorced from cricket and even from the
cultural forms associated with those communities most animated by the game.
The strategy was also dependent upon a refusal to recognise the varying meanings
that the game has in terms of identity formation, so that the ‘new faces of cricket’
were dissolved into the amorphous notion of carnival through which the tour-
nament was defined.
206 Tim Crabbe and Stephen Wagg
Whose carnival?: The 1999 Cricket World Cup

Carnival capers: two faces of English cricket

The billing of the 1999 Cricket World Cup as ‘a carnival of cricket’ was backed
by the promise that:

In an effort to extend the carnival beyond the field of play, the organisers
will encourage communities to become involved in activities around the
Tournament, through culture, music, food and other events for the whole
family – particularly for the young.
(England and Wales Cricket Board 1999)

In reality, there was not much evidence to support this claim. Indeed, rather than
encouraging any transgressive or liberating carnivalesque features, the conditions
of entry supplied with match tickets established an air of prohibition, stating that:

The following items are prohibited and may not be taken into any 1999
Cricket World Cup Match:
• Knives and other offensive weapons
• Fireworks and smoke or gas canisters
• Flares
• Sticks and poles (including flagpoles)
• Klaxons, megaphones and compressed air or gas-operated horns
• Face masks
• Banners
• Fancy dress, or oversize headwear, of a nature which has the potential to
cause injury to its wearer or other spectators, or which could severely
restrict the view of, or be construed as ‘offensive’ to, other spectators
• Bands, other than those with prior agreement in writing from the
organisers
• Any dangerous article or substance not referred to above.

The instructions go on to note that ‘National flags (without flagpoles) will be

permitted, however, their use must not restrict the view of other spectators.
Continued use of musical instruments, which causes annoyance to other spec-
tators, will result in them being confiscated.’ Furthermore, a total ban on the
importation of alcohol was applied at all but seven of the host venues.
Contrary to convention, then, this carnival was apparently to take place
without any of the ‘abandonment to hedonistic excesses, and the psycho-social
jouissance of eating, drinking, singing, joking, swearing, wearing of stylised attire
and costumes’ typically associated with sporting notions of the term (Giulianotti
1995: 194). The organisers’ one concession to their own marketing seems to have
been to book a handful of bands, which, it was hoped, might have the necessary
multicultural feel. These included a Caribbean steel pan band and an (all-white)
 The Cricket World Cup, ‘race’ and carnival 207
jazz quartet, the Bob Bates All Stars. Furthermore, the food on sale in the stadium
concourses seemed only to re-emphasise the unitary ethnic symbolism of English
cricket. Spit-roasted pork conjured up images of white, rural, ‘merrie’ England in
Canterbury, while the fish and chip stall at Headingley in Leeds fried its fare under
a banner declaring ‘Cooked in the Old Fashioned Way’. Even the Sun newspaper,
usually the standard-bearer for an unreflecting, white Englishness, felt obliged to
complain, declaring in the aftermath of India’s clash with Pakistan at Old Trafford
in Manchester, ‘Much of the Asian population of North England descended on
Manchester, but the food was strictly Western. Burgers and bacon butties aplenty,
but not a bhaji or bhuna to be bought’ (Sun, 9 June 1999).
The attitude of the cricket establishment in many ways seemed to be fairly
hostile towards both spectator behaviour and the tournament in general. At
several matches, and particularly those staged at Lord’s, there was a noticeable
absence of ‘members’ in the pavilion and those who did attend were visibly reluc-
tant to become involved in the more expressive forms of spectator interaction. At
Headingley during the match between Pakistan and Australia a middle-aged
white steward, dressed in blazer and tie, passing some celebrating Pakistan
supporters, called out, ‘Gents, can you put your flags down. People are watching
behind’, adding, ‘You can wave them if there’s a wicket.’ The fact that the
supporters behind were as animated as those waving the flags and that Pakistan
were batting seemed to be lost.
The tension between the World Cup’s public face and the attitude of its
more traditional guardians was most dramatically illustrated by an announcement
made at Trent Bridge, when India played New Zealand, midway through the
Indian innings, presumably to the Indian supporters celebrating their side’s
impressive performance. The PA announcer declared that ‘There have been many
complaints about the excessive noise at the bottom of the Radcliffe Road stand.
You are spoiling the enjoyment of the cricket.’ This one-dimensional interpre-
tation of cricketing pleasures was followed a little later by a further declaration:

This announcement applies particularly to those at the bottom of the

Radcliffe Road stand. By not sitting in your seats you are contravening the
safety regulations and obscuring the view of the people behind. Unless you
comply with the regulations you will be removed from the ground and you
will not see any further play.

While cricket’s traditional match goers may have felt some alienation from
these minor cultural insurgencies, the reality is that little appeared to have been
done by the tournament organisers to transform one-day cricket into a truly
multicultural, mass-market game. From the organisers’ and sponsors’ perspective
the tournament was primarily a marketing opportunity and one that was clearly
marked out on racial lines. As Tim Lamb, chief executive of the ECB, put it
after England’s departure, ‘The World Cup is very exciting, very colourful, and it
has done a great deal to promote the game among ethnic communities’ (Guardian,
31 May 1999, p. 1).
208 Tim Crabbe and Stephen Wagg
Reading the carnival: the media, the Cricket World Cup and
sporting stereotypes
Despite the apparent contradictions, the television and print media readily
adopted the concept of carnival as their framework for discussion of the tourna-
ment, recognising the populist value that the slogan offered. Ultimately, however,
full-hearted use of carnival terminology was mitigated, largely by frustration at the
failure of the cricket establishment to embrace their own promotional rhetoric.
From the cynical tone of the Independent on Sunday’s weekly ‘Carnival’ anecdotes
to B. C. Pires’ polemical ‘Who forgot the razzmatazz?’ in the Guardian (3 June
1999, p. 32), there was a steady stream of writing that derided the less than
carnivalesque attitude of the tournament organisers and of the country’s ‘white’
cricket followers. Reporting on the England versus Kenya match at Canterbury,
Paul Weaver reported in the Guardian:

If they transported the Rio Carnival to this city it would perish before the
starchy stare of English middle-classness and yesterday felt as flat as a Jim
Davidson joke; the whole place had the put-out, self-conscious expression
[that the actor] Derek Nimmo might have worn if he had been invited to an
acid house party.
(Guardian, 19 May 1999, p. 28)

This did not prevent the use of carnival imagery in the reporting of the cricket
itself, though. While the Independent on Sunday alliterated with a ‘banquet
of batting, bazaar of bowling and fiesta of fielding’ (13 June 1999), the Express
lamented Bangladesh’s early defeat with ‘Carnival capers can’t lift new boys’
(18 May 1999). Nor was there any failure to recognise the potential that Britain
provided for precisely the kind of carnival that had been promoted, as an ironic
consequence of the game’s colonial roots:

The logic of England’s old position at the centre of the cricketing world has
re-asserted itself. Sure there are bigger grounds elsewhere. But nowhere else
can draw in so many supporters from all the competing countries. It is hard
to believe that anywhere else could stand back, as places like Hove, Bristol,
Worcester and Chelmsford have done, and act as a benignly neutral setting
for all cricket’s different cultures.
(Guardian, 19 May 1999, p. 28)

Yet it is in precisely such contexts, where the language of carnival is invoked as a

metaphor for racial diversity, that the media can themselves unwittingly help to
generate racial, national and cultural stereotypes in the mould of Gilroy’s notion
of ethnic absolutism (1987, 1993). In terms of both the reporting of spectator
behaviour and the adoption of national sporting archetypes, the tournament
produced a catalogue of stereotypical media images.
Reporting on the India versus Pakistan match at Old Trafford, the Sun invoked
and mocked notions of Eastern mysticism with the headline ‘Indian rope trick’
 The Cricket World Cup, ‘race’ and carnival 209
alongside a picture of an Indian player tripping over the boundary rope (9 June
1999). Equally, the Observer, reporting on the first World Cup match to be
played in Dublin, portrayed the classic stereotype of the lazy, drunken Irishman,
declaring that ‘The Irish have the right temperament for cricket. They have few
peers when it comes to whiling away a day, or however long it takes, with drink
and conversation’ (Observer, 23 May 1999, p. 13). Even B. C. Pires’ assertion that
‘The next most important requirement [after sunshine] for a true carnival is black
people’ (Guardian, 3 June 1999, p. 32) does little to move beyond the racialised
motif of the uniquely undisciplined, non-intellectual, sexually promiscuous black
male.
Perhaps more benign, though, was the construction of a typology of contempo-
rary national sporting characteristics. The gloomy introspection of English cricket,
articulated in comments such as ‘When the going gets tough, England, it seems,
barely turn the engine over’ (Guardian Sport, 31 May 1999, p. 1), sits alongside
the representation of isolated, historically grounded, ‘positive’ archetypes such as
Darren Gough. A cheery, affable, passionate and gifted Yorkshireman, in many
ways Gough represents the personification of an uncompromising, white,
Northern working-class ‘British bulldog’ ethnicity.
The concern with this kind of perspective is that it creates a sympathy for
pseudo-biological rationales that all too readily fall into line with deeper-lying
racial stereotypes. As Dr Zafar Altaf, manager of the Pakistan side, put it,

Our cricket is more indigenous. By that I mean it is more about the pleasure
of hitting the ball with the bat and knocking the stumps out of the ground
than being coached in the appropriate and proper way. It is a devil-may-care
approach rather than a cautious approach and it is what gives our cricket so
much variety.
(The Times, 19 June 1999, p. 41)

Even in this self-analysis there is an implied sense of the inconsistency and lack
of temperament often applied both to Asian participation in sport (Bains and
Patel 1996) and to sport in the developing world more generally (O’Donnell
1994). This notion was even more starkly illustrated in the media reporting of
Pakistan’s performance in the World Cup final, which was contrasted with the
solid sporting temperament of the Australians:

Those in the know were always worried that Pakistan would be either
brilliant or brittle. In the event, and sadly, they were very much the latter.
Shot to pieces. Australia were just Australia. They mixed and muddled
through the early rounds but in the past week, when everything mattered in
sudden-death bold relief, they were simply terrific.
(Guardian Sport, 21 June 1999, p. 3)

While there is no disputing the quality of performance by the Australians, within

this framework of reporting there is a readiness to apply characteristics uniformly
210 Tim Crabbe and Stephen Wagg
on the basis of nationality which can all too easily be read along racial lines. After
all, international cricket originally grew out of the modernist, ‘rationalised’ sports
project associated with the British Empire of the nineteenth century (see Holt
1989; Birley 1993: 328–9). In the racialised culture of this empire, white settlers
ruled indigenous ‘coloured’ populations, and part of the pretext for this political
arrangement was the supposedly greater rationality of white people, as against the
sensuality, lack of emotional restraint or intelligence of the ‘native’. In what
Gilroy terms ‘the historic folk grammar of British racism’, ‘animal blacks enjoy an
excess of brute physicality and wily oriental gentlemen conversely display a surfeit
of cerebral power, while only the authentic Anglo-Brit is able to luxuriate in the
perfect equilibrium of body and mind’ (1993: 89).
Within these terms, what is important is not so much the fulfilment of the
respective roles but the Anglocentric designation of desirable ‘sporting’ char-
acteristics and their mapping out within a framework defined on the lines of race
and nation. Interestingly, O’Donnell (1994) has suggested that in an era of
globalised sporting and industrial developments, such typologies reinforce and
exalt the images of Western rationality and technological superiority that sustain
the domination of world economic and political relations by ‘white’ Western
nations and corporations. What is denied within this outlook is what Morgan has
described as ‘the unmistakable presence of Western values and meanings in
international sports and the equally unmistakable ability of indigenous cultures
to cull different values and meanings from those same sports’ (1998: 193).

It is this ‘textual’ plasticity, and not so much the oft noted celebrated ability
of formerly colonised nations to beat their masters at their own games, that
gives subaltern cultures the opportunity to mould Western-minted sports in
their own images, to load them with their own meanings and values, to stamp
them with their own identities.
(ibid.: 193)

Having a carnival: spectators, identity and regulated behaviour

‘Inzamam ate my paratha’: re-defining the cricket crowd

In keeping with the perspective of the ECB, Giulianotti suggests that the modern
carnival is dominated by the perceived need to organise and the identification of
particular spaces in which fans can perform, but he also notes that ‘the carnival-
esque always threatens to transgress the authorised boundaries granted to it’
(1995: 194).
In line with this interpretation, the pre-eminent feature of spectator behaviour
at the 1999 Cricket World Cup was the distinction between the performative
styles of those supporters following South Asian teams and those who were not.
The games involving Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were invariably
played out before capacity crowds, which were dominated, with the exception of
the final, by their own followers.
 The Cricket World Cup, ‘race’ and carnival 211
We conducted participant observation at matches involving two of these sides,1
including Bangladesh versus New Zealand at Chelmsford in Essex and Pakistan
versus Australia at Headingley in Leeds. For each of the sets of supporters
following these two countries the games represented an important cultural space
in which to celebrate both a love of cricket and distinctive elements of their
ethnic identities.
In contrast to the quintessentially stoic image of English cricket, Pakistani fans
approaching Leeds on the day of the Pakistan versus Australia game were adorned
in replica shirts and the green of Pakistan and Islam, flags streamed from car
windows and, as the Headingley ground appeared, the noise was audible from
several streets away. Hooters were sounding and drums banging in the midst of
frequent loud chanting.
Pakistan’s support had been drawn from all sections of the community.
Geographically we came across supporters who had made their way from Glasgow,
Newcastle, Manchester, London and Birmingham, in addition to those from the
Yorkshire area and Pakistan itself. While they were predominantly male, there
were families present, including mothers and daughters, and the age profile
extended from young children through to senior citizens. Socially, there was just
as much diversity. We met manual labourers, storekeepers, university students,
housewives, professionals and entrepreneurs. Most striking, though, was the fact
that although sections of the crowd, which was overwhelmingly (possibly by as
much as 3:1) supporting Pakistan, had a younger profile, the performative,
celebratory style of the fans was relatively uniform across generations and social
backgrounds.
Seated at the Cardigan Road end of the Northern Enclosure before the start of
play, a group of young Pakistani supporters began to shout at a well-built grey-
haired old man with a full white beard dressed all in green with the Pakistan
national emblem on his breast. He turned, while standing, raised his arms full
into the air and, at the top of his voice, cried out a long nationalist chant in Urdu,
to which the whole crowd within earshot replied ‘Pakistan zindabad’ (‘Pakistan
forever’). As he was answered, he would chant again and receive another com-
munal reply, and repeat this process before ending with his arms in the air,
prompting cheers and excited laughter all around.
This was a highly dramatic affair and it was to be repeated many times during
the Pakistani innings. Pakistani supporters seemed to hold this man in some
regard, shaking his hand and urging him to sit with them. A storeman from
Bradford sitting beside us said that the man, who became something of a celebrity
during the tournament, is known as ‘Abdul’ and attended every match that
Pakistan played. He has a revered status among the Pakistan supporters, regardless
of their age or background, partly as a consequence of the complete lack of reserve
in his expression of Islamic and nationalistic sentiment. His self-assurance and
cultural confidence in this arena were total and he was almost oblivious to the
presence of anyone attempting to make their way past him or anyone who was not
part of this celebration.
While celebratory, passionate and humorous, the Pakistan support was also
212 Tim Crabbe and Stephen Wagg
partisan and conscious of the significance of national identities. Individual,
particularly younger, supporters were quite willing to be overtly offensive towards
Australian players, fans crying ‘Shane Warne’s a fat bastard’, ‘Aussies you’re going
XXXX out of the tournament’ and booing Australian fans parading their national
flags. Invoking the continuing hostilities between India and Pakistan, heightened
by the two countries’ recently proclaimed nuclear capacity, Pakistani banners also
declared ‘Danger – demolition in progress’ and also, more pointedly, ‘Pakistan’s
nuclear weapons – Wasim & Showaib – Tested in England’.2
These forms of behaviour were largely taken in good humour, illustrated by the
ironic intervention of a middle-aged Australian who, after sitting through a
prolonged period of impassioned nationalistic chanting, began singing, in solo,
‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. In this way the significance of the reaffirmation of
Islamic identities was to some extent emptied of its meaning beyond the Pakistani
fan collective. The self-effacing recognition of the lack of any meaningful
collective Australian (or, by extension, Anglo-Saxon) equivalent inevitably
handed the definition of the day’s dominant cultural norms to the followers of
Pakistan.
The Pakistani fans’ cultural domination of the event became more and more
apparent as the day progressed, with supporters parading banners along the
footpath around the ground to ecstatic cheers around the stadium. Similarly, at
the Bangladesh versus New Zealand game we observed a column of Bangladeshi
supporters with flags, scarves and bongo drums careering around the ground
chanting ‘Bangladesh! Bangladesh!’ in clear contravention of the ‘conditions of
entry’. Furthermore, in Leeds at least, such behaviour emerged as the cultural
norm to be adopted, with growing animation (largely alcohol induced) on the part
of Australians, who in turn began to parade their own banners and flags, as if to
join the Pakistani party. As Australian wickets began to fall in the afternoon, the
Pakistan supporters celebrated more and more wildly. Hundreds of fans would
jump down into the communal walkways to cheer, run around, hug one another,
wave flags, chant, blow hooters and join human conga chains. As Thompson has
suggested, in such contexts the ‘tension between the anticipation of a pleasurable
experience and the possibility of the experience being painful lends a peculiar
intensity to the consumption of pleasure’ (1983: 128). Where identification with
the Pakistani team had been so complete and desire for victory so great, this
intensity was overwhelming. It was an even more intense version of the spectacle
witnessed during Eid celebrations in Rusholme, Manchester, when young Muslims
drive their cars while sounding horns and waving flags (see Werbner 1996: 107).
For these supporters, this was a day when they could truly enjoy a sporting event
in an atmosphere not stifled by the restrictive normative codes of English cricket
or the white, working-class masculinity that can dominate expressive supporter
culture in English football grounds (see Back et al. 2001). Furthermore, this was a
cultural space in which they could express their loyalty to Pakistan and Islam
without deferring to the controlled, rule-bound formulations of Islamic high
culture. As Werbner has argued, ‘it is in the field of sport, through support of the
national team, that young British Pakistanis express their love of both cricket and
 The Cricket World Cup, ‘race’ and carnival 213
the home country, along with their sense of alienation and disaffection from
British society’ (1996: 101). However, for many supporters the celebration of
support for Pakistan and other South Asian teams appeared to be as much to do
with the restrictive and repressed nature of English cricket, both on and off the
pitch, as a rejection of England and the English per se.
After the crowd had loudly celebrated a boundary by Saeed Anwar, those young
supporters who had earlier been waving to ‘Abdul’ had a mocking conversation
about the marketing of the World Cup. One of them looked up at an advertising
hoarding and declared ‘Carnival of cricket – ha, if it was England it would be
“Jolly good shot, well played.”’ His friends laughed, two of them chipping in with
‘Anyone for strawberries?’ and ‘I say, what a good delivery’ in simulated ‘posh’
accents. While exaggerated, these readings of ‘Englishness’ were being rejected by
young British Pakistanis who, at the same time, were embracing other, less racially
coded elements of English culture, including an ironic humour, regional accents,
references to domestic football and Western attire.
Despite the remark from Bob, a middle-aged white man from just outside
Bradford with a heavy West Yorkshire accent, ‘It’s what it’s all about this – cricket
at Headingley’, expressed without a hint of irony, it was clear that this was
certainly not what cricket at Headingley had been about in the past, and it is
doubtful that the ECB saw this as part of its vision of cricket’s future. The cultural
forms in this shrine to traditional Yorkshire values were being completely
transformed within a carnivalesque context that made no concessions towards
English cricketing norms.
It was in contrast to the emphasis placed on the social function of carnival and
festivity by writers such as Durkheim and Van Gennep (see Bristol 1985) that
Bakhtin (1973) focused on the role of the carnivalesque in similar processes of
‘transgression’. Gardiner makes the point that Bakhtin’s ‘interest in Carnival
indicates a definite (if largely unarticulated) politics of culture that expressed the
desire to understand and encourage the “popular deconstruction” of official
discourse and ideologies’ (1991: 38). In Gardiner’s interpretation, for Bakhtin,

popular festivals and rituals carved out a ‘second life’ for the people within
the womb of mainstream society, a world where the normal rules of social
conduct were (at least temporarily) suspended and life was ‘shaped according
to a certain pattern of play.
(1991: 33)

Nevertheless, the carnivalesque practices described here did not preclude the
embracing of broader non-establishment notions of Englishness as illustrated by
the fans chanting of ‘Aussies going home’ to the tune of the rather Anglocentric
Euro 96 English football anthem ‘Football’s Coming Home’. Indeed, for some
supporters, and more particularly supporters of Bangladesh, there was even
surprise at the degree of interest in the cricket. As one British-born Bangladeshi,
who lived in Bedford and supported Liverpool, remarked, ‘I’m surprised at the
Bangladeshi turnout. We’re mostly into football.’ Indeed, Morgan has argued that
214 Tim Crabbe and Stephen Wagg
what makes [international sport] a curious cultural language is that it is
difficult to categorize, at least by our conventional (Western and Eastern)
cultural standards. For it is too steeped in those disparate cultural traditions
to be passed off as a kind of Esperanto and yet too diffusely constituted from
them to be sloughed off as a sectarian cultural expression.
(1998: 187)

Carnival? What carnival?: Cultural boundaries and the

capacity for carnival
In contrast to the vibrancy experienced elsewhere, at the Australia versus the
West Indies match at Old Trafford the abiding image was one of general disen-
chantment, frustration and even boredom. This was fuelled by a number of
factors, including the complete failure of the cricket to live up to expectations,
with the West Indies all out for 110 and the Australians manipulating their own
run rate.3 It was tedious stuff and soon led even committed supporters of the
competing teams to become distracted. The West Indian supporters in particular
bore few of the carnivalesque features that had typified their engagement with the
game in the 1970s and that had re-emerged in other forms among British-based
followers of Jamaica during the 1998 football World Cup (see Back et al. 1998).
The tournament did not enthuse Britain’s African-Caribbean community in
anything like the same manner that it did with South Asian cricket followers. The
majority of spectators at this game were white England fans, and it is easy to see
how the cultural identifications being made in this context would not necessarily
be attractive to the local black community, despite their general support for the
West Indies.
Historically, cricket played a defining role in the construction of Caribbean
identities (James 1994; Beckles and Stoddart 1995). However, West Indian
cricket has been in decline for some time, particularly among younger generations
of supporters, who are increasingly drawn by the rival attractions of English
football and American basketball (Beckles 1998). Furthermore, while beating
England, or even Australia, may once have had some cultural significance for
descendants of oppressed colonial people, that relationship now has less meaning,
particularly in a context where the England team has fallen outside cricket’s elite.
Equally, while the flamboyant performances of Pakistan and, to a lesser extent,
India continue to inspire and generate a passion for the game, the West Indies are
nothing like the dominant force in world cricket that they were for much of the
1970s and 1980s. The notion of ‘a carnival of cricket’ might also have been
particularly galling to cricket followers who had witnessed the systematic efforts
of the English cricket establishment to destroy the carnivalesque features of West
Indian support during those earlier periods of sporting success.
The behaviour of England’s ‘Barmy Army’ (see Williams 1998), who indulge
in the wearing of floppy hats, cross-dressing and coordinated fancy dress, rejecting
the reserve and tradition associated with English cricket, has not overcome those
suspicions. Such styles are still far removed from the self-regulated dance hall
 The Cricket World Cup, ‘race’ and carnival 215
culture and characteristics of carnival witnessed among revellers in Notting Hill
and Port of Spain. Their relationship with certain features drawn from normative
English football fan cultures can create its own ethnically marked exclusive feel
which remains unattractive to the ‘reggae boyz and gyals’ who travelled to France
for the football World Cup (see Back et al. 1998).
In this respect it is worth noting that 5,000 black fans had braved the rain and
cold in Cardiff to watch a nil–nil draw between the Jamaican national football
team and Wales in March the previous year, and

the reason they were [there] in these terrible conditions was that they felt
this to be their team and their game. As the mass of black fans looked out
onto Ninian Park and the Jamaican team, on this cold wet night they saw
themselves.
(Back et al. 1998: 24)

The cultural insularity and contingent racial inclusions that characterise British
spectator sports are what discourage a greater commitment by black fans to cricket
in England and the establishment of an emotional bond between them and the
English game.
What is interesting, however, is that for South Asian cricket fans, even those
Bangladesh supporters who profess to follow football more closely than cricket,
the Cricket World Cup seems to provide precisely the cultural space that France
98 provided for supporters of the Jamaican football team. Werbner has argued that

Just as male elders create the cultural genres and social spaces where Pakistani
nationalism is celebrated officially or religious worship is conducted in the
utmost seriousness, so too young men and women create the cultural agendas
and social spaces for fun and amusement, for consumption and imaginative
artistic expression, which also celebrate nationalism and religiosity, but
through unofficial genres of parody or sport.
(1996: 105)

This process might extend beyond Pakistan, one supporter commenting during
the Bangladesh versus New Zealand match that ‘this is the first time we have been
able to wave our flag in this country. This is a matter of identity and pride and
we’re trying to make the players feel at home’ (Express, 18 May 1999, p. 64).

‘And Abdul’s made it’: the contingent inclusion of racialised others

Thompson suggests that ‘carnival challenges the authority of “social laws”. It is
a rebellious event in which prohibitions and their transgression co-exist and
so specify an ambiguous representation’ (1983: 133). The ambiguity of this
relationship could not have been clearer than when the organisers of the Cricket
World Cup simultaneously gave licence to the carnival while establishing the
prohibitions that would govern it. Guilianotti has suggested that it is in precisely
216 Tim Crabbe and Stephen Wagg
such circumstances, where the authorities attempt to organise and gain control of
the festivities, that the very essence of carnival is neutralised (1991: 520), since
there can then be no prospect of an ‘inversion of the rules that discipline everyday
life’ (Fiske 1989: 139).
In the event, the tournament ‘conditions of entry’ were routinely ignored,
although a form of ‘moral panic’ did blow up in relation to a series of peaceful,
if exuberant, pitch invasions, predominantly by Asian spectators, at the end
of a number of games. The reporting of the Cricket World Cup was largely
sympathetic to the role played by Britain’s ethnic minority communities, but
these concerns were in some senses emblematic of a deeper insecurity on the part
of the cricket authorities about the direction in which cricket is moving and the
kinds of supporter behaviour that are emerging.
In the build-up to Pakistan’s showdown match with India at Old Trafford, the
Sun published images of an Indian cricket crowd on the run from police above
the headline ‘Indian chaseaway . . . baton wielding riot police charge in Calcutta
as defeat gets fans upset’ (8 June 1999, pp. 38–9). The paper went on to report that
‘the game at Old Trafford will be backed by the biggest security operation ever at
a cricket match in England’. Even more sensationally, the Guardian reported that
‘War is often used as a metaphor for sport but rarely can it have been as accurate
as for today’s World Cup Super Six match between India and Pakistan’ (8 June
1999, p. 28).
In the event, the game passed off without incident, but behind the predictable
hype, given the domestic tension between the two nations, lay a deeper insecu-
rity on the part of the cricket establishment. Jim White reported from the game
that

Old Trafford was a wonderful sight. The crowd loud, colourful, ceaselessly
good natured, a timely reminder to those who would seek to orchestrate
things by playing Queen hits at maximum volume that the best atmosphere
is always self regulated. . . . Everywhere the ground was packed. Everywhere,
that is except on the upper tier of the pavilion, where Lancashire members
of what might be termed the Telegraph letter-writing tendency stayed away.
(Guardian Sport, 12 June 1999, p. 5)

However, it was not just hidden faces within the cricket establishment that
silently expressed concern about these cultural shifts. There were also lines of
discontinuity within the broader cricket-supporting public. During the match
between Pakistan and Australia at Headingley, at one point we were sitting beside
two white supporters, Steve and Paul from South Yorkshire. Steve had just been
in a dispute with a Pakistan supporter. He commented with incredulity, ‘I can’t
believe it. I’ve never bin digged [punched] by a Paki before, some poor cunt’s
gonna cop for that, someone’ll get it by end’t day. I’ll be kicked out before long
now.’ His friend Paul, who was wearing an England football shirt, was trying to
settle him down but Steve went on: ‘One of ’em hit me in’t side of head and then
pulled back his jacket like this [simulates the drawing of a weapon] as if to say,
 The Cricket World Cup, ‘race’ and carnival 217
“come and ’ave a go”.’ Paul replied, ‘Tha’s the problem, they [Pakistanis] all carry
a blade or a stick, don’t the’.’
These young men were deeply resentful both of the Pakistan supporters’
domination of the event and of the behavioural norms that had been established
in the course of this domination. They were continually asked to sit down by
supporters sitting behind them and, in Steve’s case, were very aggressive in
manner, using offensive language without concern for who might hear it. Steve
in particular seemed determined that he would make no concessions. It became
clear that he had a deep animosity towards Asians and, in the context of this
game, towards Pakistan and Pakistan supporters. As hooters were sounded and
cheering and celebrations met the fall of an Australian wicket, he asserted, ‘These
Pakis have been pissing me off all day. We should get stuck right into ’em.
Problem is, it’s just one of thousands of ’em.’ He then began to illustrate his
support for Australia. This was, however, clearly caged within a racial matrix of
opposition to Pakistan and support for their white opponents, best illustrated
by the starting up of a variation of an England football team song by Steve, Paul
and four friends who had joined them:

Keep St George in my heart, keep me English

Keep St George in my heart, I pray
Keep St George in my heart, Keep me English
Fuck the Pakis and the IRA
No surrender, no surrender, no surrender to the IRA

In the football context there is no reference to ‘Pakis’, but on this occasion a

specific emphasis was placed on the word. They sang the verse several times and
followed it with a rendition of a number of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club
supporter songs less obviously concerned with race or nation. Before long, Steve
decided to stand up behind his seat, apparently in order to provoke a confron-
tation. He was assailed with requests to sit down but stubbornly refused to do so.
He kept stating that ‘I’m not being told to sit down by a Paki in my own country.’
Eventually a Pakistan supporter with a heavy London accent came over and asked
him to sit down, to which he replied ‘Fuck off.’ Several other Pakistan supporters
then came over as an argument ensued and Paul intervened to tell them that he
would get Steve to sit down. Within a few moments another Australian wicket
fell, pandemonium broke out and Steve again jumped up. He seemed to be almost
willing someone to give him the opportunity to strike them and eventually picked
on an innocent-looking, slender young man whose flag he grabbed and verbally
abused, declaring, ‘This is fucking England, not Pakistan.’ The supporter appeared
unintimidated and held his flag in front of Steve’s face, repeatedly chanting,
‘Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan . . .’ until Steve eventually walked away.
This behaviour was in marked contrast to that of a group of white Yorkshire
fans sitting nearby, several of whom got up to dance around and chant with the
Pakistan fans as the Australian wickets fell, despite their own nominal support
for Australia. Their enjoyment of the day was not contingent upon cultural
218 Tim Crabbe and Stephen Wagg
domination. It was not even contingent on sporting success. Nevertheless, these
various forms of behaviour all emerged out of a context in which the white
supporters and supporters of Asian extraction were implicitly assumed to be, and
largely adopted the role of, sporting adversaries, whether that opposition was
explicitly racialised and aggressively played out or not.
Ultimately this was the dilemma faced by the Cricket World Cup ‘carnival’.
The tournament was reliant upon support for each of the competing countries
emerging from descendant and expatriate communities living in Britain. Indeed,
much has been made of the contribution that those communities, and particularly
those supporting sides from the Indian subcontinent, brought to the tournament.
However, this was at all times played out within a framework that established
those communities as the exotic, transgressive element. While Abdul could be
celebrated as a carnival ‘character’, with David Gower commenting on the day
of the final as the camera focused in on him, ‘And Abdul’s made it’, there remains
an apprehensive attitude towards the young Pakistani supporters who look up
to him. There is a fear and alienation within sections of the cricket establish-
ment towards the ‘new’ cultural forms displayed during the World Cup and there
are continuing deep anxieties within the white community about the threat of
‘alien’ ways to traditional, or ‘white’, English culture. More benignly, there is a
concern to keep the expressive tradition of South Asian youth culture under
control.
Within the context of the Cricket World Cup these fears were largely
suspended by the majority white community. However, the general rejection of
the relevance of the ‘Tebbit test’ remains largely contingent upon the specific
cultural conditions of the Cricket World Cup. While a variety of national and
religious identities were given legitimacy in the sporting context, those identities
and the racial stereotypes that are derived from them might prove more
problematic when expressed and embodied in other settings. This is not to play
down the degree of cultural interchange that took place during the tournament.
Rather, it is to caution against the limitations of liberal multiculturalism in the
context of a sporting form that increasingly lies outside mainstream traditional
notions of English national culture. There is also the concern that with a focus on
international cricket, understandings of the game, of how it is played and of how
it should be watched will fall into a binary, racially coded, matrix of opposition
between Western nations and ‘Asian’ nations, through which the Asian is
depicted as the deviant ‘other’.

Conclusion: carnival and the World Cup, 1999

We contend that the English cricket establishment had hoped to procure a
‘carnival’ on their own terms, carefully circumscribed by a set of detailed prohi-
bitions, commodified and sold to corporate sponsors. These prohibitions, in turn,
emanated from a racism that dominated public discourse in Britain between the
late 1960s and the early 1990s – a racism assuming the British to be a beleaguered
island race of white people menaced by dark intruders whose way of life was
 The Cricket World Cup, ‘race’ and carnival 219
different from their own. For many in the English cricket establishment of the late
1990s, drumming, chanting and standing on your seat still represent an alien
culture. In this sense the officially ECB-sanctioned notion of ‘carnival’ was about
policing and restraining the transgressive carnivalesque practices of alien cultural
styles. The preferred approach was to promote an Olympian-style pageant of
national differences, reaffirming an established, ethnically marked version of the
world and its relationship with English cricket.
Nevertheless, supporters from ethnic minority communities at the tournament,
careless both of official restrictions and of the qualms of MCC members and the
partakers of corporate hospitality, effectively redefined the ECB’s prescribed
carnival and reasserted the essential values recognised by Bakhtin. In doing so
they not only faced down the more overt versions of this racism but, at the same
time, conveyed something of the complexity and contingent nature of ethnicities
in contemporary Britain. Sometimes people are Bangladeshi, sometimes they’re
English, sometimes they cheer for the old country and sometimes, though born in
Bedford, they cheer for Liverpool . . . and so on.
To the English cricket authorities the World Cup of 1999, with its cheerily
hijacked carnival, may have begun to force an acceptance that the future of the
game is intimately intertwined with the black and Asian communities, whose
loyalty was not long ago called into question. No more telling indication that this
was being recognised could be found than the reception given to England’s first
post-carnival test squad by the Daily Mail, long regarded as the voice of conser-
vative British suburbs and the paper that employed Tebbit as a columnist. All
those selected, wrote correspondent Mike Dickson, were

English and proud of it but rarely can a collection of elite players from this
country have boasted such a diverse heritage. Under the new captaincy of
Anglo-Indian Nasser Hussain were Mark Butcher, Alex Tudor, Mark
Ramprakash and Dean Headley (of all or part West Indian descent), Aftab
Habib (Pakistani), Alan Mullally (Irish-Australian) and Andrew Caddick
(New Zealand).

Afterword, ‘In the interests of health and safety . . .’,

July 2003
Four years on from the World Cup, an opportunity arises in midsummer 2003 for
the revisitation of some of these arguments. It is Sunday 6 July. The Indian A team
are touring the UK and are in the East Midlands to play Leicestershire.
Leicester has a history of immigration from India that dates back to the late
1940s. Latterly, a large contingent of the Indian families expelled from Uganda
in 1971 came to Leicester. By common consent, the town, half of whose
population is now Asian or Asian descended, has amicable community relations,
albeit that the principal areas of Asian residence are concentrated between
Belgrave Gate (the Nottingham road to the east) and the London Road, to the
south.
220 Tim Crabbe and Stephen Wagg
Few Leicester Asians have been drawn to the county cricket ground. But this
in no way reflects the level of community integration, simply because no ethnic
group comes to the county’s Grace Road ground in significant numbers. Earlier in
the season, when Leicestershire signed the exciting Indian batsman Virender
Sehwag, the Guardian cricket writer David Hopps wrote eloquently about the
possibility that Asian Leicester could now be bonded to the county team: ‘But
a large influx must bring with it changes. What, for example, will young Anglo
Indians make of The Meet, Grace Road’s mournful old tea room, where weary
faces stare at the game through a fug of fried bacon fumes?’
He quotes a local Asian restaurant owner: ‘It’s time to bring on the samosas
and the bhajis’ (Hopps 2003). But the player’s presence has not brought the
hoped-for upsurge of Asian interest and Sehwag has gone back to India with a ‘bad
back’ – an administrative euphemism, it’s rumoured around the ground, for
homesickness. Today, though, for obvious reasons, a relatively large number of
Asian families have shown up. Quite a few wear the pale blue shirt of the Indian
one-day side and there is a mildly boisterous air to their spectatorship; someone
has a drum, for example, which he beats enthusiastically, and there is some
chanting. But at the same time, little else about this unaccustomed presence of
local Asians has any ethnic specificity about it. The children roam the ground,
play bat-and-ball games, seek autographs (from both teams), queue with their
parents for ice creams, wander in and out of the club shop . . . In principle,
perhaps, they might even like to join a club that some of its members feel may be
on the verge of extinction.
But the club’s response to them, though apparently well-meaning, is peremp-
tory. The man in charge of the public address system, a local accountant and sports
coach, is a benevolent person, dedicated to the club. But his manner is Edwardian.
In his lexicon, play doesn’t start – it ‘commences’, and moves not to a close but to
a ‘cessation’. No sooner had some apparently harmless drumming and chanting
begun to emanate from a cluster of young Asian men close to the pavilion than he
is at the microphone instructing them to stop ‘in the interests of all spectators’.
They now move to the other side of the ground and resume drumming.
Later, when some young Asian boys are seen sitting on the grass behind the
boundary rope, but within the white picket fence that surrounds the field, he is
once again on the loudspeakers, telling them that to occupy such a position
is ‘contrary to health and safety regulations’ and that they must move. But an
anomaly is immediately apparent. A row of white, middle-aged couples are also
sitting, either within the fence or in a place where the fence recesses to make
space for the covers that protect the wicket. However, because, in addition to
their whiteness and adulthood, they have a range of reassuring signifiers – sensible
folding chairs, thermoses, Sunday Telegraph crosswords, picnic baskets . . . – they
have been, no doubt unconsciously, exempted from the ‘health and safety
regulations’.
Leicester’s Asian kids, like so many of the people observed in this chapter, have
fallen foul of a racialised sense of order imposed by an institution veering at times
perilously close to commercial oblivion.
 The Cricket World Cup, ‘race’ and carnival 221
Notes
1 The research reported here is the result of a joint effort by the authors. We each
attended matches during the 1999 Cricket World Cup independently but for the sake
of linguistic simplicity our accounts are reported here in the plural.
2 Wasim Akram and Showaib Akhtar were the two principal fast-paced ‘strike’ bowlers
in the Pakistan team.
3 In a clear manipulation of the tournament rules, after ‘ensuring’ victory the
Australians deliberately slowed their own rate of scoring, taking 13 overs to score 19
runs. This had the effect of improving the West Indies’ net run rate vis-à-vis New
Zealand, who also had a chance of proceeding to the next stage of the tournament.
Results from the first round were to be carried over to the next ‘Super Sixes’ round,
and since Australia had beaten the West Indies and lost to New Zealand, it served
their interests to see the West Indies progress at New Zealand’s expense.

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11 Sheffield Caribbean
The story of a Yorkshire cricket
club
Chris Searle

How did a relatively small but determined and multi-talented arrivant Caribbean
community fare when it came to live in a northern English city, dominated by
heavy industry, in the closing decades of the twentieth century? There are many
possible starting points to a study of this kind, and many aspects of these trans-
planted lives to begin to chronicle. It would not surprise anyone who knows and
admires the writings of the Trinidadian C. L. R. James (James 1986) to be told
that one of these roads is cricket. For the story of one particular South Yorkshire
cricket club, Sheffield Caribbean, is much more than a Saturday sports story: it is
the story of a new urban community and its burgeoning culture beset with a
plethora of problems and difficult challenges. It is also a narrative of growth, skill,
tenacity and struggle in the face of these problems and challenges.
Any local cricket club can become an institutional expression of the wider
social and political life of its members – more so when it begins to represent the
civic progress of a minority urban community. Here, the structural barriers met by
the club and its players can seem like a metaphor for the daily bureaucratic or
racist skirmishes encountered by its people and their organisations. The club’s
confrontations with league officials and umpires, the hostile attitudes of some rival
clubs and their players, or the administrators at the higher-echelon regional
institutions of their sport (in this case, Yorkshire County Cricket Club and its
outmoded and exclusive rules, conventions and values) all stand as parallels with
the community’s daily stand-offs with mainstream institutions. In this context,
dealing with cricket officialdom is simply an extension of other dealing: with the
courts, with the police or with local and sometimes even national government
departments and agencies. How much do the cricketers, seeking sporting success
and a sense of cultural emancipation, extend their activism into the struggles of
mainstream and political life?
Yorkshire is England’s most celebrated (and frequently caricatured) cricketing
county. Scratch a cricket ball, it may be said, and you will uncover a Yorkshire
face, and unlike the cricket countenances of the southern counties, it will often
be an urban face. Cricket in South Yorkshire, for example, has close associations
with working-class lives and institutions, with factories and pits and with working
men’s clubs and works sides.
224 Chris Searle
According to the Channel Four cricket commentator Dermot Reeve, 20
per cent of all club cricket played in England is played in Yorkshire, which has
a totality (in 2003) of 721 clubs playing in its various leagues (Channel Four,
broadcast from Headingley cricket ground, 24 August 2003). It is only during the
past decade that Yorkshire County Cricket Club has turned its back on over
a century of parochialism and bigotry and allowed non-Yorkshire-born cricketers
to play for the county. This began with the contracting of world talents such
as Richie Richardson of Antigua and Sachin Tendulkar of India to boost the
chances of Yorkshire CCC in the county championship. These changes prefigured
new opportunities not only for Englishmen born outside Yorkshire (the present
England captain, the Lancashire-born and Sheffield-bred Michael Vaughan
being the most prominent recruit), but, more pertinently in the context of
this essay, for young urban black cricketers with Caribbean or Pakistani roots.
These cricketers came typically from migrant families who for decades had
lived, worked and paid their council tax in Yorkshire cities. Yet even these
developments have not significantly changed the associations that the county
club has had with racism and exclusion. As recently as January 2003, Yorkshire’s
then captain, the Australian Test batsman Darren Lehmann, was charged by
the ICC with making racist remarks about the Sri Lanka one-day interna-
tional team after a World Cup preliminary match (Hoult 2003: 29). Even now
(January 2004), no Yorkshire-born or -based black cricketer has ever played
for Yorkshire. The past continues, savagely kicking, within the changes of the
present.

Caribbean Sheffield: the making of a community

A Caribbean community grew within Sheffield from the mid-1950s onwards. An
elite group of university academics and doctors developed around the influence of
Professor (of law) Roy Marshall, a Barbadian who was a cousin of his namesake
who played in the triumphant West Indies touring team of 1950 and later scored
prolifically for Hampshire in the English County Championship. The professor
became the elected chair of Sheffield’s first West Indian Association, which
welcomed arriving students, nurses and steelworkers to the city and on their
behalf campaigned for better reception and treatment. A shortage of transport
workers in Sheffield provoked a relocation of Caribbean bus drivers (mainly of
Jamaican, Barbadian or Grenadian origin) from London. These black soon-to-
become Sheffielders joined a longer-sojourned group, mainly of ex-servicemen
who had either jumped ship in Liverpool and made their way across the Pennines
to South Yorkshire or were RAF returnees who had chosen to settle in the city
after demobilisation.
Very soon the community’s cricketers began to filter out through the city’s
established clubs and found themselves playing for occupation-based teams such as
Sheffield Transport or steelworks sides such as Firth Brown, Davy’s, Forgemasters,
Tinsley Wire or Hadfields. Although many of the cricketing newcomers found
acceptance and friendship within these clubs, others experienced isolation,
 Sheffield Caribbean 225
unwelcoming clubhouses, pubs and other after-match venues, and suspicious,
sometimes hostile, teammates and opponents. Hence the growth of informal
Sunday ‘friendlies’ between a nomadic, groundless team of Sheffield Caribbean
cricketers and other Caribbean teams in London (to which some of the new black
Sheffielders still retained strong social and sporting links), Leeds and Lancashire
cities. This trend only fed the appetite for the formation of a specifically
Caribbean club in Sheffield – particularly as the city’s West Indian Association
was becoming more confident and assured and was now based in local church
premises. As family life became more consolidated with the sending for partners
and children, and community growth within specific neighbourhoods such as
Pitsmoor (where many Jamaicans settled) and Nether Edge in the south of the
city (which became the preferred locality for Grenadians), Sheffield became, in
effect, another Caribbean island, integrally linked to the wider West Indian
diaspora.
In 1967, Sheffield’s first youth club for young Caribbeans was formed in a
glorified Nissen hut in Crookesmoor, largely the work of Sue Atkins, a recently
arrived detached youth worker, who worked from the streets and other informal
venues to stimulate positive activities among estranged Caribbean youth. While
the West Indian Association took up the prevailing issues around the local black
youth – school underachievement, the lack of resources and police hostility
among them – the youth club (initially condemned by national government as a
sectarian institution, while strongly supported by the local council) mobilised
local black youth. This mobilisation was particularly around sports excellence and
culture and, through successful activity building, it legitimised the idea of a black
sports club.
A part of the new club’s function was to train and empower young Sheffield
black people to grapple with local bureaucracy and to develop a new and young
community leadership in all aspects of essential social life, including sport. Young
Caribbean cricket enthusiasts wanted to move from school cricket to club cricket,
and were keen to form a team. Their approaches to Sheffield Council Recreation
Department secured a ground in Firth Park in the north of the city. But this
somewhat notorious site stood on an excessively steep slope and had already been
refused by many other applicant clubs. Moreover, the Caribbean rejection of it
coincided with a practising group of the club’s young players being chased out of
Millhouses Park, in the south of the city, by council officials.
Eventually, in 1967, cooperation between the Education Department and
the friendly head teacher of Athelstan Junior School in south-east Sheffield
secured use of both the school ground and its changing rooms. The West Indian
Association provided kit, and the new team soon showed its worth, winning the
Sheffield Youth Club League for the first three seasons of its existence. By 1970
the team had joined the lowest division of the senior Norton and District League
and had ‘poached’ back several talented black players from local, predominantly
white, clubs. By 1974, having won the first four divisions of this league, year by
year, Sheffield Caribbean could look forward to Premier Division status, where
neutral umpires were a part of the established provision.
226 Chris Searle
Certainly match officials, in the Caribbean’s experience, had hitherto seemed
anything but impartial. Mike Atkins, a Barbadian who arrived in Sheffield in 1962
and became an irrepressible community activist (eventually qualifying as a careers
officer and becoming the first director of Sheffield City Council’s Race Equality
Unit), was also a fervent cricketer. He remembers two league umpires in
particular, known by Sheffield cricketers far and wide as ‘Trigger’ and ‘Fiddler’. As
to the former, Atkins recalls:

He couldn’t hardly see. He could only see that you were black. I remember
one match, played on a farmer’s field at Mosborough [in south-east Sheffield],
when he gave all ten of our wickets lbw, while as we batted the local crowd
kept coming forward from behind the boundary, throwing the ball back and
preventing us scoring any fours. Their wicketkeeper was constantly sledging
us with racist comments and yet our players were reported as ‘swearing in our
own language’. We were officially told of the league’s ‘benefit of the doubt
lbw syndrome’ towards the batsman, but we never saw it’.

Such graphic reminiscences are almost cinematic in their metaphorical power.

They give a snapshot of a community under siege, yet still defiant. Atkins also
recalls a barrage of criticism from league officials through their match reports: ‘no
grass on the pitch’, ‘no sightscreens’, ‘poor changing room facilities’, ‘substandard
teas’, and all this proceeding while Sheffield Caribbean was winning the league’s
Premier Division and the inter-divisional cup. Sunday matches were still
nomadic, with the team participating in the Clive Lloyd League and regular
‘friendlies’ with Caribbean teams from, among other places, Luton, Liverpool,
Birmingham, Leicester and various London boroughs.

Fire versus fire

The late 1970s and early 1980s were the era of what became known in the British
press and public consciousness as ‘the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’,
centred around the political progress of Sheffield’s left-leaning Labour city
council. In 1982 the council established its Race Equality Unit, and activists
within the City’s black communities began to see some positive municipal
responses to their long-held concerns. This was despite the gulf in commitment
between some conscientious elected councillors and the many still virtually
unaffected council officers. But away from the inner areas of the city, where black
Sheffielders mostly lived, and towards the outskirts of Sheffield, the ‘White
Highlands’ and the county borderlands with north Derbyshire, where many
local clubs had their grounds, there had been little penetration of the ideas
and remedial practices of racial justice. This partly explains the Caribbean’s
experiences in Mosborough, a sprawling suburb, mostly of new estates, in the
south-east of Sheffield and edging Derbyshire where National Front activity was
developing. A 15-year-old local schoolgirl had written the following about the
experiences of a black friend and her family, who lived near Mosborough:
 Sheffield Caribbean 227
I live in Mosborough on the southern side of Sheffield. Recently in the local
newspaper I read a report that the Ku Klux Klan are operating in and around
Derbyshire. I found this very worrying as Derbyshire is next to Mosborough.
A week later my friend was beaten up. Sharon lives in Eckington, near
Mosborough, which is an all-white area. Her and her family have lived there
for seventeen years. The family were having a driveway built at the front of
the house. They had laid the concrete. While it was still wet someone had
written ‘NF – Get out you black bastards’.

The family were very shocked.

Then a gang Sharon knew turned on her. Sharon had known these people all
her life. In one of her friend’s houses she found some NF leaflets and newspapers.
She confronted her friends about them. The five boys turned on her and her white
friend. She was very badly beaten up and ended up in hospital with two broken
ribs. Her white friend was also beaten up and called a ‘Nigger Lover’ (Earl Marshal
School 1993: 189).
Cricket in the Sheffield area is also profoundly affected by the ‘We don’t
play it for fun’ ethic, which is paramount throughout Yorkshire cricket – the idea
that the game must be played hard and any expedient must be employed in order
to win. Thus, the Sheffield Caribbean played much of their cricket in the midst
of a ‘Mosborough world’, a context where extreme gamesmanship and racist
ignorance intersected, and the boundaries between the two were often too murky
to discern. ‘This is the way we play it Yorkshire, so you’d best get used to it’ was
often the riposte to protests mounted by the Caribbean, who soon learned to fight
Yorkshire cricket fire with fire of their own – so much so that the team became
widely respected and feared across Sheffield cricket leagues as ‘the team to beat’
– the strongest club side (outside the Yorkshire Council League) in the City. They
brought with their cricket the powerful social and political achievement of having
come both from outside and below to a position of cricketing distinction and
excellence. This, in itself, carried a message that defied racism and caused many
ordinary cricket-playing Sheffielders to rethink their previous attitudes and
prejudices.

The summer of 1981

The inner-city resistance during the summer of 1981 of Brixton, Toxteth and
Bristol found its own unique expression in Sheffield. A match with the South
Yorkshire Police ‘was one game we wouldn’t play’, remembers Mike Atkins. This
was despite earnest invitations by the constabulary and the undertaking by
Sheffield black churches to organise a team. ‘They tried to buy us off with YOP
[Youth Opportunities Programme] programmes, in return for our cooperation,
particularly as tension grew, with increased recourse to “stop and search” tactics
and harassment of young black men in the city centre.’ A series of meetings
between community activists, supportive left-Labour councillors and the South
Yorkshire Police devised a peacekeeping strategy. A youth leader, Leroy Wenham,
228 Chris Searle
would be the link if there was a problem of increased tension. When a group of
20 to 30 black youths congregated near Castle Market, there was a serious police
overreaction. Wenham was called in to defuse the situation, but soon found
himself arrested, along with a number of black youngsters, and was finally
convicted of obstruction. All Sheffield Caribbean players now pulled out of the
appointed match between the police and the black churches, as an expression of
solidarity with the arrested youths. ‘It showed us very clearly how the police were
prepared to use cricket, the game we loved, as a tool,’ declared Atkins, as he
recalled a visit soon after these events from the Home Secretary and a meeting
with the police, in which black cricket activists in all quarters of the city were
condemned as uncooperative and troublemakers.

Cricket and black community unity

Perhaps the Sheffield Caribbean cricketers’ experience in their home city was
different from that in many other English cities in one vital respect. From the
outset there was little or no insularity between cricketers originating from
the different islands across the Caribbean nation – hence the pride of unity
behind the club’s name – and, beyond this, the club fostered an authentic racial
and cultural inclusiveness. From 1967 onwards the resources of the youth club
were shared with youth from Sheffield’s Yemeni, Bangladeshi and Pakistani
communities, and Caribbean youth activists gave support to these communities
in their own struggles for council-controlled resources. From its very beginnings
the cricket club always welcomed Asian players, and long-time players remember
‘an Asian quota’ as part of team selection. When some conservative mosque
leaders opposed the formation of a secular and democratic Pakistani youth club
close to the Caribbean model, the youth of both communities organised at close
quarters.
Sheffield Caribbean’s most eminent cricketing product is the Derbyshire (and
latterly Northamptonshire and Leicestershire) and England pace bowler Devon
Malcolm, who played regularly for the club in the early 1980s. Devon opened the
bowling with the almost-as-quick Steve Taylor, who also played for Derbyshire
Seconds. Neither of these powerful bowlers of Jamaican origin had any prospect
of playing for Yorkshire, although both their families were Sheffield working
people. Malcolm writes movingly in his autobiography about the loyal support of
his Sheffield Caribbean clubmates and about his cricketing connections with the
city’s Muslim communities and of the times that he was invited to play for local
Asian sides:

I remember playing for Asian sides in Sheffield, and I enjoyed getting to know
about their religion, how they lived their lives. Cricket teaches you respect
for others. Sheffield Caribbean club, where I first learned about cricket in any
depth after coming over from Jamaica, was so important for me at a time of
my life when I might have drifted, just like many other black kids. They put
in so much hard work on my behalf, encouraging me to bowl fast and even
 Sheffield Caribbean 229
organising transport for me and paying for my teas. I still keep in touch with
them and will always be grateful to them.
(Malcolm 1998: 144; Searle 2001: 73–82)

In 1991, Earl Marshal School, a local comprehensive with a strong element of

cricket-loving Pakistani students, opened the Devon Malcolm Cricket Centre
with the very active leadership of members of Sheffield Caribbean. Both Steve
Taylor and stalwart Owen Gittens had become teachers at the school, and Mike
Atkins was appointed its chair of governors. Devon had lived near the school as
a youth and became the centre’s enthusiastic sponsor, making regular visits and
giving talks on aspects of cricket and his own experiences at Test match level. As
the school’s head teacher, I was privileged to sit in on some of these sessions, and
I remember well the sense of wonder and engagement on the (mostly Pakistani)
students’ faces as Malcolm relived through a video commentary his crushing 9 to
57 against the remnants of a white South African team at the Oval in August
1994. Later, in 1995, the paceman donated to the centre a proportion of the
high court damages awarded to him after an article by Robert Henderson in
Wisden Cricket Monthly had claimed that England cricketers born outside the
United Kingdom lacked the necessary commitment to their adopted country.
‘Sweet dreams are made of this!’ ran the headline in the Caribbean Times; ‘Youth
to benefit from Malcolm’s dismissal of cricket’s racists’ (Slater 1995: 1). The
centre itself became a model of inner-city cricket development and the hard and
talented coaching work put in by Taylor and Gittens was at its heart. Many young
players – mainly from Pakistani families, but including local Caribbean, Somali
and Yemeni youth too, moved on to play for the city’s Asian sides, as well as for
Sheffield Caribbean. A huge moment in the Centre’s history was during its initial
development in December 1990 when it hosted a visit from the then Pakistan
captain, Imran Khan. Sheffield Caribbean administrators and activists were at the
centre of what became a huge local event and celebration of international cricket.
At this point it is important to delve into the early lives of some of the club’s
extraordinary cricketing militants: Mike Atkins, Owen Gittens and Sam Gittens
are to Sheffield Caribbean what the ‘Three W’s’ (Frank Worrell, Everton Weekes
and Clyde Walcott) were to West Indies cricket after the Second World War.
Born within two years of each other in the early 1940s in villages on the tiny
island of Barbados, they have done outstanding work to sustain the fortunes of the
club. Moreover, each has been inspired by the cricketing glory of the Caribbean
players of world renown whom they remember from their boyhood. Atkins, from
Dover village, knew the West Indian fast bowler Wes Hall as his neighbour and
ran errands for his cousin, West Indian Test batsman Peter Lashley. He bowled at
Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott in local nets and remembered how a back-
foot drive from the all-powerful Walcott ‘crashed into my hand. I couldn’t move
it for weeks!’ Owen Gittens has been an integral part of the club as player and
administrator since being demobbed from the RAF in the late 1960s. In St John,
in Barbados, where he grew up, he was a contemporary of Gary Sobers and was
coached at Lodge School by the great Everton Weekes. Sam Gittens, who still
230 Chris Searle
plays, administrates and umpires in the local Asian league, is from Bayland and
grew up in the next street to Sobers and just down the hill from Sobers’ cousin
David Holford. He remembers early matches with Frank King and Seymour
Nurse. It is these late colonial apprenticeships that provided the very fibre of a
club forged in a postcolonial industrial city in Yorkshire, more than an ocean
away.
The pioneering work of this extraordinary trio and other veteran club members
with their provenances in other islands was directly inspired not only by the
example of the boyhood heroes who lived so closely inside their lives, but also by
the succeeding, all-conquering generation of Caribbean cricketers of the ‘black-
wash’ years, who were contemporaries: Viv Richards, Andy Roberts, Clive Lloyd,
Joel Garner, Michael Holding, Gordon Greenidge (a frequent visitor to Sheffield
and a friend of the club) and Malcolm Marshall, whose exploits in the 1970s and
1980s made the West Indies cricket team the most powerful and successful
in world cricket. Atkins, Gittens and Gittens were Barbadian exiles and new
Sheffielders but, more significantly, they were West Indians abroad, a part of the
diaspora, implicitly and explicitly loyal to the ‘One Caribbean’ Test team of their
childhood memories – a team and also a metaphor for, and expression of,
Caribbean integrity, which in the words of the leader of the Grenada revolution,
Maurice Bishop, ‘wants nothing to do with sectarianism, conspiracies or cliques
but an agenda which serves our people, the Caribbean people, and confronts and
seeks to resolve their multiplicity of problems’ (1982: 10). For in Sheffield too
these cricketers established an annexe of that same concept of a unified Caribbean
nation. And as activists of their community’s sporting prowess they are also agents
and catalysts of an eventual Caribbean nationhood – even within the confines of
a Victorian ‘steel city’, ironically now seeking to reinvent itself as a twenty-first-
century ‘city of sport’, full of new, Olympic-standard complexes for swimmers and
divers, athletes and skaters, but with very little to offer cricketers.

On their own ground

In 1986, Sheffield Caribbean at last secured its own ground. This was in
Ecclesfield, a northern suburb of the city. This achievement followed the period
of Malcolm and Taylor’s bowling successes with the club, as well the prodigious
run-getting of batsmen such as Buster Reynolds and the brothers Martin and
Ronnie Forte. The club had won the Premier Division of the Norton and District
League for three consecutive years (1982–4) and had been told by officials that
they would now move directly into one of the top divisions of the Sheffield
League. However, when they applied to do so, they were informed that they could
only join at Division D level. (By 1989, they had moved up, on merit, to Division
A, becoming League Champions in 1992.) In 1985 a previous application to
join the South Riding Division of the prestigious Yorkshire Council League had
eventually ended in disappointment when teams from the North, South and West
Riding divisions had voted en bloc against them. One of the reasons given for this
vote was the ‘poor quality’ of Sheffield Caribbean’s new ground, even though a
 Sheffield Caribbean 231
few years earlier the same divisions had happily accepted Knatts Sports, who at
the time were using the same Ecclesfield ground. The club made indignant protest
through the regional press and Yorkshire Television, but to little avail. In an
article in The Independent in February 1987 (Foster 1987: 7) it was acknowledged
that ‘Caribbean had become the fastest growing sports club in Sheffield, with
a formidable reputation of producing talented young players’. Yet the article also
quotes the secretary of the Yorkshire Council League, William Pye, apparently
claiming that Caribbean’s playing standard was insufficiently high. ‘We reject
accusations of bias,’ said Pye. ‘We consider the matter closed.’ The reader also
learns how the Caribbean Sports Club’s netball team had been expelled from
the Rotherham and District Netball League for alleged ‘excessive aggression and
unsportsmanlike attitude’. Such backward rationales were familiar enough to the
cricketers of Sheffield Caribbean.
The acquisition of the Ecclesfield ground came during the same fruitful period
when the Sheffield and District African Caribbean Association (SADACCA)
gained increased influence within Sheffield’s education, health and social services,
and took over large new premises in the city centre. SADACCA members were
also strong protagonists in the setting up of the city’s Black Community Forum,
a campaigning organisation composed of delegates from all of Sheffield’s black
and minority communities. Meanwhile the cricket club continued its struggle,
this time against vandals and/or racists who targeted their precious field. In 1987
the clubhouse windows were smashed and the broken glass ground into the pitch.
The pavilion sustained £8,000 worth of damage in an arson attack and the club
tractor was destroyed. In 1988 the scorebox was burned down. The groundsman,
who had worked at the ground for thirty years, told the Sheffield Star he had never
known such sustained violence to any sports ground (The Star (Sheffield), 19 May
1988).
The club made fresh applications to join the Yorkshire Council League in
both 1990 and 2000. The latter instance boiled down to a contest between the
Caribbean and Sheffield Works Department for one vacant place. The League
could not admit the Works Department team because their ground was acknowl-
edged to be in a poor state and their changing facilities were a Portakabin. But it
remained unwilling to admit Sheffield Caribbean, citing previous reasons (widely
seen as spurious), and instead played the following season one team short.
Through the late 1990s and into the new millennium, the changes within
Yorkshire CCC, notably the turning away from the ‘born in Yorkshire’ selection
policy, began to affect other old-established exclusionist practices in Yorkshire
cricket culture. Pushing hard for these changes have been the diehards of Sheffield
Caribbean – in particular, Mike Atkins, who gained the support of the Sports
Council for an investigation into black participation within the structures of
Yorkshire cricket. Atkins also presides over the county club’s first ever Black and
Ethnic Minority Cricket Forum, a formal subcommittee of Yorkshire County
Cricket Board, on which the chief executive of the Board, the youth development
officer, the marketing manager and the secretary of the board are all obliged to sit.
The board is also giving five years’ funding to ten Youth Development Cricket
232 Chris Searle
Centres (partly based on the inner city model of the Devon Malcolm Cricket
Centre) throughout the county. Although the first young black Yorkshire crick-
eter is still to walk out onto the field as a member of the county first team, the
grounds for optimism that he will soon do so are much stronger now.
Thus, in postcolonial Yorkshire, through a dogged and unflagging contestation,
institutional racism in the county’s cricket has been faced down and opportunities
for black community cricketers increased as another expression of the long
striving against racism in British urban life. In this context, Sheffield Caribbean
continues to play and develop with all its heart and mind, mindful that cricket is
an important part of the many-sided struggle of defending the Caribbean presence
in postcolonial Britain, composed too, as Tim Hector wrote, of cricketers who
‘make it up, and over from under’ (Hector, 1998; see also Chapter 8 of this book),
sustained by their own deeply flourishing roots.

References
Bishop, Maurice (1982) Speech, 7 November, reprinted in One Caribbean, London:
Britain/Grenada Friendship Society.
Earl Marshal School (1993) Lives of Love and Hope, Sheffield: Earl Marshal School.
Foster, Jonathan (1987) ‘A prejudice for fairness’, The Independent (London), 6 February.
Hector, Tim (1998) ‘Cricket is more than meets the eye’, Fan the Flame website
20 February.
Hoult, Nick (2003) ‘Lehmann faces ban for racial remarks’, Daily Telegraph, 17 January.
James, C. L. R. (1986) Beyond a Boundary, London: Stanley Paul.
Malcolm, Devon (1998) You Guys Are History, London: Collins Willow.
Searle, Chris (2001) Pitch of Life, Manchester: Parrs Wood Press.
Slater, Ross (1995) ‘Sweet dreams are made of this’, Caribbean Times, 11 November.
12 Clean bowl racism?
Inner-city London and the
politics of cricket development
Nick Miller

In November 1999 the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) voiced its
commitment to implement an extensive campaign to tackle the problem of racism
within cricket. Tim Lamb, its chief executive, stated, ‘Complacency on racial
equality is not acceptable’ and that ‘we must open our doors to everyone and
ensure that all cricketers and those associated within the game are treated with
respect and given every opportunity to participate in or support the game’ (BBC
News Online 1999). The statement was made in response to the findings of a
report commissioned by the ECB to investigate racial equality in cricket. The
report, entitled Clean Bowl Racism, revealed that 58 per cent of those consulted
believed racism existed in the game (ECB Racism Study Group 1999a). In iden-
tifying and highlighting elements of racism as being ‘counterproductive to the
development, progress and well being of English cricket’ (ibid.), the report made
recommendations to combat prejudice. The ECB immediately adopted these
recommendations as policy and circulated them to all cricket clubs in England
and Wales in a document entitled ‘Action Plans for Racial Equality in Cricket’
(ECB 1999b).
In addition to stating that ‘racism is unacceptable’ at club, county and inter-
national levels of the game, the report went on to say that ‘actively embracing
and developing cricket for ethnic minorities is seen as a vital contribution
to improving the standard and standing of English cricket’ (ECB Racism Study
Group 1999a). To achieve this, the ECB felt that the promotion of inner-city
cricket would be the most ‘appropriate and productive’ approach to this develop-
ment. In October 1999 the Sports Minster, Kate Hoey, and the England captain,
Nasser Hussain, launched the ECB’s Inner City Community Cricket Project at
Lord’s Cricket Ground. The aim of the scheme was to provide funding for facilities
and coaching in the inner-city areas to encourage young people, and particularly
those from ethnic minorities, to play cricket (Department of Culture, Media and
Sport 2000).
The aim of this chapter is to argue that the commitment to combat racism and
focus on developing cricket at grass-roots level represented a significant shift in
ECB policy. This change followed a decade of widespread discussion of racism
in cricket and one that particularly focused on the alienation of black and Asian
players in the game. Throughout the 1990s it had become increasingly evident
234 Nick Miller
that, while cricket was struggling to maintain public interest, its popularity was
‘thriving within Britain’s black and Asian communities’ (McDonald and Ugra,
1998: 1). Thousands of Asian cricketers were playing competitive cricket in Asian
leagues in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Essex and east London (ibid.). However, there
remained a huge discrepancy between the enthusiasm for cricket expressed by
young Asians and the small number of British-born Asian players at senior level.
Despite campaigns such as Hit Racism for Six (HR46), the cricket authorities
refused to concede that this inequality could be attributed to discrimination
within the game. Mike Marqusee (1998: 317) maintained that during this period
the cricket authorities adopted a ‘hear no evil, see no evil’ approach to racism.
Therefore, the question that must be asked is, why did this shift in ECB policy
occur?
I shall argue that since 1997, a series of complex political, social and economic
factors, and changes within cricket and British society, forced the ECB to review
its policy towards inclusion and discrimination. I maintain that despite the
recommendations in Clean Bowl Racism, the ECB has failed to break down the
cultural barriers that continue to alienate black and Asian people from English
cricket.
Central to this study is the relationship between cricket, ethnicity and national
identity. I will now examine the nature of an English identity that has devel-
oped historically in the culture of cricket and the place of British-born black and
Asian players within this culture. I shall argue that developments within this
relationship have played a prominent role in the contestation surrounding English
cricket since the 1990s.

Englishness and the village green

A brief examination of the cultural and social significance accorded to cricket in
England demonstrates how sport provides a key symbolic site for the construction
and reproduction of national identities (Carrington 1998: 102). Cricket has
historically been presented as being quintessentially English (Williams 1999: 5).
By promoting the values of civility, tradition, fair play, of the gentleman and the
countryside, the notions of cricket and Englishness have become intertwined with
the habitus of the male upper-class elite, which ruled the game, the country and
the British Empire from the late eighteenth century. As Maguire (1999: 178)
argues, cricket is seen to represent what ‘England’ is and as such gives meaning to
the identity of being ‘English’.
Despite the collapse of the Empire, cricket’s status as a national relic remains
and cricket continues to figure predominantly in advertisements to create
immediately recognisable images of England. As McDonald and Ugra (1998: 1)
maintain, ‘Cricket on the village green is for many people the sunny-side-up of
what England still means.’
But this represents a very narrow notion of what England’s cultural identity
should look like (Carrington 1998: 102) and bears little relation to the contem-
porary reality of multicultural, urban and modern Britain.
 Inner-city London and cricket development 235
For many in the inner cities, the unemployed, the low waged, the homeless,
and all those who are abused because of their race or sex, the village cricket
match is a symbol of the England in which they have no part. Cricket’s
mythology is the product of a vision in which large sections of the population
are consigned to inferior rank.
(Marqusee 1998: 46)

For Marqusee (ibid.: 46), such portrayals of ‘Englishness’ and cricket on the
village green are neither ‘accidental’ nor ‘incidental’. During the 1990s, cricket
became fundamental in constructing a national identity that reflected a nation at
ease with itself, at a time of political and economic crisis. High unemployment,
a rise in violence and crime, and political pressure from Europe to join the single
currency coincided with England’s loss of power and lack of success in world
cricket.
References to England’s heritage became a feature of the discourse of the
government at this time, and the most blatant example can be seen in the Prime
Minister’s St George’s Day speech in 1993. In his address to the nation, John
Major deliberately used cricket to ‘invoke a mythical, nostalgic and implicitly
white notion of England’, an essentially rural country full of ‘invincible green
suburbs’, with Englishmen drinking warm beer to the distant sounds of cricket
being played on the village green (Carrington 1998: 102). Carrington (ibid.: 102)
argues that the imagery within Major’s speech represented an attempt to promote
‘dreamlike constructions’ of earlier ‘golden ages’ as a way of managing ‘contem-
porary political, economic and social problems’ by recourse to an invented past
of imperial greatness when ‘Britannia ruled the waves’ and the English were not
‘beaten at their own game’ of cricket.
More importantly, while this England did not exist in multicultural Britain, the
continuing refuge in nostalgic discourse of Englishmen playing village cricket had
clear racial connotations. The imagined version of Major’s Britain is presented
as a homogeneous community undivided by race and culture, one prior to the
immigration of the many black and Asian people who came to settle in Britain
from the colonies (Gilroy 1993: 52). The increasing presence of this ‘alien culture’
is represented as the ‘enemy within’ and invites the conclusion that national
decline and weakness coincided with the arrival of black immigrants. Gilroy
(1993) argues that such analogies of modern Britain and the Empire have become
increasingly common in political discourse to exclude black people from the
British national identity and represent what Barker (1981: 23) has labelled ‘new
racism’.

English cricket and ‘the enemy within’

This is illustrated during the 1990s, as the inwardly looking nationalism evident
in the political climate emerged in the discourse of English cricket (Crabbe and
Wagg 2000). Jack Williams in his book Cricket and England (1999) complained
that cricket during this time was ‘pervaded with snobbery, sexism and racism’
236 Nick Miller
– a view supported by Crabbe and Wagg (2000), who argue that from the
1980s English officials and commentators began to view ex-colonial teams with
suspicion and hostility. Many denounced the ‘viciousness’ of the ‘chilling’ West
Indian pace bowlers as ‘downright thuggery’ (Moorehouse 1979) and accused
their Pakistani counterparts of being ball-tampering ‘cheats’ (Oslear and
Bannister 1996; Crabbe and Wagg 2000). At the same time, Viv Richards and
Imran Khan received racist abuse from members of the crowd at Headingley
(Abbasi 1999).
In addition to these overt examples of racism, complaints concerning the
detrimental effect that overseas players were having on the county game became
commonplace within the cricket establishment. This debate took a sinister turn
when an article by Robert Henderson entitled ‘Is it in the blood?’ was published
in Wisden Cricket Monthly (Henderson 1995). Henderson called for ‘unequiv-
ocal Englishmen’ to replace ‘Negroes’ and other ‘foreigners’ in the England team
because they supposedly lacked commitment to the national cause (Carrington
1998: 102). Outside the game, the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit
launched a bitter attack on Britain’s minority communities by suggesting that
because they did not support the England cricket team, they were disloyal to
the country they lived in. In what became dubbed as the ‘cricket test’, Tebbit
demanded to know ‘which side do they cheer for?’ when England played against
the West Indies, India or Pakistan.
The Tebbit test and Henderson’s article were met with universal condem-
nation. However, the cricket authorities’ response was far less damning. By failing
to challenge Tebbit’s claims, the cricket establishment appeared not only to
tolerate the use of cricket as a measure of national inclusion, but to sanction it
(Marqusee 1998: 160–1). Henderson’s attack on the inclusion of black players
in the England cricket team caused more of an outcry, but a report from the
Independent (1994) shows he was not alone in his views:

What made it additionally pleasing was that England’s attack did not for once
look like a United Nations strike force. Not since the Old Trafford Test of
1989 . . . have England fielded five bowlers with undiluted allegiance to the
country that they were representing.
(quoted in Marqusee 1998)

In response to allegations of discrimination within English cricket, many were

keen to point out that racism was simply ‘not cricket’. By portraying Henderson’s
article as merely an aberration against the inclusive nature of cricket, rather than
recognising it as the most obvious of a number of serious racist incidents in this
period, the cricket authorities not only were failing to acknowledge the existence
of racism, but showed themselves unwilling to challenge and eradicate it from the
game. As Marqusee argues,

When it comes to racism, English cricket’s real problem is its culture of

complacency and denial, which expresses itself in a knee-jerk defensiveness
 Inner-city London and cricket development 237
whenever the touchy topic rears its ugly head. The burden of the case against
the cricket establishment and cricket media is not that they are racist but
that they are unable or unwilling to recognise the reality of racism and the
problems it poses for the game.
(1998: 314–15)

The two cultures of English cricket

The failure to acknowledge and challenge racism in cricket became more evident
during 1998–9, when a number of significant events elevated to a national level
the debate surrounding the place of black and Asian people in English cricket.
In 1998, Roehampton Institute was commissioned to research black and Asian
cricket in Essex (McDonald and Ugra 1998: 1). Previously, a programme broad-
cast on the BBC entitled The Race Game (BBC 1991) highlighted that while there
was an abundance of black and Asian talent playing in local leagues in Yorkshire,
no British Asian had played for Yorkshire County Cricket Club or been invited
to join the county’s youth development scheme. The programme argued that by
following this policy the county was not only completely neglecting a major
constituency of potential players, but also implementing a development system
that was ‘little short of apartheid’ (Kew 1997: 104). The Roehampton report
concluded that these concerns of exclusion were not unfounded. Anyone for
Cricket claimed that a similar emergence of black and Asian clubs and leagues had
evolved in Essex and east London (McDonald and Ugra 1998), as a result of the
hostility encountered by black and Asian cricketers when they tried to join local
clubs or leagues.
The authors of the report, Ian McDonald and Sharda Ugra, identified the
existence of ‘two distinct but related cultures of cricket, defined by ethnicity’. One
is mainly African-Caribbean and Asian, urban, and confined to sub-standard
council pitches with limited resources, and it exists outside the official structure.
The other is white, rural and endowed with well-kept private facilities, and
competes within the official ECB structure (McDonald and Ugra 1998: 41,
Marqusee 1998: 316).
The report argues that despite their exclusion from the mainstream, there is
an ‘overwhelming desire among black and Asian teams to become integrated into
the official structures of the game’ (McDonald and Ugra 1998: 55). However,
black and Asian teams’ applications were often rejected because they failed to
meet the league requirements of owning their own ground. It was also claimed
that the mainstream leagues hide behind league regulations and cultural stereo-
types to prevent the admission of black and Asian teams into the official leagues.
White clubs did not want to play Asian teams because they viewed the ‘overtly
competitive’ and ‘highly vocal’ way that Asian teams play their cricket as deni-
grating the importance of etiquette as a prominent value in ‘English’ cricket. Club
secretaries also complained that few white teams would play Asian teams, because
they failed to uphold the tradition of the post-match drink (McDonald and Ugra
1998: 41), and bar takings would be low.
238 Nick Miller
The fact that cricket leagues have developed separately over the years has
occurred partly because of prejudice on both sides, but also because of different
attitudes towards cricket on and off the field. For predominantly white clubs, the
social aspect of cricket such as playing etiquette and post-match drinking are part
and parcel of the game, while Asian players place more importance on cricket as
a competitive sporting experience (McDonald and Ugra 1998: 14). There is also
a belief among Asian players and supporters that the English way of playing
cricket is boring. The emphasis on ‘textbook’ coaching tends to stifle the natural
talent of players, and white teams are accused of adopting a negative approach to
playing matches.
However, as McDonald and Ugra (1998) argue, this relationship is not equal,
because the official structures of the cricket establishment – the affiliated clubs,
the counties and ultimately the ECB – have the power to effect the integration
or the continued exclusion of black and Asian teams. In comparison to the white
majority, the black and Asian communities remain relatively poor and powerless
(Hit Racism for Six 1999). As the dominant group within this relationship, the
predominantly white cricket establishment have been able to use this power to
structure cricket in their preferred ways. This has enabled them to institutionalise
these practices and meanings to define what cricket is or what it should be like
within social formations (Jarvie 1991: 5). Through this process, the traditional
white ‘English’ way of staging cricket becomes the norm to which the predomi-
nantly black and Asian players need to adapt in order to become integrated
(McDonald and Ugra 1998: 14).
The response of the ECB to the findings of Anyone for Cricket remained one
of denial and defensiveness. However, in 1999, Matthew Engel’s editorial in the
influential Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack took up the findings and claimed that a
form of racial segregation was affecting the game in England. He wrote:

In an informal, unspoken, very English way, cricketing apartheid has become

an accepted practice in England. . . . I know of nothing that constitutes
active racial discrimination in English recreational cricket. But there is a great
deal of what could be called passive discrimination, a refusal to go an extra
inch and welcome outsiders into a club’s often clannish atmosphere. . . .
It has become normal for ethnic-minority players to gravitate towards their
own clubs, and there is now clear-cut evidence of segregation operating,
informally, in both Yorkshire and Essex . . . the effect is that black and Asian
players are operating outside the official structure. They have become second-
class in all kinds of little ways.
(Engel 1999: 14–15)

Therefore, while ‘the culture of ‘English cricket’ may not be explicitly racist, the
Englishness of the official game becomes a means of racial exclusion, racial
stereotyping and, to a lesser extent, racial abuse of black and Asian players
(McDonald and Ugra 1998: 55). As Engel insists, the removal of these barriers
was not simply a moral issue, but imperative to the development of the game.
 Inner-city London and cricket development 239
‘English cricket should now be reaping great benefit from the generation born
here of parents who came to Britain in the great wave of post-war migration from
the subcontinent and the Caribbean.’ By playing cricket outside the official
structure of the game, they are denied the opportunities available to their white
counterparts to progress in the county and international game. This inequality is
borne out by Abbasi (1999), who in an article on The Week Internet page pointed
out that in 1999 the England captain, Nasser Hussain, was one of only 24 British
Asians registered as players with county clubs.
Engel’s intervention represented a considerable development in the campaign
against racism in cricket; furthermore, his comments took on more significant
meaning during the Cricket World Cup held in Britain later that year.

The carnival of cricket

The ECB hoped that the Cricket World Cup in 1999 would provide a spectacle
that would increase the profile of cricket, particularly among young people, in
Britain. It was believed that this impact relied heavily on the England team
performing well. However, while England’s elimination in the first round seriously
dented these expectations, supporters from Britain’s ethnic minority communities
effectively hijacked the ‘carnival of cricket’ (Crabbe and Wagg 2000: 86) and
turned it into a hugely enjoyable and successful event. British-based Asian sup-
porters of Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh turned out in force to cheer
on their teams. The fact that these fans were not supporting England and happily
failed the Tebbit test (Chaudhary 1999) was irrelevant, and many commentators
in the media, the government and influential figures within cricket finally
identified this enthusiasm as representing a huge potential for the regeneration of
cricket in Britain.
As Crabbe and Wagg (2000: 86) argue, the World Cup demonstrated how the
future of the game is intimately intertwined with the black and Asian commu-
nities. Simon Barnes (2000) reflected the prevalent opinion by arguing in The
Times that ‘the future of English cricket is all tied up with the English people of
subcontinental extraction’. The debate also exposed Anyone for Cricket?’s findings,
that cricket played by ethnic groups was poorly resourced and often existed
outside the official structure. In the light of this, the ECB came under increasing
pressure to confront these inequalities. Simon Hughes wrote in the Daily Telegraph
that young Asians in particular ‘do not have to be led kicking and screaming to
play cricket’ and should be offered massive encouragement by the authorities
to make up for the ‘gross neglect of the past’ (1999). Christopher Martin-Jenkins,
also writing in The Times, argued:

The challenge to the ECB is to invest as much as possible, as soon as possible

in the lower reaches of the game to catch all the youngsters who have been
inspired by the glamour of the World Cup. Without doubt the supporters
of the subcontinental teams have contributed greatly to the fun of this
World Cup.
240 Nick Miller
Their exuberance, occasionally a little unbridled, has underlined the need
to do more, especially in the provision of facilities to encourage the abundant
South Asian enthusiasm for cricket. . . . That is truly the challenge for the
ECB, Local Authorities and the government.
(1999)

New Labour, social inclusion and institutionalised racism

In addition to raising the consciousness of the media, the interest generated by
World Cup had a significant impact on the Labour government’s perspective of
cricket. The Sports Minister, Tony Banks, stated that ‘one of the lessons that
we must learn from the World Cup was the enormous fervour and enthusiasm for
cricket among our Asian communities’. He went on to say that ‘English cricket
could be transformed by the greater involvement of the ethnic communities’
and that he would be meeting with the ECB to discuss new initiatives to ‘combat
the evil of racism within the sport’ (Schaefer 1999). The World Cup demon-
strated to the government that, rather than being a relic of old England and
Englishness, cricket was in fact the one sport all the main minority communities
have a presence in (McDonald and Ugra 1999). As such, cricket represented a
sport through which New Labour could focus its commitment to tackling the
issues of sport and social exclusion.
During this period the government was drafting a strategy for sport that would
represent a radical change in the relationship between government and national
governing bodies of sport. A Sporting Future for All stated that ‘sport can make a
unique contribution to tackling social exclusion in our society’ (Department of
Culture, Media and Sport 2000: 39) and funding will only be devolved to govern-
ing bodies of sport that ‘commit themselves to putting inclusion and fairness at
the heart of everything they do’ (ibid.: 20).
Therefore, the ECB was acutely aware that unless it improved opportunities for
areas of deprivation, ethnic minorities, women and disabled people to lead, coach
and participate in cricket activities, it would receive a reduction in funding from
both the government and the National Lottery. The incentive of extra funding
clearly influenced the ECB’s decision to adopt more inclusive policies.
A further factor that cannot be overlooked is that the debate surrounding
the marginalisation of black and Asian teams from the official structure of English
cricket emerged at the same time as the Macpherson Report, published in 1999.
The inquiry into the handling of the racist murder of the black teenager Stephen
Lawrence accused the Metropolitan Police of ‘institutionalised racism’, and called
for ‘every institution to examine their policies and practices to guard against
disadvantaging any section of their communities’ (Macpherson Report 1999).
The fact that the Clean Bowl Racism survey concluded that 58 per cent of respon-
dents believed that racism existed in English cricket certainly generated fears that
the ECB would also be perceived as being institutionally racist. Although only
12 per cent of these thought racism was ingrained (ECB Racism Study Group
1999a: 44), it was obvious that the ECB could not afford to appear complacent.
 Inner-city London and cricket development 241
Therefore, the publication of the Clean Bowl Racism report on racial equality
in cricket can be seen as a direct response to the challenges made to the ECB in
the media and political sphere. The document voices a commitment to imple-
ment an anti-racist programme at all levels in the playing structure of the game.
In addition to introducing codes of conduct prohibiting racist abuse in clubs, staff
training on equity and cultural diversity, and an anti-racist publicity campaign,
the report also required the county cricket boards to give high priority to including
schemes and programmes that incorporated ethnic minority cricket into their
development plans. In order ‘to illustrate cricket’s determination to ensure ethnic
minorities have equality of opportunity’ (ECB Racism Study Group 1999a), the
publication of the report coincided with the launch of the ECB’s Inner City
Community Cricket Project in October 1999. The fact that the new Sports
Minister, Kate Hoey, launched the initiative reflected the political significance of
the whole process.
However, while, as David Hopps commented in the Guardian (1999), the
report signifies a ‘belated recognition that English cricket urgently needed to
address racial inequality’, many other commentators remained sceptical. Simon
Hughes in the Telegraph (1999) maintained that the sum of £30,000, earmarked
for each inner-city project over a three-year period, would ‘not even scratch the
surface’ of the investment needed in areas such as London. Therefore, despite the
publication of Clean Bowl Racism, questions remain as to whether the ECB is
genuinely committed to increasing the involvement of black and Asian people in
the game. Was it merely rhetoric in the face of severe criticism? The following
case study of Middlesex Cricket Board’s development programme and events
within cricket since its publication will attempt to answer these questions.

The Middlesex Cricket Board

The Middlesex Cricket Board (MCB) is one of 38 county boards responsible
for the development of cricket activities within their county boundaries. The
funding for grass-roots development work is distributed by the ECB through its
charitable arm, the Cricket Foundation. Each year for the four years 1999–2003,
approximately £21⁄2 million was divided between all the county boards for local
development purposes (ECB 2000). The MCB is responsible for the development
of cricket in the suburbs of Middlesex (on the outskirts of London) and a number
of inner-city London boroughs. The development work carried out by the MCB
includes a schools programme, a programme for women’s and girl’s cricket, club
development and junior county squad training. However, recently the MCB has
become involved with a number of inner-city cricket development projects that
include Victoria Park Junior Cricket Club in Hackney and Stoke Newington
Cricket School. These projects have been promoted in the media as an example
of the ECB’s commitment to ‘provide more opportunities for black and Asian
children from London’s inner city area to play cricket’ (BBC News Online 1999).
The aim of this case study is to examine these projects and to analyse whether they
represent a realistic change in the culture of cricket within the governing body.
242 Nick Miller
Victoria Park Junior Cricket Club
The most highly publicised initiative is a joint project involving the Middlesex
Cricket Board and Tower Hamlets and Hackney councils, which have worked in
partnership to create a new junior cricket club at Victoria Park in east London.
Hackney had been identified as ‘a wasteland for cricket’, with no cricket pitch or
club with a junior section in the borough. Despite the lack of opportunities to
play, cricket was becoming increasingly popular in local schools as a result of the
successful work of the London Schools Cricket Project and the Middlesex Cricket
Board. Both organisations provided coaching courses that introduced cricket into
the curriculum. However, the lack of facilities remained a serious barrier to the
development of the game.
A working party was formed involving representatives from the MCB, Hackney
Sports Development and the London Schools Cricket Project to establish a junior
cricket club in Victoria Park. The project was funded by sponsorship money from
Yellow Pages and enabled the MCB to run a programme of coaching sessions at
the park and paid for some new cricket equipment. The high-profile cricketers
Mark Ramprakash and Angus Fraser were recruited to launch the club, and the
ex-England and Middlesex captain Mike Gatting was appointed as its president.
The club has been a great success in its four-year existence. As one of the coaches
explained,

The sessions attracted a great number of children aged seven to thirteen years
old and from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. We had white kids, black
kids and a lot of the local Bangladeshi boys came regularly. At present there
are about one hundred young people registered to our club.

When asked about the future of the club, the coach was less positive. He said
the initial aim of the project had been to create a successful children’s cricket
programme that in time would be incorporated into an established senior club
as its junior section. Unfortunately, this had proved difficult because of the lack
of established clubs in the area. A more significant concern for the project is that
the Yellow Pages funding reduced each year, and while the club still gets some
financial support from the MCB, the project has been forced to apply for a grant
from the National Lottery in order to continue the coaching programme.

Stoke Newington Cricket School

The Stoke Newington Cricket School (SNCS) was founded in 1998 and provides
opportunities for young people to gain cricket coaching in the local area. The
project started in a school, but owing to its popularity moved to nearby Clissold
Park, where the sessions took place on the tarmac tennis courts. The cricket
school now boasts a regular attendance of 60 young people and plays its matches
on a synthetic Flicks cricket pitch that can be laid down on any area of grass
or concrete. The cricket school has generated enormous interest in Stoke
 Inner-city London and cricket development 243
Newington, and its organiser, David Blundell, maintains that it could ‘double
the numbers attending each week’ if it had more qualified coaches. With MCB
support the school has recently run a coaching course for Hackney-based cricket
leaders, which will enable the SNCS to expand its provision of cricket sessions
into a number of local schools.
When asked about the support the SNCS receives from local governing body,
Blundell replied that the MCB had provided

quite a lot of money in kind. They gave us £250 to install indoor nets at the
school, they supplied us some kit and the Flicks pitch. Yellow Pages paid for
the places on the coaching course. They are in touch and contactable and
have been good on that score. However, they invested a great amount of
money into the cricket development at Victoria Park at about the same time
as we were starting here, so to some extent we have missed out. Victoria Park
is a top-down model, in the sense that all the money has come from the MCB,
they employ the coaches and recruited the kids, whereas we are local people
who want to play and develop cricket. We have been successful in gaining
money from the lottery and private sponsors, which gives us a certain amount
of autonomy. We are not an MCB project. We are grassroots.

As Blundell highlights, the cricket development in Stoke Newington provides

an interesting contrast with the MCB in Victoria Park. It is clear that much
of the success of the Hackney project can be attributed to the short-term funding
provided by Yellow Pages. The injection of this money increased the cricket
activities available to young people living in these targeted inner-city areas. But
although it has generated a great deal of interest among young people, there was
little ongoing support from the MCB to ensure that this provision of cricket was
sustained when the funding had finished. However, as Blundell points out,
funding alone is not enough:

There are distinct ways in which the County Boards can and to some extent
do provide, but it needs to be coupled with consultation to find out what
we need – like a decent pitch, equipment and qualified coaches rather
than throwing money at things that are inappropriate. By having a greater
sense of what is required at grassroots level, they could use the money more
productively . . . the MCB should coordinate a network and structure to
support what local people are doing rather than providing top-down devel-
opment.

In order to capitalise on the good work and enthusiasm created through the
projects funded by Yellow Pages, the MCB needs to establish a coordinated
structure for the development of cricket that includes the inner-city areas within
its boundaries. Of course funding will be an issue, but, as the local governing
body, it should be building on the excellent work of the London Schools Cricket
Project and ensuring that a framework exists for young people to continue their
244 Nick Miller
cricket outside school. This does not mean the MCB should deliver the cricketing
opportunities itself, but it should provide the resources and expertise to enable
local people who know the area, the schools and young people and have ‘a deep-
rooted love for the game, to get on with the development’ (interview with David
Blundell, 2000). By adopting this more strategic approach, rather than what
Blundell refers to as the noblesse oblige nature of support, the MCB will demon-
strate its commitment to regenerating grass-roots cricket in the inner cities.
However, a failure to do so will raise questions over whether the Yellow Pages-
sponsored projects represented little more than a philanthropic public relations
exercise in response to a political climate demanding a more inclusive approach.

The future
Unfortunately in this context, since September 2000 the MCB has focused its
work on developing womens’ and girls’ cricket, competitive opportunities for
schools, and county junior squads. When asked why the inner-city projects were
not included, the MCB explained that the money available from the Cricket
Foundation was limited and much of Middlesex’s allocation had been committed
to employing a women and girls’ cricket development officer. Therefore, without
the Yellow Pages money the MCB was seeking other sources of funding to build
on the work initiated at Victoria Park. So, while the ECB stated its commitment
to developing the integration of ethnic minority teams into cricket structures, no
extra funding was made available to the county boards to finance this work. In
fact, the money granted to the MCB in 2000 had only increased by £1,000 (MCB
2000) from the previous year.
The failure to increase the money available to county boards cast a serious
doubt over the ECB’s commitment to develop the game at the grass-roots level.
As Marqusee (1998: 327) argues, despite the ECB’s ‘grandiose plans for restruc-
turing recreational cricket’, there remains a huge discrepancy between money
allocated to each first-class county club and the sum available to recreational
cricket through the county boards. Two and a half million pounds from the
Cricket Foundation is not a lot of money to be split between 38 counties. For
Marqusee (1998: 325–7), what is desperately needed to revive the game in urban
areas is ‘a massive, carefully planned and democratically controlled injection of
resources’. However, it seems that this radical economic redistribution of ECB
funds is not forthcoming despite the claims of Clean Bowl Racism.
The research demonstrates that individuals within the MCB are committed to
developing the game in inner-city areas. However, they have to focus on ECB
objectives, which view such work as an area of low priority. This makes it difficult
for these individuals to effect change, and explains why ‘the help comes in little
bits rather than part of any framework of development’ (interview with David
Blundell, 2000). The injection of money from Yellow Pages enabled the MCB to
provide equipment and funding in Hackney and Stoke Newington, but the failure
to take a strategic approach to these developments meant that it achieved a mixed
level of success. This, coupled with the lack of plans or provision to sustain the
 Inner-city London and cricket development 245
projects once the funding had run out, raises the question of whether the work
would have been undertaken at all without Yellow Pages backing.

The inner city and ethnic minorities

The Victoria Park project was heralded in the media as being ‘designed to provide
more opportunities for black and Asian children from London’s inner city areas
to play cricket’ (BBC News Online 1999) and as such demonstrated the ECB’s
commitment to combat racism. However, it was evident from the research that
no special considerations were made to encourage specific ethnic groups to attend
the sessions. The high concentration of ethnic minorities living in Hackney
meant the projects attracted young people from a diverse range of ethnic and
cultural backgrounds, but this in itself does not constitute an attempt to tackle
racism. What is concerning is that portraying inner-city developments as being
anti-racist has become prevalent in the rhetoric surrounding the Clean Bowl
Racism campaign. In the report (ECB Racism Study Group 1999a: 50) it is recom-
mended that ‘ethnic minority/inner city cricket will be given a higher priority
than has hitherto been the case in the relevant County Board Development
Plans’.
By promoting the notion of the development of cricket in urban areas as being
synonymous with tackling issues of race, the ECB is simply reconstructing old
myths that portray the inner cities as black, urban cricketing wastelands. As David
Blundell (interview, 2000) from the Stoke Newington Cricket School argues,

It is all too easy to point to us and say it is an inner-city project and therefore
it has these characteristics and that is why we [the MCB] support it. . . . That
sort of labelling bothers me. The fact that Stoke Newington is seen as an
extraordinary place to develop cricket reflects quite a lot about what their
ideological assumptions are about where cricket is normal, which to them is
suburban.

The danger of such an approach is that by limiting its actions to delivering

urban cricket projects, the MCB is doing little to remove the cultural barriers that
marginalise black and Asian players from the official structures of the game. In the
Clean Bowl Racism report the ECB stated that county boards must ‘encourage
ethnic minority clubs and leagues to become an integral part of the cricket family
by embracing and accepting diverse cultures’. However, there is little evidence to
suggest that this has been undertaken. The representative interviewed for the case
study stated that the MCB encouraged Asian teams to affiliate to Middlesex
Cricket Board, but ‘they appear to not want to join’. When it was suggested
that this viewpoint contradicted the findings of the report, the representative
argued that

Clean Bowl Racism did not find cricketers or officials to be overtly racist; the
main issue was the lack of cricket facilities. The problem for Asian and West
246 Nick Miller
Indian clubs is that, being more recently formed, they were unable to find
facilities; they had been snapped up by more established clubs. In fact new
teams entirely of white players would face exactly the same problems.
(interview with Richard Davis)

This shows that despite the findings of the Anyone for Cricket report and the
subsequent proposals made by the ECB’s Racism Study Group, the ‘culture of
complacency and denial’ referred to by Marqusee remains deeply ingrained in
the standpoint of the English cricket establishment. Its continuing to point to the
lack of facilities and a stereotypical belief that black and Asian cricketers prefer
‘to keep themselves to themselves’ shows that little progress has been made to
unite the cultural divisions in English cricket.
In June 2002, Jonathan Rendall (Observer Sport Monthly) confirmed the
continued segregation between Asian and white teams in Yorkshire. Mount
Cricket Club successfully runs five Asian teams and has eighty-seven players on
its books, but still has no ground of its own. The club plays matches on a council-
owned pitch so dangerous that two players have lost eyes through injuries.
Mount’s secretary confirms that they play their cricket outside the official struc-
tures of the game and will continue to do so as long as ‘white middle-class people’
run the leagues. Despite the lack of facilities, they still manage to produce a large
number of talented cricketers. Unfortunately, this has not been rewarded by
Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Rendall (2002) points out that although Sachin
Tendulkar was Yorkshire’s overseas player during the 1990s, only one home-bred
Asian player has ‘made it through the gates of Headingley as a first-class player’.
According to the Asian players interviewed, ‘Yorkshire was a closed shop for
Asians’; one says that it is ‘a very, very racist club’.
These allegations were disputed by Yorkshire Cricket Board’s chief executive,
Chris Hassell, who stated that Yorkshire had taken positive steps to address the
situation by appointing a cricket development officer with a specific responsibility
for black and ethnic issues. However, as Tom Moody in the Observer (2003)
argues, successful role models at the top will be far more effective than well-
meaning initiatives devised by the ECB. Moody’s county, Worcestershire, has
made positive steps to ‘encourage the unquenchable thirst for cricket among
British Asians’ (ibid.) and developed a direct route to talented cricketers by
strengthening its links with the nearby Asian community. This policy is already
reaping rewards as Worcester have several English Asians on their books, includ-
ing Vikram Solanki and Kabir Ali, recently elevated to the England one-day
squad. Moody says that ‘we are not alone’ in this development: Nottinghamshire
has three Asian cricketers who toured Australia in 2002 with the England Under-
19 squad. They included the captain, Bilal Shafayat, who originally played for
West Indian Cavaliers, made his first-class debut at the age of 16 and is tipped by
many to be the future star of English cricket (Mitchell 2003).
However, while the future looks more promising for British Asians, there still
remains an element of distrust among sections of the Asian community, who insist
it is ‘only getting better because young whites are no longer interested in cricket’
 Inner-city London and cricket development 247
(Rendall 2002). It is also interesting to note that the squad representing England
in the World Cup in 2003 included only one black player, the captain, Nasser
Hussain.
Unfortunately, few Asians see Hussain as a positive role model. During a radio
interview, when asked if his appointment as England captain would inspire other
Asian cricketers to play for England, he replied that all that mattered to him was
‘the three lions on his chest’ (Chaudhary 2001). Then, as young Asians battled
with police and the National Front in Oldham and Aylesbury during the summer
of 2001, Hussain asked why British Asians continued to support cricket teams
from the Indian subcontinent rather than England. Referring to a recent match
against Pakistan, he complained, ‘It was depressing to see a sea of green Pakistani
shirts at Old Trafford.’ Vivek Chaudhary, writing in the Guardian (2001), argued
that these comments demonstrated that Hussain had ‘spent too long being
pampered by the cricket establishment and become disconnected from the experi-
ence of ordinary Asians in Britain’. For Chaudhary, Hussain’s reign as England’s
captain was a wasted opportunity to reach out to Asians and get them involved
in the cricket establishment; rather than inspiring the cricket-mad youngsters, his
comments alienated them further.
However, while it is evident that many British Asians support teams from
the subcontinent as a means to express their alienation from mainstream society,
the suggestion that this represents a disloyalty to Britain remains unfounded. As
Chaudhary (2001) argues, in a multicultural society like Britain, people have
shifting loyalties and identities. The same Asians who supported Pakistan happily
cheered on the English football team in the World Cup at the same time (Aldred
2002). He goes on to maintain that supporting Pakistan or India is not only a
reaffirmation of their cultural heritage; it is also fun. ‘Watching and playing
cricket the subcontinent way is uplifting and inspiring. The English way is pretty
dull’ (Chaudhary 2001).

In conclusion
The existence of two distinct cultures within English cricket, identified earlier,
remains fundamental to the debate surrounding the place of black and Asian
cricketers. Despite the ECB’s publication of Clean Bowl Racism and commitment
to combat racism, it is evident how the symbolic meanings attached to English
cricket and Englishness continue to exclude many of Britain’s ethnic communities
from cricket. The promotion of the inner-city projects discussed in the MCB case
study, as examples of tackling discrimination, appear to be the only concession
made in this process. The assumption that because these projects were based
in urban areas highly populated by Britain’s ethnic communities the ECB was
demonstrating its commitment to fight racism confirms how deeply ingrained
within the cricket establishment the notion of cricket as a predominantly rural,
white sport played out on the village green remains.
As Marqusee (1998) argues, ‘cricket is not the property of any one race or
culture, it belongs to everyone with an interest in the game’. Therefore, the search
248 Nick Miller
for a homogeneous culture or unchanging national identity in modern Britain is
both futile and dangerous. For while young Asians’ heroes are Sachin Tendulkar
or Shoaib Ahktar rather than Michael Vaughan or Darren Gough, what better
role models are there? Rather than questioning this, the ECB, the media and
Hussain himself should embrace the Asians’ love of cricket and take steps to
integrate Britain’s black and Asian communities fully into the game. This can
only be achieved by a real commitment from the ECB to remove the cultural
barriers and inequalities in English cricket, rather than the knee-jerk reaction to
intense criticism evident in the Clean Bowl Racism campaign.

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Barker, M. (1981) The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe, London:
Junction Books.
Birley, D. (1999) A Social History of English Cricket, London: Aurum Press.
Carrington, B. (1998) ‘“Football’s coming home” but whose home? And do we want it?
Nation, football, and the politics of exclusion’, in A. Brown (ed.) Fanatics: Power,
Identity and Fandom in Football, London: Routledge.
Crabbe, T. and Wagg, S. (2000) ‘A carnival of cricket? The Cricket World Cup, ‘race’ and
the politics of Carnival’, Culture, Sport, Society, 3 (2) (Summer): 70–88.
Engel, M. (ed.) (1999) Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, Guildford, UK: Wisden.
Gilroy, P. (1987) ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and
Nation, London: Unwin Hyman.
Gilroy, P. (1992) ‘The end of anti-racism’, in J. Donald and A. Rattansi (eds) Race,
Culture and Difference, London: Sage.
Gilroy, P. (1993) Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Culture, London: Serpent’s
Tail.
Jarvie, G. (1991) ‘Introduction’, in G. Jarvie (ed.) Sport, Racism and Ethnicity, London:
Falmer Press.
Jarvie, G. and Maguire, J. (1994) Sport and Leisure in Social Thought, London: Routledge.
Kew, F. (1997) Sport: Social Problems and Issues, Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.
McLellen, A. (1994) The Enemy Within: The Impact of Overseas players on English Cricket,
London: Blandford.
Maguire, J. (1999) Global Sport: Identities, Societies, Civilizations, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Marqusee, M. (1998) Anyone but England: Cricket, Race and Class, London: Two Heads
Publishing.
Moorehouse, G. (1979) The Best Loved Game, London: Michael Joseph.
Oslear, D. and Bannister, J. (1996) Tampering with Cricket, London: Collins, Willow.
Werbner, P. (1996) ‘“Our blood is green”: cricket, identity and social empowerment
among British Pakistanis’, in J. MacClancey (ed.) Sport, Identity and Ethnicity, Oxford:
Berg.
Williams, J. (1999) Cricket and England: A Cultural and Social History of the Inter-war Years,
London: Frank Cass.
 Inner-city London and cricket development 249
Reports/strategies/research papers
Department of Culture, Media and Sport (1999) Policy Action Team 10, Research Report:
Sport and Social Exclusion, London: DMCS.
Department of Culture, Media and Sport (2000) A Sporting Future for All, London:
DMCS.
Department of National Heritage (1995) Sport: Raising the Game, London: DNH.
ECB (2000) The ECB Cricket Report 1999/2000, London: ECB.
ECB Racism Study Group (1999a) Clean Bowl Racism: Going Forward Together: A Report
on Racial Equality in Cricket, London: ECB.
ECB Racism Study Group (1999b) Clean Bowl Racism: Going Forward Together: Action
Plans for Racial Equality in Cricket, London: ECB.
McDonald, I. and Ugra, S (1998) Anyone for Cricket? Equal Opportunities and Changing
Cricket Cultures in Essex and East London, a report commissioned by Essex Cricket
Association and London Community Cricket Association, London: University of East
London.
Macpherson, W. (1999) The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William
Macpherson of Cluny, Cm 4262-1, London: The Stationery Office.
MCB (2000) Middlesex Cricket Board Youth and Coaching Income and Expenditure Account
30/900, London: MCB.
Sport England (2000) Active Sports Development Framework for Cricket, London: Sport
England.

Newspapers/magazines
Aldred, T. (2002) ‘Nationality is a thing of the past’, Guardian, 21 June.
Barnes, S. (2000) ‘The day when a national joke lost its punchline’, The Times, 5
September.
Chaudhary, V. (1999) ‘The test cricket fans are happy to fail’, Guardian, 10 May.
Chaudhary, V. (2001) ‘A question of support’, Guardian, 29 May.
Engel, M. (2000) ‘Now cricket’s come home after 31 years’, Guardian, 5 September.
Henderson, R. (1995) ‘Is it in the blood?’ in Wisden Cricket Monthly, July.
Hopps, D. (1999) ‘Lord’s declares war on racism’, Guardian, 17 November.
Martin-Jenkins, C. (1999) ‘England’s failure tests game’, The Times, 20 June.
Martin-Jenkins, C. (2000) ‘Oval glory shapes England’s future’, The Times, 5 September.
Mitchell, K. (2003) ‘Prince Billy’, Observer, 19 January.
Moody, T. (2003) ‘Potential gold mine to be tapped’, Observer, 8 December.
Rendall, J. (2002) ‘Some corner of a foreign field’, Observer Sport Monthly, June.
Revell, P. (1999) ‘Where racism just isn’t cricket’, Guardian, 25 May.
Schaefer, S. (1999) ‘Hit racism for six, says Banks’, Independent, 29 June.
Steen, R. (1999) ‘Wisden editor declares racism is just not cricket’, Guardian, 1 April.

Internet
Abbasi, K. (1999), ‘ The Asian flavour: English cricket seems to be ready to hit racism for
six, but will it revive its fortunes’, The Week, 19 September.
BBC News Online: Sport: Cricket (1999) ‘Apartheid holding back cricket’, BBC News
Online, 1 April.
CricInfo (1999) ‘Cricket’s “Bible” Hits out at Racial Bias’, Cricinfo, 1 April.
250 Nick Miller
DCMS (2000) ‘Kate Hoey opens inner city cricket scheme to attract players of the future’,
DCMS Web Site, 18 October.
Deeley, P. (1999) ‘Hussain hurt by chorus of boos’, Electronic Telegraph, 23 August.
ECB web page (2000) ‘Channel Four – investing in the future’, ECB Web Page, 4 July.
Hit Racism for Six (1999) ‘submission to ECB Racism study group’, HR46 website,
29 August.
Hughes, S. (1999) ‘Ethnic minorities in search of a level playing field’, Electronic Telegraph,
28 August.
Marqusee, M. (1998) ‘Two cultures of English cricket’, HR46 website, June/July.

Television
BBC 1 (1991) The Race Game, quoted in F. Kew (1997) Sport: Social Problems and Issues,
Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. 1991

Interviews
David Blundell – (SNCS)
Richard Davis – (ECB)
David Holland – (MCB)
13 The ambush clause
Globalisation, corporate power
and the governance of world
cricket
Mike Marqusee

Long before it was a global game, cricket was an imperial game. At least, that was
how it was seen by the rulers of the British Empire, in Whitehall and at Lord’s.
Their subjects sometimes saw it differently, playing cricket often in spite rather
than because of its imperial origins, as a means of claiming space within the
Empire or challenging it from without. When the anti-colonial movements ended
British rule, they also initiated the slow collapse of the structures and assumptions
on which world cricket was based (this process was completed only in the early
1990s, with the downfall of the apartheid regime in South Africa). Cricket itself
remained, however, and in some regions, notably South Asia, acquired ever-
greater popularity. After an exceedingly slow start, the governors of world cricket
raced to catch up with the new postcolonial reality. But by the time they did so
(again, only in the mid-1990s), they found themselves plunged into a neo-liberal
world flux characterised by corporate power, extreme inequality among nations
and the dominant sway of the United States. Among the latter’s many cultural
peculiarities was a reluctance to worship at the shrine of cricket. Cricket’s insti-
tutions and traditions, inherited from the imperial era, have nearly buckled under
the strain.

A spectre haunting cricket: Rupert Murdoch and the Cricket

World Cup of 2003
Most cricket fans will not have heard of it, but there is indeed an entity called the
Global Cricket Corporation (GCC). It’s a name that says so little and yet so much.
Bland and nondescript, yet bristling with hubris. Corporate self-aggrandisement
at its most egregious. It is nonetheless an apt description.
GCC is a small slice of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s global media–
entertainment conglomerate. In 2003, News Corporation boasted total assets of
$43 billion and annual revenue of $17 billion (Jamaica’s GDP, by comparison, is
$10 billion). Among its liabilities is a guarantee to pay the International Cricket
Council (ICC) a minimum of $550 million over five years in return for global
broadcasting and marketing rights for the World Cups of 2003 and 2007 (and
other ICC events).1
252 Mike Marqusee
This is hardly an onerous guarantee for News Corp, and not only because
of Murdoch’s vast and diverse assets. Already most of it has been recouped
through the sale of South Asian television rights to Sony. What’s more, built
into the contract are clauses that protect the Murdoch empire from many of the
vicissitudes that afflict the game.
‘Apparently two factors went in favour’ of the Murdoch bid, reported cricket
commentator Harsha Bhogle. ‘One of them was a fascinating qualitative factor
– the commitment to build the ICC as a brand . . . to nurture it, to look after it
and protect it like you would a child.’ The second factor arose from what Bhogle
called ‘a brown–white split’ in world cricket. The rival bid from Indian-based Zee
was rejected, despite being almost $100 million higher than Murdoch’s, in what
Bhogle described as ‘an obvious move by a power bloc to counter the Asian
administrative offensive’.2
Though Murdoch will eye the fortunes of 20th Century Fox, Fox News, the
Sun and other major News Corp holdings with greater interest than the ups and
downs of the ICC, cricket is nonetheless an integral part of his corporate strategy.
Sport, he has famously declared, is a ‘battering ram’ with which to secure entry
into new markets. And cricket has already given Murdoch a valuable foothold in
millions of Indian homes. It is also a contributor to the corporate ‘synergy’ through
which Murdoch’s various assets enhance each other. The ICC deal gives any
Murdoch subsidiary or affiliate ‘first right of refusal and the last right to match’ any
bid for the broadcast rights in any particular territory. So even where Murdoch’s
broadcasting arms – in South Asia, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom
or North America – lose the bidding war, their very presence ensures that there
will be a battle for the rights – to GCC’s advantage. In the World Cup of 2003
the exception was the United Kingdom – where the rights were left to Murdoch’s
Sky because neither the BBC nor Channel Four was interested in making a bid.
Nonetheless, for Murdoch, cricket is an auxiliary investment, one among many;
for the ICC, in contrast, the Murdoch deal is make or break. All the Test-playing
countries are reliant on the income stream it guarantees – and that has given
Murdoch tremendous clout within the world game.
This became apparent in the wake of the 2003 World Cup, when GCC
withheld some $15 million in payments owed the ICC. Murdoch’s team were
claiming compensation for revenues lost as a result of England’s refusal to play in
Zimbabwe, New Zealand’s refusal to play in Kenya, and alleged violations by
Indian players of the ‘ambush clause’. The latter was designed to protect GCC’s
exclusive right to sell sponsorships, and, as will become clear, embodied claims
and carried implications likely to shape world cricket in the coming years.
Initially, the ICC decided to dock New Zealand $2.5 million, England
$3.5 million and India $6.5 million. Though these amounts were later scaled
down, the GCC compensation claim was still an onerous one for all concerned.
‘Approximately 30 per cent to 35 per cent of our forecast income for the next five
years would be lost [if GCC pulled out of the deal] and that would have a huge
impact on all aspects of cricket in New Zealand including player payments,’
warned New Zealand’s cricket manager, Martin Snedden. So although the GCC
 Globalisation, corporate power and cricket 253
deal was supposed to free national boards of financial anxieties – and enable them
to focus on development – it has introduced a new and over-riding anxiety, one
characteristic of an economy globalised from the top down.

Zimbabwe: human rights and double standards

The dependence on Murdoch money weighed heavily in the run-up to England’s
World Cup boycott of Zimbabwe. ‘Sport is a business,’ Tim Lamb, the chief
executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), kept saying. ‘We are
a company and we have signed contracts for a multi-million pound event. This is
not a game of beach cricket.’ But under pressure from the media, the government
and the players, Lamb and the ECB shifted their position. Now it was ‘security’
and not finance that was to be the deciding issue. Despite the entreaties of the
ECB, the ICC ruled that the venue was safe and the match should proceed. At
the insistence of the players, England then unilaterally forfeited the match – along
with a possible berth in the Super Six (the World Cup’s intermediate round) and
several million dollars.
As the debate unfolded, the hypocrisies on all sides defied enumeration. In
Britain there were strident demands for a boycott from people who had been
equally strident, not so long ago, in denouncing the boycott of apartheid South
Africa. The plight of white farmers in Zimbabwe seemed to reawaken old racial
alliances: sections of the British media peddled a not very well-disguised appeal
to back our white ‘kith and kin’. On the other side, there was the surreal spectacle
of African National Congress (ANC) politicians solemnly declaring that politics
has no place in sport – the same people who once recited the mantra ‘no normal
sport in an abnormal society’. The Indian government would not allow its team
to play in Pakistan – but had no problems with Zimbabwe. The British gov-
ernment railed against Mugabe, but was delighted with General Musharraf’s
military dictatorship. In the midst of the World Cup, Britain and the United
States launched their attack on Iraq. As Imran Khan pointed out, there was a
powerful case for a boycott of Britain as an international aggressor and violator of
the UN Charter.3 Because of fear of an al-Qaeda attack, New Zealand refused to
play in Kenya – but would they have refused to play in New York?
For the United Kingdom and Australia, Mugabe was a handy Third World bully
against whom they could afford to take a moral stand – while continuing to
promote the policies and forces that had brought independent Africa to its knees.
For the South Asian nations, backing Mugabe carried a hint of anti-imperialist
fervour – but one that did not require them to actually challenge the imperial
power or the multinational corporations they were trying meanwhile to seduce.
Both sides shouted ‘hypocrite’ at the other and both were right.
Zimbabwe’s crisis is rooted in the legacy of empire. The negotiations that led
to majority rule left disproportionate economic power – not least land ownership
– in the hands of the white minority (as did the later transition in South Africa).
In the early years of his reign, Mugabe extolled cricket as a tool with which to
build ‘a nation of gentlemen’. But cricket never became a mass sport in Zimbabwe
254 Mike Marqusee
and remained associated with the white farmers, who in time became the targets
of Mugabe’s desperate bid to camouflage his failures with anti-colonial rhetoric.
The fog of double standards and expedient rationales should not obscure some
salient facts about Zimbabwe. Mugabe has ruled the country as a corrupt and
petty autocrat, and it was his servile compliance with the ‘structural adjustment’
demands of the IMF that first fuelled mass opposition to his regime. The demo-
cratic opposition forces in Zimbabwe – not the white farmers but the Zimbabwe
Trade Union Congress, the popularly elected opposition politicians of the
Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and the human rights organisations
– called for a boycott of the cricket as part of their call for wider sanctions against
the regime. That call should have been respected – by cricketers, corporations and
ordinary citizens.
As in the past, the same cricket authorities who speak freely of the spirit of
fair play and the virtues of cricket as a nation and character builder hotly denied
any ethical or political responsibility. While ready to crack down on a glare of
dissent, they permit the game to be used by dictators, demagogues and corporate
raiders. In contrast, the England players – and even more, the Zimbabwean
dissidents Henry Olonga and Andy Flower – decided in the end to draw a moral
demarcation.
The motives and politics of the England players may have been muddled, but
they showed greater wariness about how history will judge them than did the ECB
or ICC. Like other international cricketers, they struggle with the multiple roles
they are expected to play in the modern game. On the one hand, they are ‘just
cricketers’ and their sole mission is ‘to win’; on the other, they are ‘ambassadors
for their country’, ‘ambassadors for their sport’ and, of course, ambassadors for the
sponsors. They perform for the population of the host country and at the same
time for the folks at home. In a world of warfare, repression and gross economic
inequalities, Zimbabwe is likely to pose cricket only one of many dilemmas.
A cancelled sports event always costs money, but it is hard to see why GCC
should not bear at least some of the burden. The crisis in Zimbabwe was clearly
not of the ICC’s making. And the pressure not to play in Zimbabwe came from
governments that Murdoch supports – Tony Blair’s in the United Kingdom and
John Howard’s in Australia – and from some of Murdoch’s own newspapers.
Synergy, it seems, maximises profits and minimises responsibility. And what of
GCC’s vaunted concern for the ICC ‘brand name’? The dispute did nothing to
enhance the reputation of world cricket.

‘Relationships of ownership, they whisper in the wings’4

In contrast to their muddle over human rights, the cricket authorities and the
GCC showed sterner mettle in protecting the rights of sponsors and advertisers.
The contracts signed by GCC (on behalf of the ICC) and the sponsors
(‘partners’ in corporate-speak) contained an ‘ambush clause’ guaranteeing the
sponsors exclusivity and prohibiting attempts by competitors to cash in on the
World Cup. The clause was binding not only on the ICC and the World Cup
 Globalisation, corporate power and cricket 255
organisers, but also on the participating governing bodies and the individual
players. Effectively, it barred players from endorsing any rivals to official sponsors
for the duration of the Cup. It also made the ICC the disciplinary agent for GCC
– thus reversing the chain of accountability that binds the ICC to the national
boards and through them the players.
The players cried foul. Their rights had been sold without consultation or
compensation. A long, intricate and (at the time of writing) still unresolved
controversy ensued. Indian players, who stood to lose most because of their exten-
sive personal endorsements, refused to sign the original contracts. They agreed to
participate in the tournament only on amended terms that diluted the original
clauses. As a result, in the wake of the tournament, GCC withheld a substantial
part of its payment to the ICC, which passed that penalty – $6.5 million – to the
Indian Board. The Indian Board protested, and eventually counter-charged the
GCC with ‘inadequate marketing’.
The champions of globalisation are militant in their assertion of ‘intellectual
property rights’ – private and exclusive ownership of brand names or scientific
formulae or indeed sporting events. In an effort to placate the World Trade
Organisation and the multinational corporations, South Africa had already passed
a tough new statute against ambush marketing; violators could be sentenced to
jail. GCC and others had made clear to the ICC that if it wished to maximise the
value of the World Cup, and of world cricket in general, it had to ensure that the
rights it sold were exclusive. No one else was to enjoy the opportunity to exploit
the game.
During the World Cup itself the cricket authorities were vigilant in enforcing
the ambush clause. At the match between Australia and India at Pretoria, a
spectator was ejected for the offence of opening a can of Coca-Cola – official
sponsor Pepsi’s arch rival. The renegade Coke guzzler was Arthur Williamson, a
Johannesburg businessman, who claimed that security personnel ‘manhandled’
him out of the stadium. World Cup communications head Rodney Hartman
argued that the restrictions were clearly printed on the back of all match tickets
and were necessary ‘to protect the interests of sponsors’.
This neo-liberal effort to protect corporate property rights stripped players
and national boards of rights and property they had long considered their own.
Moreover, the ambush clause rested on an assertion of exclusive ownership by the
ICC – a body whose legal basis is a Monaco-based corporation. At what stage and
on what basis were the assets of world cricket in their entirety appropriated by
the ICC – to be sold to Murdoch? By what right does the ICC make its claim on
the players’ faces and bodies and names? It is a claim that certainly cannot rest on
the ICC’s performance as a world governing body or its track record in managing
cricket’s assets effectively or accountably.
What the ambush clause imbroglio demonstrated is that there is an ongoing
and unresolved struggle within the game over the division of the spoils. And it is
not just about how the pie is sliced, but also about who gets to wield the knife. In
other games, the increased market value of sport in a media-saturated society has
bred player power as the stars have learned how to exploit their growing celebrity.
256 Mike Marqusee
In this, as in so much else, cricket has lagged behind. But having found themselves
ambushed by the ambush clause, the cricketers are increasingly considering their
options. At a meeting in autumn 2002 of more than 100 Test players from nine
nations, Tim May, the Australian off-spinner who leads the nascent Federation
of International Cricketers, attacked the employers’ presumptions. ‘The ICC has
sold your images to the sponsors without permission. You don’t want a situation
where a player is standing next to Pepsi and endorsing it for free. He needs to be
paid for the personal endorsement.’5
May also warned the players of the dangers inherent in a dispute with GCC.
Given the decline in the rights market, he speculated that the $550 million deal
might be worth only half what it had been when it was signed in 2001. He
speculated that GCC would welcome an excuse to withdraw – a prospect that
frightens both the ICC and the national boards.
Cricket was a creation of the world’s first market society – eighteenth-century
England – and the cash nexus has always played a role in shaping the game. But
for more than a century, cricket was shielded from the market by aristocratic and
imperial privileges. No longer (Marqusee 1994). As the aftermath of the 2003
World Cup vividly demonstrated, the game is now subject to all the vicissitudes
of capitalist globalisation. It is a fate for which cricket’s history has left it ill-
prepared.

The inherited terrain: the ICC in an unequal world

The ICC was a late bloom of the British Empire. Its history has been shaped by
imperial hierarchies – and its transition to a post-imperial order has been belated
and incomplete.
The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) was founded in London in 1789 – and
rapidly became the recognised arbiter of the game, in England and overseas.
It was, and remains, a private members’ club, and for generations its leadership
was drawn from Britain’s ruling elite. Over the years, the game followed English
soldiers, sailors, colonists and merchants around the world, but international com-
petition remained informal and ad hoc until 1877, when England and Australia
played the inaugural official Test. Here two teams widely recognised as represen-
tative of the best cricketers from each of the two countries met for the first time.
But the Test series and cricketing relations between the two countries were at this
stage and for many years to come governed through negotiations between the
MCC in London and its counterpart in Melbourne.
The family of Test-playing nations was expanded to include South Africa in
1888. At this time, South African cricket was less developed than cricket in
North America, but the compulsions of empire were always uppermost in the
minds of the MCC elite, and at that moment the empire was deeply engaged in
staking a claim to South Africa, where vast gold deposits had been discovered.
Cricket was used to bolster that claim, and specifically to support the English-
speaking colonists against their Boer rivals. After the Boer War, imperial priorities
shifted. The aim now was to incorporate white South Africa as a whole, and
 Globalisation, corporate power and cricket 257
cricket tours were seen as a means of fostering friendship between ‘Briton and
Boer’. It was largely in order to consolidate the empire in South Africa that the
ICC was founded – as the Imperial Cricket Conference – in 1909, with three
member nations, England, Australia and South Africa (at a stroke severing the
United States from world cricket).
As part of its imperial burden, the MCC took responsibility for administering
the ICC, and the MCC chairman and secretary became, ex officio, president and
secretary of the ICC. This amateur arrangement continued for the next eight
decades. Unlike that of football, cricket’s spread remained confined to societies
under the direct rule of the British Empire. As a result, the MCC’s imperial
prerogatives were rarely challenged. And when they were, as in the bodyline
controversy during England’s tour of Australia in 1932–3, it was very much a
confrontation between two senior members of the world cricketing club; the other
nations, and the ICC itself, stood aside.
Just as the MCC widened its circle of members as and when it suited the
convenience of the dominant elite, so the ICC welcomed new Test-playing
countries. After South Africa, the next to join the club were the West Indies in
1928, New Zealand in 1929 and India in 1932 – all of which reflected in different
ways the impact of nationalist politics and the ongoing effort by the empire’s
masters to incorporate and manage the new forces emerging within it (Guha
2002; Bowen 1970; Beckles 1999). After partition, India sponsored Pakistan’s
admission to the Test club, despite English scepticism. Sri Lanka’s application was
in turn backed by both India and Pakistan, but resisted by the English for many
years. Even after they won Test status in 1981, the Sri Lankans found themselves
treated as a second-class Test nation by the English authorities for nearly 20 years.
Within the ICC it has always been the case that some Test-playing nations are
more equal than others.
Until recently the ICC’s role in organising international cricket competition
was minimal; tours and Tests were arranged bilaterally, according to the traditions
or whims or political designs of the separate national boards. The ICC never
required recognised Test nations to play against each other. The old South Africa
refused to play against the West Indies, India or Pakistan. Australia shunned New
Zealand (playing an initial Test only in 1946 and not again until the 1970s) in
an attempt to assert regional supremacy and in keeping with the Australian view
that New Zealand were unworthy opponents. Neutral umpires – a device that
would seem a sine qua non for any international sporting competition – were not
even contemplated in cricket until the late 1980s, when they were unilaterally
introduced by Pakistan.
Cricket’s transition from colonialism was remarkably retarded. In 1993 the
paternalistic, Anglocentric system was replaced by an elected president and the
beginnings of an independent full-time administration. The patricians of the
MCC gave way to hard-headed businessmen and politicians from South Asia,
South Africa and Australia. Members of elites from various countries with various
priorities, they have all been united in a desire to exploit the emergent global
marketplace.
258 Mike Marqusee
However, the ICC is still governed by the exclusive club of Test-playing
nations – and the Test-playing nations retain the right to decide who shall be
admitted to their ranks. Apart from apartheid South Africa between 1971 and
1992, the ICC has never stripped a country of Test-playing status. No matter how
poor your cricket is, no matter how routinely you are beaten by others, if you’re a
Test-playing nation you will retain your vote on the ICC’s top table – cricket’s
equivalent of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. It is sometimes
assumed therefore that long-term cricket development is a one-way process, that
it may stall but cannot recede. The recent evolution of Zimbabwe’s cricket – to
cite only the most salient example – suggests otherwise. Yet it is hard to imagine
any country ever losing Test status. Political and commercial imperatives will
continue to make it virtually impossible to assemble a consensus within the ICC
to relegate anyone.
Test cricket still lacks the kind of transparent and internally consistent global
competitive structure that football boasts. The national boards continue to prefer
the contests they know they can sell – England versus Australia, for example – to
those demanded by a more equitable and open system. But it is not only the
parochialism of the boards that presents problems to ICC modernisers here. There
are problems in the scale and logistics of such a competition that derive ultimately
from cricket’s origins in an earlier, pre-industrial age. Five- and six-test series
evolved not only because they were supreme and sustained challenges for mastery
that made for rich entertainment, but also because the exigencies of global travel
demanded longer visits. It is hard to see how global cricket, with its numerous
seasonal and geographical peculiarities, can ever be rationalised in accordance
with the norms of an age of a deracinated virtual reality.
In comparison with soccer’s world governing body, FIFA, the ICC is top-heavy,
dominated by the big cricket nations, and at the same time less centralised, with
far more powers remaining in the hands of the national boards. The new president
of the ICC, Ehsan Mani, a Pakistani accountant long resident in the United
Kingdom and with many years of service in the corporate sector, is the latest in a
series of would-be modernisers hoping to push the ICC towards the FIFA model.
He is seeking greater control (not least commercial control) over all international
cricket. Like his predecessors, Mani will find his efforts inhibited by the sheer
unevenness of the global cricket market. You can hear him struggling with this
dilemma in an interview he gave shortly after his appointment:

If cricket is to survive it has to compete with other sports. In the subcon-

tinent, cricket has no competition. So, the development priorities are
different. In these countries, what we lack are top infrastructure facilities
– high-performance coaching centres, academies. . . . But in England, and in
some other countries, cricket is competing with other sports such as football
and rugby. . . . What the England and Wales Cricket Board has to do is to go
out and attract the young kids who go into other sport. . . . In the long run,
I am very clear that members will have to yield more power on a variety of
issues to the central body. It has to happen. Only then can the ICC go
 Globalisation, corporate power and cricket 259
forward . . . at the ICC, we are constantly looking at the way Test and one-
day cricket is structured in terms of where the ownership should lie and
whether it should be programmed centrally. On whether or not ICC should
own all Test and one-day cricket, we are of the opinion that the ICC ought
to leave behind money to countries to run their own cricket. Imagine India
without any money at the board level! It may change in the future. Every
country has its own rights and we don’t want to step on those.

The ICC has inherited a lopsided game in a lopsided world. The South Asian
Test-playing countries boast a total population of 1.5 billion, and within these
countries cricket is unrivalled as a spectator sport. In contrast, Britain, Australia
and New Zealand – a bloc of predominantly white, advanced capitalist economies
– boast a total of 84 million, and cricket competes in these societies with a much
wider array of sport and leisure activities. However, it is in the nature of the
globalised economic order that some people are more equal than others. Average
GDP per capita in the Anglo-Australasian bloc is ten times greater than in the
South Asian bloc. The ‘Old Commonwealth’ countries’ combined GDP is some
two-thirds that of the South Asian countries, whose population outnumbers theirs
by 17 to 1. The 84 million in Australia–Britain–New Zealand consume the same
volume of electricity each year as the 1.5 billion in South Asia. There are more
people connected to the Internet in Australia (pop. 19 million) than in India
(pop. 1.1 billion). Britain’s military expenditure is three times India’s – and
equivalent to the entire GDP of the West Indies or Zimbabwe.
South Africa’s role as a swing power within the ICC reflects its peculiar
position in the global hierarchy. Its average GDP per capita is about midway
between South Asian and Western levels – but this ‘average’ disguises the
unspeakable gulf between the wealthy, mostly white minority and the impov-
erished black majority. There may be nearly as many cell phones in South Africa
as in India, but life expectancy – at 46 – is by far the lowest of any cricket-playing
country.6

Making a killing: national identity in a globalised economy

As Ehsan Mani is only too aware, the ICC has been riven by conflict between
the South Asian and Anglo-Australians blocs. The South Asian bloc’s economic
and political clout is formidable, and the Anglo-Australians have found that
reality hard to swallow. Jagmohan Dalmiya, former ICC president and for some
years the dominant figure on the Indian board, has frequently characterised this
attitude as an ‘imperial hangover’. That element is certainly present. But the
South Asian bloc’s case has been weakened by its inability to tackle its own
problems – as it tacitly admitted when a former commissioner of the London’s
Metropolitan Police was drafted in to deal with the match-fixing crisis. But even
more than the allegations of corruption and incompetence, the South Asian bloc
is compromised by the continuing disruption of the India–Pakistan cricket rivalry
– world sport’s fiercest derby and, apart from the soccer World Cup final, perhaps
260 Mike Marqusee
its biggest single spectator attraction. The absence of competition between India
and Pakistan has been the hole in the heart of world cricket.
Its future depends, of course, on the evolution of relations between the two
countries. Here too, cricket finds itself dogged by the legacies of imperialism. But
while cricket cannot bring an enduring peace between India and Pakistan, it can
be used to advance or obstruct the processes that might lead to this peace.
The principal culprits in the disruption of India–Pakistan cricket relations have
been the forces of right-wing Hindu nationalism in India. They have used cricket
(usually ignoring other sports) in their attempts to rally public opinion against the
designated enemies without (Pakistan) and within (Indian Muslims). The
questions raised by cricket between India and Pakistan become, in times of
international tension, tests of patriotism. A frustrated Pakistani board routinely
denounces the Indians for ‘playing politics’ with cricket – which is a bit rich
coming from men appointed by a military dictatorship.
Meanwhile, the India–Pakistan cricket rivalry is sublimated offshore – in
Sharjah, Singapore, Bangladesh, Australia, England and South Africa. This
displacement seems to have made it an attraction of even greater intensity for
television spectators at home. A report in the Indian press by Anand Vasu
described reactions on both sides of the border to India’s victory over Pakistan in
the 2003 World Cup, thanks to a masterful innings by Sachin Tendulkar.

There was a spontaneous eruption of firecrackers, cheers, chanting and joy

across the length and breadth of a large country as India pulled off a stunning
win against the old enemy Pakistan for the fourth time in as many World Cup
clashes. . . . It was always going to be a day of heated arguments, passionate
following and a tense battle out in the middle. Several cities in India had
declared a public holiday to watch their team take on Pakistan in a one-dayer
for the first time in three years. Cities that did not were paralysed as children
stayed away from schools, offices emptied out by the start of the game and the
streets wore a deserted look. Time stood still, life was put on hold as India
delivered the game that a billion people wanted. . . . There will be mourning
in the streets of Lahore and Karachi. There will be heartburn in Pakistan’s
provinces. There will be calls for a change of captain and coach. There will
be anger, there will be disappointment and there will be a sense of shock.7

One of the paradoxes of globalisation is that it has fostered the attractive power
of parochial identities. In a world dominated by the likes of the GCC, national
identity, in particular, is a prized commodity – malleable, manipulable, profitable.
When India played Pakistan in Australia in early 2000, the series was promoted
by its South Asian broadcasters, Star-ESPN, under the slogan ‘Qayamat!’ –
apocalypse – accompanied by thunderous rumblings and flashes of light. For
Murdoch (owner of Star) and the Disney Corporation (owner of ESPN), the clash
between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, replete with religious connotations,
was merely handy matter with which to attract an audience and enhance the
value of their investment in cricket.
 Globalisation, corporate power and cricket 261
The American delusion: the World Cup, 2007
With a mere six million people and a combined GDP of only $28 billion (New
Zealand has about two-thirds as many people, but its GDP is three times larger),
the West Indies are today, as they have always been, a marginal outpost in the
global cricket marketplace. Nonetheless, in 2007 they will host the World Cup.
In other circumstances it might have been the fulfilment of C. L. R. James’s vision
of West Indians ‘making their way with bat and ball into the comity of nations’.
But much has changed since 1963, when James’s classic Beyond a Boundary was
published.
As elsewhere in the British Empire, cricket in the West Indies reflected social
and racial hierarchies. It was the genius of James to see that the game did not
belong exclusively to the colonial power or the local elite and that it could be an
instrument for national unity and liberation. As if in fulfilment of his prophecies,
during the 1960s and 1970s the West Indian cricketers became the game’s first
real global champions, winning hearts and minds in Australia, India, Pakistan and
Britain.
It was always remarkable that a sequence of world-beaters should have sprung
from the Caribbean: an impoverished society with a relatively small middle class,
economically and strategically marginal, an entity embracing numerous nation-
states and diverse cultures. Buoyed up by the anti-colonial movements of the
era, their peripatetic cricketing representatives forged a new unity and played
with unrivalled purpose. Thanks to their Caribbean and worldwide prestige, the
cricketers exercised both a political and a financial independence rarely seen
before in the game. Kerry Packer’s star-studded breakaway series of the late 1970s
rattled world cricket from top to bottom and led to the banishment of some of
the game’s biggest names, but the West Indian cricketers played for Packer
unpenalised. They also used their clout to block the Packer series from being used
as a Trojan horse by apartheid South Africa.
Just as no one – except C. L. R. James – had foreseen the West Indies’ rise to
dominance, no one foresaw their precipitate decline. Various reasons have been
advanced for this manifest downturn in the standard of West Indian cricket since
the mid-1990s: the impact of US sports via television, the difficult economic
conditions of the past twenty years, insularity and disunity, the waning of post-
independence élan. Whatever the diagnosis, cricket authorities, politicians and
cricket fans across the region are joined in a hope that the 2007 World Cup will
usher in a West Indies cricket revival.
What is being dubbed ‘Windies World Cup 2007’ will be the largest single
sporting or cultural event ever undertaken by the region. Tourism, sponsorship
and the sale of intellectual property rights are expected to generate over half a
billion US dollars, with other World Cup-related activity bringing in several
times that mount.
Across the West Indies there has been much emphasis on the fact that ‘the
world will be watching’ – and much anxiety about the region’s capacity to
perform. At a press conference in Guyana in March 2003 the ground rules were
262 Mike Marqusee
spelled out by the managing director of Windies World Cup 2007 Inc., Chris
Dehring, an investment banker:

What we’re talking about is the International Cricket Council Cricket World
Cup. That is extremely important for people in the Caribbean to understand.
This is not the West Indies’ World Cup, to do what we want with and to any
standards we choose. There are standards to be met, even while maintaining
a distinct Caribbean flavour . . . Windies World Cup 2007 has to be seen and
appreciated as a global event that the West Indies have been given the
privilege of hosting.

Dehring emphasised that ‘right alongside us’ will be the Global Cricket
Corporation.

This international event will come with its international sponsors and
there will be little room for domestic sponsors. In fact, it is anticipated that
‘sunset’ legislation will have to be put in place to guard against ambush
marketing, such is the seriousness with which we have to protect the rights
of international sponsors who have paid all that money. Understand clearly
what we are saying because there will be grave consequences for Guyana if
you do not. As an example, Bourda [one of the West Indies’ long-established
Test venues, in Georgetown, Guyana] and its environs will have to be
absolutely clean of all signage in order for it to be usable as an official stadium
in 2007.

As if to rub home the point to the Guyanese, Dehring stressed that Bourda could
not assume it had a right to stage a World Cup match just because of its traditional
status as a Test ground.

No venue in the Caribbean has ever hosted an ICC World Cup match, so
there can be no ‘traditional’ World Cup venue. To compare the traditional
hosting of a Test match to that of hosting a World Cup match is like using
the qualification of being a teller in a commercial bank in Guyana to apply
for the job as head of the World Bank.8

In response to Dehring’s warnings, an editorial in the Stabroek News commented:9

For Guyana’s part, it is inconceivable that the World Cup could be brought
to the West Indies without matches being staged in the land of Kanhai,
Lloyd, Kallicharran, Gibbs, Fredericks, Croft, Hooper, Chanderpaul, Sarwan
et al. Guyanese here and abroad would simply not be able to comprehend
this possibility. But there should be no mistake about it. There is a risk
that matches might not be staged here unless we – all of us, not only the
government and the Guyana Cricket Board – spring out of the inertia that
cocoons us until it is usually too late to act.
 Globalisation, corporate power and cricket 263
The newspaper went on to argue that unless the local authorities moved quickly,
Guyana could find itself squeezed out of a World Cup match. Since the ICC and
GCC called the shots,

Guyana is unlikely to benefit from any sentimental considerations of its

cricketing legend, the immaculate beauty of the Bourda sward or the near
fanatical attachment of its citizens to cricket. Purely hard-nosed determi-
nations will be made by the venue analysers who will scour the region in the
upcoming months.

In the absence of traditional prerogatives, Bourda would find itself in open

competition with newer but better-appointed venues in Grenada, Antigua and
St Vincent. And as if that were not threat enough, the newspaper noted that ‘the
ICC and GCC are clearly of the mind to expand the reach of cricket in the region,
if only to make the tournament more lucrative’. Florida, New York, Bermuda,
the Cayman Islands were all mentioned as possible Windies World Cup venues.
‘This means even tougher competition for Guyana.’
The ICC has always been reluctant to grant the West Indies a World Cup, not
only because of doubts about facilities but also because it is bound to be a less
lucrative proposition when it comes to advertising and media rights than South
Asia, England or Australia. But in compensation there is the lure of the United
States. Indeed, for the ICC and the GCC, the main attraction of the Caribbean
seems to be its proximity to the United States.
Expanding cricket’s domain into the United States has been a long-standing
dream of the big players in the ICC. Since the mid-1990s there has been talk of
staging a one-day series in Disneyworld. In 2002 a board meeting of the ICC in
Monaco was treated to a commercial presentation by Major League Baseball.
Ehsan Mani explained the strategic thinking to Rediff.net:

We have to take cricket to new areas and new markets like the United States.
We are working very hard to stage World Cup matches there in 2007. If we
don’t do it, cricket will get blocked out in the United States. Just the sports
revenue market of the US is $100 billion a year. The ICC is talking about
raising $550 million over seven years. That puts into perspective the gap we
have in this area. The game needs money to move forward, for development,
to set up proper structures for the ICC and its members. We are not in a
position to just play cricket and say that we are not interested about the
money.

It seems as if the lords of cricket are worried that in the absence of a toehold on
the American mainland, they will always be second-class citizens in the global
empire of sport. In the end, however, the ICC decided not to stage any 2007
World Cup matches in the United States. The factionalism that has hobbled US
cricket for 20 years made the whole proposition too fraught with peril, political,
financial and legal. Instead, in an attempt to go over the heads of the competing
264 Mike Marqusee
factions, the ICC employed a British businessman as director of something called
‘Project USA’, whose main aim is to find ways of staging one-day internationals
in the United States. But factionalism in cricket is by no means confined to the
United States. The deeper problem is that cricket’s American dream is both a
vainglorious delusion and a colossal failure of the imagination. The US sports
market is indeed the world’s richest but it is also its most competitive. While the
South Asian communities now resident in North America are sizeable enough to
provide big audiences for occasional matches, there is little likelihood that cricket
will ever break out of the immigrant niche and grab a piece of the action from
baseball, basketball or American football. Even soccer has prospered in the
United States only after decades of intensive grass-roots development and with
the help of an immigrant and immigrant-descended base many times larger than
cricket enjoys.
Overall, globalisation as currently designed and managed is more likely to foster
the export of US sports (and culture in general) than the import of alien games
such as cricket. But for the cricket bosses the US market offers a short cut to
prestige and wealth. So much easier than the long-term grass-roots investment
needed to develop cricket in its existing markets – where the game is inhibited by
either mass poverty or the strength of its competitors.
In the run-up to Windies 2007, as elsewhere, globalisation promises to eradicate
local traditions in favour of the priorities of multinational corporations. The
preparations for the tournament also confirm the gravitational pull of US wealth
and power within the neo-liberal world order – of which, after all, Rupert
Murdoch is the great champion. The local boards and even more the local fans
feel themselves helpless playthings in the grand schemes of the ICC, but the ICC
feels itself a plaything in the hands of the GCC and global market forces.
Yet one can never be completely pessimistic about cricket, even about the fate
of a commercial pawn such as the World Cup. As Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguyan
novelist, said of football in South America, ‘The more the technocrats programme
it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, the more it
continues to be the art of the unforeseeable.’

Notes
1 News Corporation Annual Report, 2003, http://www.newscorp.com/investor/annual_
reports.html.
2 http://www.rediff.com/sports/2000/jul/01harsha.htm.
3 ‘Who’s the real villain?’, Imran Khan, Guardian (London), 24 January 2003.
4 ‘Gates of Eden’, Bob Dylan.
5 ‘Players unite to take on ICC: more sponsorship rows loom before World Cup’, David
Hopps, Guardian, (London), 21 September 2002.
6 Statistics from the CIA World Fact Book.
7 Anand Vasu, Cricinfo (www.cricinfo.org), 1 March 2003.
8 Frederick Halley, Guyana Chronicle, 5 January 2003.
9 Stabroek News, Georgetown, Guyana, 31 March 2003.
 Globalisation, corporate power and cricket 265
References
Beckles, Hilary McD. (1999) The Development of West Indies Cricket, 2 vols, London: Pluto
Press; Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.
Bowen, Rowland (1970) Cricket: A History of its Growth and Development throughout the
World, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.
Guha, Ramachandra (2002) A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British
Sport, London: Picador.
Marqusee, Mike (1994) Anyone but England, London: Verso.
Index

A Sporting Future for All (government Ashcroft, Bill 3

strategy document) 240 Atkins, Mike 226–31
Abbas, Zaheer 123 Atkins, Sue 225
Abbasi, Arif Ali Khan 124 Attlee, Clement 182
Abbott, Tony 17 Austin, H.B.G. 163
Abeysekera, Karunaratne 143 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Abeysekera, Sam 145 (ABC) 17–18
Abeywardene, Lassie 147 Australian Cricket Board (ACB) 10, 16,
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 20, 22–3, 136, 148, 151
Commission (ATSIC) 20 Azad, Kirti 90
Aboriginal Cricket Working Party 20 Azharuddin, Mohammed 87–90
Adams, Paul 61
Advani, L.K. 77 Bacher, Dr Ali 48, 50, 55, 57, 62–3, 67
African National Congress (ANC) 49, 51, Badcock, Capt. F.C. 147
253 Badenhorst, Alan 62
Afrikaner Nationalist Party 49, 52–6, 60, Baig, Abbas Ali 80, 147
63, 64–8 Bailey, Jack 195
Agnew, Jonathan 198 Bailey, Reverend Brooke 137
Ahktar, Shoaib 248 Bailey, Trevor 187
Ahmed, Niaz 121 Bakhtin, Mikhail 213
Akram, Wasim 125 Balakrishnan, C. 135
Ali, Kabir 246 Bale, John 3
Aligarh College 111 Balfour, Ngconde 62
All Blacks, (of 1905) 28; 35–6, 42 Ball of Fire 194
Alley, Bill 195 Bandaranaike, S.W.R.D. 134
Allison, Lincoln 52 Bangladesh war (1971) 100
Altaf, Dr Zafar 209 Banks, Tony 240
Amarasuriya, Hemaka 133, 153 Bannister, Alex 184, 187–8
Ambrose, Curtley 56, 161 Barbados Cricket League (BCL) 163
Ames, Leslie 121 Bari, Wasim 123
Anandarajah, C.E. 134 Barlow, Eddie 64
Anderson, Benedict 12, 94 Barmy Army 104, 214
Annetts, Denise 19 Barnes, Simon 239
Antigua Cricket Club 162 Barrington, Ken 197
Anyone for Cricket report 238–9, 246 Bateman, Colin 198
apartheid 21–2, 48–9, 54, 173, 261 Baucom, Ian 106
Appadurai, Arjun 95, 111 Beazley, Kim 14
Arnold, Russe 154 Beckham, David 89
 Index 267
Beckles, Hilary 3, 160, 167–8, 170,173–4 Burki, Shahid Javed 122
Bedi, Bishen Singh 81, 169, 193 Butcher, Mark 219
Bedi, Mandira 105–6
Benaud, Richie 189 Caddick, Andrew 219
Bennett, Fred 148 Campaign Against Racism in the Media
Berlins, Marcel 194 201
Berry, Scyld 82,166 Carrington, Ben 235
Betting scandals (‘Cronjegate’) 87–8 Cashman, Richard 10, 80,118
Beyond a Boundary 106, 261 CENTO (Central Treaty Organisation)
Bharat Army 104–5 122
Bharatiya Janata (Hindu Nationalist) Central Province Cricket Association
Party (BJP) 5, 87 (CPCA) 147
Bharti, Uma 87 Cesaire, Aime 168
Bhimani, Kishore 101 Ceylon Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
Bhogle, Harsha 252 142
Bhutto, Zulfiqar Ali 113, 117, 120–3 Ceylon Cricket Association (CCA) 139,
Binny, Roger 89 142
Bird dynasty (of Antigua) 159 Challenor, George 183
Bird, Harold ‘Dickie’ 198 Chanderpaul, Shivnarine 161, 262
Black Caps 39 Chandrashekhar, Bhagwat 81, 169
Black, Peter 192 Chanmugan, Neil 147
Blainey, Geoffrey 12 Channel Nine TV 17
Blair, Tony 254 Chappell, Greg 20, 37, 150
Bloomfield Cricket Club 133 Chappell, Ian 20
Blundell, David 244–5 Charter of Freedom for Colonial Peoples
Board of Control (later Australian Cricket (1942) 182
Board) 16 Chatterjee, Partha 95
Board of Control for Ceylon Cricket Chaudhary, Vivek 247
(BCCC) 142 Chauhan, Chetan 90
Board of Control for Cricket in India Chrisman, Laura 3
(BCCI) 79, 82–3, 84, 88, 91,112 Churchill, Sir Winston 15, 186
Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan Clark, Belinda 19
(BCCP) 112–14, 121–5 Clean Bowl Racism campaign 233–4,
Board of Control for Cricket in Sri Lanka 240–1, 244–5, 247–8
(BCCSL) 133, 145–6, 148–9, 152 Clinton, President Bill 77
Bodyline controversy 191, 257 Clive Lloyd League 226
Bogra, Mohammed Ali 120 Close, Brian 190, 193–4
Boon, David 13 Cohen, Leonard 2
Border, Allan 14, 84 Collis, John 200
Bosch, Tertius 51 Colombo Academy 137
Bose, Mihir 79, 83, 95, 100 Colombo Cricket Club (CCC) 133, 136,
Bourda cricket ground, Georgetown 149
186–7, 262 Colts Cricket Club 133, 138, 140
Boycott, Geoffrey 200–1 Commonwealth Immigration Act (1962)
Bradman, Sir Donald 3, 10–11, 14, 18–19, 192
21, 23–4, 143 Compton, Denis 195
Bramble, William 175 Concerned Group of Cricketers 68
Bray, Charles 185 Confederation of South African Trade
British Nationality Act (1981) 5, 196, 201 Unions (COSATU) 60, 66
Broad, Chris 199 Congress Party (of India) 110
Buchanan, John 136 Constantine Learie 147, 163, 166, 168,
Bukhatir, Sheikh Abdul Rahman 84 183
Buller, Sid 194 Constantine, Mr Carlton 191
268 Index
Cornelius, Justice R.A. 114 Digby, William 137
Cowdrey, Colin 189–90 Disney Corporation 260
Crabbe, Tim 236, 239 Dissanayake, Gamini 142–3, 148
Cranwell RAF College 145 Donald, Alan 51, 64
Creech Jones, Arthur 182 Doordarshan (Indian broadcasting service)
Cricket and England 235 102
Cricket and Race 19 Dos Santos, Sir Errol 186
Cricket Foundation 244 Dravid, Rahul 89, 105
Cricket Max 39–40 Duleepsinhji, Kumar Shri 140
Cricket Wallah 82 Durkheim, Emile 213
Cricket World Cup 1999 204–20, 239 Dyson, John 147
Cricket World Cup 2003 251–6, 260 Dyson, Michael Eric 164
Cricket World Cup 2007 261–4
Croft, Colin 198, 262 Eden Gardens, Kolkata (Calcutta) 84–5,
Cronin, Mike 3 99, 100
Cronje, Hansie 51, 56, 64 Eden Park, Auckland 28, 32, 35, 38
Crossroads township 60 Edrich, John 188
Crowe, Martin 39 Edwards, T.C.T. 146, 147
Empire CC (Barbados) 163, 172
D’Oliveira affair 49 Engel, Matthew 238
D’Oliveira, Basil 197 England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB)
Dakin, Geoff 51 204–7, 210, 213, 219, 233–4, 237,
Dalmiya, Jagmohan 85, 88, 99, 259 239–48, 253–4, 258
Daniell, Thomas 136 ESPN (satellite TV channel) 102, 260
Das, S.S. 88 Evatt, Herbert 16
Dassanayake, S.B. 152 Examiner (Sir Lankan newspaper) 138
Davidson, Jim 208
Davies, Charles 65 Faulkner, John 16
Dawn (Pakistani newspaper) 115 Federation of International Cricketers
de Caires, Cecil 165 256
de Fransz, W. 138 Fernando, H.I.K. 145–6
de Klerk F.W. 51 Fernando, Tyronne 142
de Kretser, R.L. 140 Fleming, Scott 85
de Saram, D.L. 140 Flintoff, Andrew 89
de Saram, F.C. 140, 143–4, 146, 154 Flower, Andy 22, 254
de Silva D.S. 143 Foenander, S.P. 139
de Silva, A.E. 146 Folley, Malcolm 193
de Silva, Ajit 149 Foot, Sir Hugh 16
de Silva, Aravinda 151–2 Forbes, O.B. 139
de Silva, D.H. 143, 146 Forte, Martin 230
de Silva, D.P. 143 Forte, Ronnie 230
de Zoysa, L.E. 140 Fraser, Angus 242
Deane, William (Governor General of Fredericks, Roy 262
Australia) 11 Friendship Cup 86
Dehring, Chris 262 Fuard, Abu 142–3, 145–6
Denness, Mike 85, 92
Desailly, Marcel 90 Gaelic Athletic Association 15
Dev, Kapil 81, 83, 87, 89, 99 Gairy, Eric 176
Devon Malcolm Cricket Centre 229, 232 Galeano, Eduardo 264
Dexter, Ted 189 Gandhi, Indira 81
Dias, Roy 149 Gandhi, Leela 2
Die Stem (South African national anthem) Ganguly, Sourav 77, 88–9, 103
52 Gardiner, Michael 213
 Index 269
Garner, Joel 199, 230 Hassan, Syed Fida 121
Garvey, Marcus 160 Hawke, Bob 16
Gatting, Mike 242 Hazare, Vijay 96, 107
Gavaskar, Sunil 81, 83, 99–100, 125 Headingley cricket ground, Leeds 207,
Gemmell, Jon 3 211–13, 223
Georgetown Cricket Club 172 Headley, Dean 219
Gibbs, Herschelle 63 Headley, George 168, 183
Gibbs, Lance 167, 262 Hector, Leonard ‘Tim’ 159–76, 232
Gibson, Pat 193–6, 197, 198–200 Henderson, Claud 62
Gilbert, Eddie 19–20 Henderson, Robert 205, 229, 236
Gilchrist, Roy 200 Hero Honda (Indian company) 88
Gillespie, Jason 19 Heyn, Charles 138
Gillete Cup 34 Hignell, Andrew 31
Gilroy, Paul 208, 210, 235 Hillary, Sir Edmund 28, 35–6, 42
Gittens, Owen 229–30 Hilton College 59
Gittens, Sam 229–30 Hindutva (renewal of Hindu pride) 90
Giulianotti, Richard 210, 215 History of the Pan African Revolt (1934)
Global Cricket Corporation (GCC) 160
251–2, 255–6, 262–4 History of West Indies Cricket 164
Goddard, John 165, 183–4 Hit Racism for Six campaign 234
Gooch, Graham 197 Hobbs, Sir Jack 96, 140
Goonesena, Gamini 144–5 Hoberman, John 126
Gough, Darren 209, 248 Hoey, Kate 233, 241
Gover, Alf 193 Holding, Michael 192–5, 230
Government College 111 Holford, David 230
Gower, David 96, 200, 218 Holkar Cricket Association 144
Grace Road, Leicester 220 Hooper, Carl 174–5, 262
Grace, Dr W.G. 96, 196 Hopps, David 220
Greatbatch, Mark 39 Howa, Hassan 52
Greenfeld, Liah 97 Howard, John 10, 14, 17, 20, 254
Greenidge, Gordon 175, 230 Hughes, Kim 148
Greig, Tony 196 Hughes, Simon 239, 241
Griffith, Charlie 188, 194 Hulme, Peter 201
Griffith, S.C 145 Humayun, Shahzad 116
Growth, Employment and Redistribution Hussain, Munir 116
strategy (GEAR) 60, 66 Hussain, Nasser 219, 233, 239, 247
Guha, Ramachandra 78, 89, 103 Hutton, Len 145, 186–7
Gul, Aftab 121 Hutton, Will 60
Gunasekara, Dr C.H. 140
Gurusinghe, Nihal 146 Iftikar Nawab of Pataudi 140, 189
Guyana Cricket Board 262 Imperial Cricket Conference 257
Imperial Cricket Council 49
Habib, Aftab 219 Inman, Clive 144, 145
Hadlee, Richard 35–36, 38, 150 Inner City Community Cricket Project
Hadlee, Walter 35 233, 241
Haigh, Gideon 10 Insole, Doug 190
Hair, Darrel 150 International Cricket Council (ICC)
Hall, Stuart 2, 9 21–2, 85, 89, 112, 126, 149, 224, 253,
Hall, Wes 188–90, 200, 229 255–9, 262–4
Hammond, Wally 96 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 66,
Harms, John 10 172, 176
Harper, Roger 175–6 Iqbal, Asif 123
Hartman, Rodney 255 Islamia College 112
270 Index
Jackman, Robin 197, 201 Klein, Naomi 60
Jadeja, Ajay 87–8 Klusener, Lance 57
Jaffna Central CC 141 Knatts Sports Cricket Club 231
Jagan, Dr Cheddi 176, 186 Kontouri, Alex 152
Jalil, Hassan 116 Kriket Kriket (Hindi cricket journal) 103
James, C.L.R. 3, 90, 95, 106, 159–60, Ku Klux Klan 176, 227
162–3, 165–6, 223, 261 Kumar, Dilip 80
Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP, People’s Kureishi, Omar 116
Liberation Front) 135 Kuruppu, Brendon 133
Jardine, Douglas 15, 191
Jatika Chintanaya (Nationalist Thought) Lagaan (Indian film) 91–2
154 Laker, Jim 195
Jayasinghe, Stanley 144–5 Lamb, Allan 196
Jayasuriya, Sanath 143, 151 Lamb, Tim 207, 233, 253
Jayaweera, Neville 142–3 Lara, Brian 56, 171, 174–5
Jayawickrema, S.S. 140 Lashley, Peter 229
Jayewardene, J. R. 142 Lawrence, Ken 200
Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 113 Lawton, James 193
Jones, Deborah 18 Le Pen, Jean Marie 90
Jones, W.S. 186 Lehmann, Darren 224
Jordan, Michael 170 Letlhake, Donald 63
Joseph, E.H. 138 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)
134, 151, 153
Kaif, Mohammed 88, 90–1 Lieversz, Darrel 146
Kallicharan, Alvin 175, 262 Lillee, Dennis 14, 169
Kaluperuma. Lalith 149 Lister, Joe 146
Kaluwitharana, Romesh 136 Littlemore, Stuart 18
Kanhai, Rohan 166, 175, 188, 191, 262 Lloyd, Clive 81, 173, 175, 193, 195, 199,
Kapoor, Raj 80 230, 262
Kardar, Abdul Hafeez 114 London Schools Cricket Project 242–3
Kardar, Shahid Hafeez 122–3 Lord Beginner 184
Karunaratne, E.M. 139 Lord Kitchener, 164
Kehelgamuwa, T.B. 133 Lords cricket ground 233
Kelaart, ‘Banda’ 138 Lords, West Indies first test victory against
Kelaart, Collin 138 England at (1950) 182–5
Kelaart, Edward 140 Lucas, Slade 160
Kelaart, Tommy 140
Kellaart, Dr Edgar 138 Mackerdhuj, Krish 51
Kemp, Gerald 191 MacLean, R.A. 59
Kernot, Cheryl 16 Macmillan, Brian 61–2
Khan, Air Marshal Nur 124 Macpherson Report (1999) 240
Khan, Bashir 116 Magiet, Rushdi 52
Khan, General Muhammed Ayub 120–1 Maguire, Joseph 234
Khan, General Nur 114 Mahanama, Roshan 151
Khan, Imran 101, 114, 123, 125, 169, 236, Maharaj Kumar of Vizanagram 140
253 Mahaweli Development Board 148
Khan, Majid 119, 123 Mahinda College (Galle) 141,143
Khan, Mansur Ali 80 Mahmood, Fazal 123
Khan, Muawar Ali 123 Major, John 235
Khan, Zaheer 88, 90 Makopanele, David 63
Khayelitsha township 60 Malay Cricket Club 140
kilikiti (Pacific version of cricket) 41 Malcolm, Devon 228–9
Kiwi Cricket 38 Mandela, Nelson 48, 51,53, 55, 173
 Index 271
Mandle, W.F. 10, 11 Movement for Democratic Change
Mangeshkar, Lata 77 (MDC) 254
Mani, Ehsan 258–9, 263 Mpephu, Patrick 58
Mankad, Vinoo 107 Mugabe, Robert 253–4
Manley, Michael 164 Muhamed, Sadiq 123
Manley, Norman 175 Muhammed, Mushtaq 123
Mann, George 1 Mujahid, Chisty 115
Mann, Simon 1 Muldoon, Robert 37
Manning, J.L. 191 Mullally, Alan 219
Mantanzima, George 58 Muralitharan, Muttiah 134–6, 150
Mantanzima, Kaiser 58 Murdoch, Rupert 5, 85, 251–5, 260, 264
Maple Cricket Club (Trinidad) 162 Murray, Deryck 197
Marasinghe, T.B. 147–8 Musharraf, Gen. Pervez 253
Marker, Jamshed 116 Muslim League (of India) 110
Marqusee, Mike 3, 150, 234–5, 244, 247 Muthiah, A.C. 88
Marshall, Malcolm 167, 198
Marshall, Pat 184 Nandy, Ashis 78, 89, 95
Marshall, Prof. Roy 224 National University of Singapore (NUS)
Martin-Jenkins, Christopher 239 136
Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) 31, Nawab of Mamdot 123
139–40, 162, 172, 219, 256 Nayudu, C.K. 96, 140
Mascarenhas, Mark 85 Nehru, Jawarharlal 91, 107
Mashile, Elias 59 Nepia, George 28
Masood, Asif 121 New Zealand Cricket Almanack 32, 34–5
May, Peter 200 New Zealand Cricket Council (NZCC)
May, Tim 256 30–1, 34–5
Mbeki, Thabo 52, 55–6, 59, 68 New Zealand Cricket Inc. (NZC) 39–40
McCarthy, Pat 140 New Zealand Herald 3
McDonald, Ian 234, 237–8 New Zealand Listener 33
McGlew, Jackie 63, 189 News Corporation 5, 251–2
McGrath, Glenn 19 Ngam, Mfuneko 59
McKay, Jim 9 Nielsen, Tim 136
McWatt, Clifford 186 Nimmo, Derek 208
Medellin Cartel 176 Nkosi Sikeleli’ Afrika (South African
Melbourne Cricket Club (Jamaica) 172 national anthem) 52
Mendis, Duleep 149, 152 Noman, Omar 125
Menzies, Badge 186 Nondescripts Cricket Club (NCC) 133,
Menzies, Sir Robert Gordon 15–17, 140
20–1 Norgay, Tenzing 28
Merchant, Vijay 83, 95, 96, 140, 141 Norton and District League 225
Miandad, Javed 84–5, 91, 107 NRIs (Non Resident Indians) 104–5
Middlesex Cricket Board (MCB) 241–5 Ntini, Makaya 59, 61
Midnight’s Children (novel) 3 Nunes, Karl 186–7
Miller, Keith 14, 189–90
Miller, Toby 9 Old Trafford, Manchester 208, 216
Mirza, Iskander 120 Old, Chris 169
Montego Bay conference (1947) 182 Olonga, Henry 22, 254
Moody, Tom 246 Ontong, Justin 57
Morgan, William J. 210 Opatha, Tony 149
Morrell, Randy 147–8 Outschoorn, Laddie 144
Morris Isaacson School 59
Mottau, Owen 148 Packer, Kerry 36–7, 82, 87, 100, 101, 124,
Mount Cricket Club 246 171, 261,
272 Index
Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) 114, 124 Rastafarians 168
Pakistan Times 115 Ray, Robert 16
Palmer, V. 12 Reconstruction and Development Programme
pan Africanism 160 (RDP) 55, 60, 67
Parish, Bob 148 Reeve, Dermot 224
Parker, Robert 194 Reid, Buddy 146, 147
Pascoe, Len 20, 169 Reliance (Indian conglomerate) 84
Patel, Brijesh 80, 147 Rendall, Jonathan 246
Patel, Imtiaz 64 ressentiment 97–8, 100
Patriotic Front 154 Reynolds, Buster 230
Patron’s Trophy 113 Rice, Clive 57
People’s Progressive Party (PPP) 186–7 Rice, Jonathan 59
Pereira, George 140 Richards, Donald ‘Donnymitch’ 169
Perera, Palitha 142–3 Richards, Vivian 167, 169, 170, 173, 175,
Perera, Ruchira 136 196, 199, 230, 236
Perera, S.S. 136, 139 Richardson, Richie 161, 171, 224
Phillipson, Eddie 189, 194 Richmond Cricket Club 141
Philpott, Peter 147 Rising Sun Cricket Club (Antigua) 163,
Piachaud, Dan 145 172
Pickwick Cricket Club (Barbados) 162 Rivals Cricket Club (Antigua) 163
Pierce, N. 165 Roberts, Anderson (‘Andy’) 167, 173, 230
Pieris, P.I. 145, 147 Robins, Walter 190, 194
Pires, B.C. 208–9 Rockwood, Dr John 139
Pirzada, Abdul Hafeez 122–3 Roebuck, Peter 20
Pokhran nuclear test (1974) 100 Rohinton Baria Trophy 112
Pollock, Shaun 55–6, 68 Rosselli, John 97
Ponnambalam, G.G. 144 Rostron, Frank 185–6
Ponniah, Mano 145, 147 Rotherham and District Netball League
Ponting, Ricky 22 231
postcolonial studies 2 Rudolph, Jacques 57
postmodernism 2 Rushdie, Salman 3
Powell, Enoch 192
Prahran Cricket Club 148 Sabina Park, Jamaica 171
Prasanna, Erapalli 81 Salahuddin, Brigadier 114
Proctor, M.J. (Mike) 59 Salve, N.K.P. 84
Putnam, Robert D. 40 Sandiford, Keith 4
Pye, William 231 Sara Trophy 147
Saravanamuttu, P. 139
Qaddafi Stadium 123 Sarkar, Tanika 97
Qadir, Abdul 169 Sarwan, Ramnaresh 262
Quaid-i-Azan Trophy 112–13, 115 Sathasivam, M. 140, 143
Queens Park CC (Trinidad) 162 Schaffter, Chandra 136, 145–6
Scindia, Madhav Rao 79
Ramadhin, Sonny 164–5, 184, 200 SEATO (South Atlantic Treaty
Ramprakash, Mark 219, 242 Organisation) 122
Ranatunga, Arjuna 146, 148, 151, 152, Sebe, Lennox 58
154 Sehway, Virender 220
Ranatunga, Dhammika 152 Senanayake, Robert 142
Ranatunga, Prasanna 154 Shafayat, Bilal 246
Ranji Trophy 79, 97–8, 140, 144 Shannon Cricket Club (Trinidad) 163,
Ranjitsinhji, K.S., Jamsaheb of Nawanagar 172
91, 96, 140 Sharjah cricket tournament 83–4, 95,103,
Rao, Narasimha 102 150
 Index 273
Sharma, Ajay 87 Stoke Newington Cricket School
Sharma, Chetan 107 (SNCS) 242, 245
Shastri, Ravi 83 Sumathipala, Thilanga 152–3
Sheffield and District African Caribbean Sunday magazine 101
Association (SADACCA) 231 Sutcliffe, Herbert 140
Sheffield Caribbean Cricket Club Swanton, E.W. 183
223–232 Sweeney Sports Research Consultants
Sheffield City Council 225–6 13
Sheffield Shield 32 Symcox, Pat 62
Sheffield Wednesday Football Club 217
Sheffield Youth Club League 225 Tamil Union Cricket Club 133, 135, 138,
Shiv Sena movement 86, 126 144
Silva, Amal 133 Taylor, Steve 228–9
Sinclair, Abraham 63 Tebbit, Norman (‘Tebbit test’) 105, 181,
Singh, Harbhajan 88 204–5, 236, 239
Singh, Maninder 89 Tendulkar, Sachin 85, 103–5, 224, 246,
Singh, Raj 79 248, 260
Singh, Tavleen 101 Tennekoon, Anura 147–8
Singh, Yuvraj 90 Test and County Cricket Board (TCCB)
Sinhalese Sports Club (SSC) 133, 140, 195
143 Test Match Special 80
Smit, Mark 67 Thackeray, Bal 86, 126
Smith, Alan 197 Thatcher, Margaret 200–1
Smith, Chris 196 The Case for West Indian Self Government
Smith, Don 147 (1932) 160
Snedden, Martin 252 The Race Game (BBC programme) 237
Snell, Peter 28 Thomasz, Patrick 138
Snell, Peter 35–6 Thomson, Jeff 169
Sobers, Garfield (‘Gary’) 147, 148, 166, Tillakaratne, Hashan 150
175, 190, 229–30, 246 Tissera, Michael 145–7
Sonn, Percy 53, 57 Trans World International (TWI) 85
South African Communist Party (SACP) Transformation Charter 56
49, 66 Transvaal Cricket Board 52
South African Council on Sport Trent Bridge, Nottingham 207
(SACOS) 58 Trinidad Cricket Club 162
South African Cricket Board (SACB) 51, Trueman, Fred 187, 190, 193–4
64 Trumper, Victor 14
South African Cricket Union (SACU) Tshwete, Steve 53, 63–4
149 Tudor, Alex 219
Soweto uprising 59 Turner, Glenn 35–6
Spartan Cricket Club 172 Turner, Ross 20
Spivak, Gayatri 2
Sportsworld magazine 101 Ugra, Sharda 234, 237–8
Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) 134, 143, Umrigar, Polly 192
154 Underwood, Derek 169
St Anthony’s College, Kandy 135 United Cricket Board of South Africa
St John’s Cricket Club (Antigua) 141, 162 (UCB) 49, 51, 55–7, 63–4, 68
St Johns College, Jaffna 134 United National Party (UNP) (Sri Lanka)
Star Sports (satellite TV channel) 85, 102, 135, 142
260 urban riots in UK, early 1980s 197, 227
Stewart, Mickey 188
Stingo Cricket Club (Trinidad) 163 Vaas, Chaminda 134
Stoddart, Brian 4 Vajpayee, A.B. 86
274 Index
Valentine, Alfred 164–5, 184, 200 Wettimuny, Sidath 148, 153
Van Gennep, Arnold 213 Whatmore, Dav 147, 148, 152
Van Hoff, Oswald 138 White Australia Policy 19, 24
Vanderspar, George 139 White, Crawford 188, 190
Vaughan, Michael 224, 248 White, Jim 216
Venkataraghavan, Srinivas 81, 169 White, Raymond 52, 57, 63
Vereenidge Oost-Indische Compagnie Whitelaw, William 201
(Dutch East India Company) 137 Wijetilleke, Rienzie 153
Verwoerd, H.F. 58 Wilkins, C. 138
Victoria Park Junior Cricket Club 242 Williams, Jack 19, 182, 235
Vij, Gen. N.C. 77 Williams, Patrick 3
Vitharana, Dr Vinnie 143 Williams, Stuart 161
Vorster, Balthazar Johannes (‘John’) 21, Williamson, Arthur 255
197 Willis, R.G.D. (‘Bob’) 169
Vryburg High School 59, 61 Wisden Australia 19
Wisden Cricket Asia 89
Waddy, Rev E.F. 139 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 15, 238
Wagg, Stephen 236, 239 Woodcock, John 193–4, 197–201
Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 29 Wooldridge, Ian 188, 190–1
Walcott, Clyde 96,168, 185, 193, 229 World Bank 66
Walker, Ashley 139 World Series Cricket (WSC) 82, 101,
Walling, ‘Sir’ Sidney 162 104, 124
Walsh, Courtney 173 World Tel 85
Ward, Russel 12 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 255
Warnapura, Bandula 148–9 Worrell, Frank 165–8, 188, 189, 191, 194,
Warne, Shane 19, 212 229
Warner, Sir Pelham (‘Plum’) 11
Washbrook, Cyril 183 Xingwana, Lulu 54
Waugh, Mark 19
Waugh, Steve 13, 14, 19 Yardley, Bruce 147
Weaver, Paul 208 Yardley, Norman 185
Weekes, Everton 168, 229 Yorkshire Council League 227, 230–1
Weerasinghe, Dhanasiri 145–6 Yorkshire County Cricket Club 223–4,
Weinman, ‘Jillah’ 138 231, 239, 246
Weinman, Edward 138 Young Ceylon journal 138
Wenham, Leroy 227 Young Guns 39
Werapitiya, T.B. 142 Young, Robert 1
Werbner, Pnina 212, 215 Yuvraj of Patiala 140
Wessels, Kepler 51, 62, 64
West Indian Cavaliers 246 Zee (Indian media corporation) 252
West Indies Cricket Board of Control Zia-ul-haq, General Muhammed 117, 122,
(WICBC) 151,165, 172, 186, 199 124–6
West Indies Federation 167 Zimbabwe Trade Union Congress 254