Cricket, Race and the 2007 World Cup

Boria Majumdar, Jon Gemmell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415371643
• eBook ISBN: 9781317998426
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cricket has been subject to a number of changes over the last twenty years. We can no longer talk of a sport particular to an out-dated English way of life. Cricket has become global and has to exist within the global environment. Primarily the world game has become commercialised. This collection of essays assesses the developments within major playing nations between the World Cups. Do we now live in a world where commercialism is the primary factor in determining sports, or are wider historical prejudices still evident? Seeking to answer these questions, Cricket, Race & the 2007 World Cup focuses on racial and ethnic tensions and their place in the new globalized, cricketing environment.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

‘To Be an Englishman’: Nation, Ethnicity and English Cricket in the Global Age

Stephen Wagg

In cricket [there is an ongoing] row about whether the game should go forward to a world of coloured clothing, selling advertising space on the umpire’s coat and Rupert Murdoch’s money; or stay with the traditions of the BBC, polite applause and the game being run by people who think a chap shouldn’t be given out LBW if his father is in the House of Lords. Both have their own agenda, and neither has the interests of the game as its priority. [1]

In football, by and large, it’s the fans that are racist but in cricket it’s the establishment. It’s institutionalized racism. The smell of imperialism is in your nostrils all the time. [2]

This study will be concerned with two central issues in contemporary English cricket, both of which touch on notions of ethnicity and nation. It will explore the paradox in which, on the one hand, cricket has been an enduring motif of an unchanging Englishness while, on the other, particularly since the 1960s, the English cricket authorities have availed themselves of an ever more malleable definition of English nationality. The study will briefly trace this malleability historically from the late nineteenth century through to the present day. It will then discuss new ideas of ethnicity and nationality and their implications for English cricket. It will go on to assess the relationship to English cricket of various ethnically defined communities; it will analyse the controversy over whether or not the England cricket team should play in Zimbabwe and close by commenting on the significance of the Ashes series played in England in the summer of 2005, which was widely perceived as momentous in its implications.

First, a note on English cricket, ethnicity and nation.

Anyone But England: English Cricket and the ‘Ethnic’

In common discourse, still, ethnicity is widely assumed to be something that only certain groups have. For the remainder ethnicity is not mentioned; it remains therefore invisible and, at best, assumed. These taken-for-granted ethnicities are ordinarily ‘white’ and, invariably, they pass for a national culture that is timeless, above politics and consensual. English cricket has certainly matched this description for much of its history – perhaps until 1994 and the publication of Anyone But England, by the American writer and cultural critic Mike Marqusee. Marqusee’s book placed English cricket in politics and history, showing the long-standing dominance of the game by a narrow, reactionary elite and making explicit the deep contours of class and ‘race’ in its culture. The impact of the book was, in its way, extraordinary. Although written from an essentially Marxist standpoint, it won (occasionally grudging) praise across the political spectrum and around the international cricket world. In 2004, quite unusually for a book of its kind, only one second-hand copy of Anyone But England was available for sale over the internet (at over £100 for a paperback) and, when it appeared in a third edition in 2005 it carried recommendations from 49 reviewers. Privately, of course, the very idea of a political deconstruction of English cricket’s historic assumptions about ‘race’ and nation could be expected to cause resentment among the people making those assumptions. As Marqusee himself notes, ‘While I was researching this book a copy of the synopsis found its way into the press room at Lords. There it was glimpsed by a veteran correspondent who spied the phrase “racism in English cricket”. It made him very angry. “Oh god,” he moaned, “I hate all that”.’ [3]

In 1993, the cultural critic Terry Eagleton reviewed a new book on literary Englishness: ‘British’, he wrote,

is a political concept, ‘English’ a cultural one. Britain means Crown, State and Empire; England means tea shops, lager louts and sun-drenched cathedral closes. When a nation is still busy forging its identity, the political is to the fore; as that identity slowly sediments into a second nature, those more tacit, taken-for-granted forms we call culture begin to take over.

This England, often evoked in the novels regarded as the great works of English literature, is not, however, ‘a tract of land or collection of individuals’ so much as a ‘country of the mind’. [4] Eagleton’s review is printed next to a photograph of two people reclining in deck chairs, watching a game of cricket. Nothing, of course, better represents this taken-for-granted England than the game of cricket. Paradoxically, however, just as many of the writers regarded as the best in the English language were not themselves English (Joseph Conrad, Henry James …) many of the men who have played cricket for England have similarly begun life, and in some cases remained, citizens of another country. Arguably this has never been a matter for contention so much as in the last 15 years or so. This, I have suggested elsewhere [5] and reiterate here, is at least partly because of shifts in the wider politics of national identity. In Eagleton’s terms, there have been crucial changes at the level of ‘Crown, State and Empire’ and these have helped to send the English cultural myth world of tea shops, cathedral closes and, of course, cricket into a state of flux.

To Be an Englishman: Cricket, Englishness and Nationality

As the historian Jack Williams has recently made clear, in the days when the British Empire was politically secure, the Englishness of cricket and gentlemanly decorum could be extended without demur to men who were not British by birth. Englishness could be acquired or conferred. For example, despite the residual notion that the white, Anglo-Saxon colonizer was superior to the indigenous population, Indian princes were admitted to the England cricket team. This was plainly because, in times of stability for the British Empire, class effectively trumped ethnicity and thus highborn colonials could be admitted to the sedate world of ‘cathedral close’ Englishness. Thus, when they staged a Test Match against Australia in July of 1896, the Lancashire committee selected K.S. Ranjitsinjhi to play for the home team. The Times confirmed that ‘Ranji’ would be one of ‘five gentlemen in the England side’. [6] The following day it was made clear that this selection had the prior approval of the Australian captain:

As to the presence of the young Indian prince in the side, it may be interesting to mention that he stipulated that he would play if the choice were unanimous and if the Australians raised no objection. Mr Trott, the Australian captain, openly expressed a wish to see Ranjitsinjhi in the English side. [7]

That is, Ranjitsinjhi’s qualification for the England team was ultimately the subject of a gentlemen’s agreement, struck within the imperial family. Later that month the same newspaper describes the cricket played by Ranjitsinjhi as recalling ‘to many [Dr W.G.] Grace’s great years in the [eighteen] seventies’. [8] Moreover, as Williams makes clear, ‘Ranji’ was thereafter beckoned into the world of Englishness and happily accepted the invitation: ‘Duleep and I’, Ranjitsinjhi would say of his nephew and himself in the 1920s, ‘are English cricketers.’ [9] This flexible Englishness, affordable to Indian noblemen, was not, of course, uncontested. It remained provisional and with a racial undertone: Lord Harris, until the previous year governor of Bombay, objected to Ranji as a ‘bird of passage’ and Ranji was omitted from the England party to tour South Africa in 1906, apparently at the request of the South African authorities. [10] Ranjitsinjhi’s nephew K.S. Duleepsinhji was omitted from the England team at the request of the South Africans after one Test in the series of 1929. [11] However, this shared Englishness was not, in any event, confined to Indian aristocrats. As McLellan shows, a number of cricketers of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods at different times represented both England and Australia, notably Billy Midwinter, born in Gloucestershire in 1851, who, after emigration, played in eight Tests for Australia (the first the inaugural Test against England in 1876) either side of four appearances for England. [12]

Birthplace has, arguably, continued to be a matter of negligible importance in the selection of the England cricket team throughout the post-Second World War period. Among prominent England internationals capped between 1945 and the present: Raman Subba Row (England, 1958–61) was born to an Indian father and an English mother in Streatham in 1932; Colin Cowdrey (1954–75) was born in Bangalore in 1932, the son of an English tea planter; Ted Dexter (1958–68) was born the son of an English insurance underwriter in Milan in 1935; Andy Caddick (1993–2003) was born in 1968 in Christchurch, New Zealand; and Nasser Hussain (1989–2004) was born in Madras in 1968 to an Indian father and an English mother. Among the current England Test and one-day squad, Vikram Solanki was born in Udaipur, Rajasthan in India in 1976 and Geraint Jones in Papua New Guinea the same year. And of Andrew Strauss, current England opening batsman, the Cricinfo website says: ‘He was born in Johannesburg in March 1977, but is a very English product, having learned his game at Radley College and Durham University.’ [13]

Strauss is among the latest of a number of England players born in southern Africa. Most were the children of white, settler or settler-descended families. The father of Tony Greig (1972–77), born in Queenstown, South Africa in 1946 was a Scot. Allan Lamb (1982–92; born in Cape Province in 1954), Chris Smith (1983–6; born in Durban in 1958) and his brother Robin Smith (1988–96; born in Durban in 1963) were all white South Africans (although the Smiths had English parents) who could not play Test cricket for South Africa because of that country’s exclusion from international cricket. Lamb qualified for England by residence. Derek Pringle (1982–92) was born in Nairobi in 1958, the son of Don Pringle, who had migrated to Kenya from Lancashire in the late 1950s and who played two one-day internationals for Kenya in 1975. (Pringle was chosen for England while still at the hallowed English institution of Cambridge University.) Graeme Hick (1991–2000) was born in 1966 in what was then Salisbury, Rhodesia.

The exception here was the celebrated case of Basil D’Oliveira (1966–72; born in Cape Town in 1931), defined in apartheid South Africa as a ‘Cape Coloured’ who came to England to play in the Lancashire League in 1960 and qualified for the England team by residence; D’Oliveira thus became the only England cricketer to make the transition from a racialized South African minority to British citizenship.

The point about these many selections is that they were rarely contentious, either in England or elsewhere in the international cricket world, and that, if they were contentious, it was not in relation to Englishness or nationality. For example, when D’Oliveira was selected to play for England, The Times, historic mouthpiece of the British establishment, remarked:

The arrival of D’Oliveira after only one full season of county cricket is politically ironic and may in time become politically contentious, if he is still in the picture when MCC next go to South Africa. Being ineligible for the country of his birth (as a Cape Coloured he would have seen his early cricket from the restricted enclosure at Newlands) he acquired himself a British passport and a growing reputation as an allrounder. He may, in the long run, fall short of being quite good enough to hold his own, either as a Test match batsman or as a Test match bowler, but he is worth the trial. [14]

Six years later, in a similar vein, John Woodcock wrote of Greig, who had come to England at the age of 22: ‘What to me is a pity is not that such a fine cricketer is now playing for England. It is that by force of circumstance England can claim no credit for the invigorating way he first developed his game.’ [15]

Three years later, however, with Greig about to be offered the England captaincy, a more vexed politics of Englishness became apparent. ‘Reservations about Greig’, wrote Woodcock, ‘spring not from his ability, not his temperament as a Test match cricketer, but from his attitudes. His appointment would have to be conditional upon his renouncing altogether the law of the jungle.’ [16] Greig, in other words, was perceived to play too hard and had not yet acquired the civilities of an English gentleman. This brought an angry rejoinder from Robin Marlar, ex-Cambridge University and Sussex captain, in his Sunday Times column the following weekend:

Oh my sainted aunt! Where has the man been all winter? [England had lost a series by four Tests to one in Australia] Was Ian Chappell [captain of Australia] pouring the tea at the vicarage fete? Was Rodney Marsh [Australian wicketkeeper] preaching the merits of turning the other cheek? Was Dennis Lillee [Australian fast bowler] training to sing ‘How now brown cow’ in nicely modulated tones? George Orwell’s thesis stops short of telling us the News...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Introduction: Cricket, Race and the 2007 World Cup
• 1 ‘To Be an Englishman’: Nation, Ethnicity and English Cricket in the Global Age
• 2 All White Mate? Cricket and Race in Oz
• 3 South African Cricket: ‘The Rainbow Nation Must Have a Rainbow Team’
• 4 Few and Far Between: Māori and Pacific Contributions to New Zealand Cricket
• 5 Nationalist Romance to Postcolonial Sport: Cricket in 2006 India
• 6 Pakistani Cricket at Crossroads: An Outsider’s Perspective
• 7 Landmarks and Threads in the Cricketing Universe of Sri Lanka
• 8 Zimbabwe: What of the Future?
• 9 Bangladesh Cricket: Scoring on Passion, but Little Else …
• 10 A Matter of Necessity: The Minnow and World Cricket
• Index