Failing the Tebbit test • World Cup final, 1983 • Eclipse of
England I:ICC, 1993 • Eclipse of England II:England in India and Sri
Lanka, 1993 • ‘England’ now • The game itself
The 1983 World Cup final was hardly a feast of cricket genius, but, like all great cricket occasions, it was given spice by events and alignments off the field.
It was held, like the previous two finals, at Lord’s. The West Indies, twice World Cup champions and for seven years the undisputed masters of international cricket, were 4–1 favourites over India, a bits and-pieces side captained by the twenty-four-year-old Kapil Dev. India were considered lucky to have made the final at all. They were relative newcomers to the one-day game and their spin bowling skills were thought to be more suited to Test conditions.
I left home early that bright morning. My first stop was the local council’s transport depot, where I had to pick up a mini-van before collecting a group from the youth club where I worked. We could have taken the tube to St John’s Wood but the young men in my charge insisted that an occasion of this importance merited luxury transport. In the end they got their way and I booked the van. At the youth club I picked up Alex, a fellow youth worker with dreadlocks, and five local youth, Jeffery, George, Herbie, Frank and Theo. They were loaded down with holdalls bearing beer and beef-flavoured crisps. I was the only white person.
The youths had been badgering me for months to get tickets to the final. When I pointed out that their West Indian favourites might not progress that far in the competition, they laughed. Their confidence in their team was complete. We got the tickets from a member of our youth-club management committee, who happened also to be a member of the MCC.
As we drove to Lord’s, our party was in good humour. You could see the sure anticipation of a West Indian victory on the young men’s faces and hear it in their jokes and laughter. This was a day to celebrate the black kings of cricket and they intended to savour every moment. After we parked, we walked through the leafy streets past posh houses to the ground, mingling with little bands of West Indian and Indian supporters. Passing a group of turbaned Sikhs in suits and ties, my overgrown charges (they were all bigger than me) swaggered as if each one was Viv Richards strolling to the crease, as if each one partook of the power and majesty of the West Indian side.
All of us would have disgracefully failed Norman Tebbit’s cricket test. Alex had been born in Jamaica, so I suppose he had an excuse, but all five of the boys had spent their entire lives in north London. They did not follow cricket with any zeal, but they had made the West Indian side their own. For them, the West Indies’ combination of raw power and refined skills served as a magisterial reply to a racist society. Whatever they may have liked to think, they were not West Indians. They were not like their parents. Their loyalty to and pride in the West Indian Test side was a political choice.
All of this I admired. As an expatriate American, I enjoyed the luxury of picking favourites from one Test series to another. I dare say Tebbit would disapprove of this whimsical approach even more than of the ‘disloyalty’ of the black youth. However, in the Lord’s cup final, I faced a dilemma.
I had first fallen in love with cricket during the hot summer of 1976, when the West Indies made the South African-born Tony Greig grovel. In 1983, Lloyd was still in charge of the side; Greenidge, Richards, Roberts and Holding were still its backbone. I felt attached to these players. I wanted to see them confirm their superiority today in a blaze of fast bowling and strokeplay. And solidarity with my young companions seemed to demand that I support the reigning World Champions.
But I was enmeshed in a peculiar conflict of loyalties. Repeated visits to India had instilled in me an affection for and unquenchable curiosity about the country. Besides, India were the underdogs. It would be a pity if they failed to put up a fight. And though I found it easy to sympathize with the proud commitment of my charges to their West Indian favourites, I was less keen on their contempt for the Indians, whom they usually referred to as ‘Pakis’ and whom they regarded as ‘soft’ because, they claimed, Asian kids would not stand up for themselves. ‘Paki’ shop-owners hassled them, they said, and accused them of stealing things.
In the van on the way to the ground I had tried to dispel some of their prejudices. I reminded them that there were Asian people who had lived for generations in the West Indies and that Alvin Kallicharran was as West Indian as Viv Richards. The only effect of this was to stimulate a discussion on whether or not Theo, who was what his friends called ‘half-caste’, would be mistaken for a ‘Paki’ at Lord’s. Theo didn’t like this at all.
We sat in the lower tier of the grandstand (under the Father Time weather vane). The overhanging upper tier permitted us only a long horizontal sliver of a view, which none the less took in the whole playing area as well as the scoreboard. Mine was one of very few white faces in this section of the ground. In the banter and boasting surrounding me there was a relaxed camaraderie and no hint of tension between rival supporters. The West Indian fans confidently awaited yet another triumph and looked forward to star performances from their favourites. The Indian fans, proud to have made it to the final, hoped their side would put up a good show but expected little. This made for good relations all around. Steel drums, klaxons, the smell of ganja mingled with Indian flags, chants of ‘Jai Hind’ and steaming pooris.
In front of us sat a middle-aged Indian factory worker from Wolverhampton. Round and short with a grey moustache and a heavy accent, he struck up a lively conversation with the black youth from Highbury, winning them over by referring to Holding and Garner as ‘your great fast bowlers’ and admitting he was worried about what ‘your great Viv Richards’ would do to India’s modest attack. The kids were so pleased with this that they reciprocated by praising Kapil Dev, who was their kind of player.
The West Indies won the toss and Clive Lloyd confidently inserted the Indians. His decision appeared vindicated when Gavaskar was caught off Roberts for two in the second over. My gang was convulsed with rapture. Our Indian friend smiled and wagged his head in sad acknowledgement of the inevitable. He would certainly not begrudge the youth their moment. But a few overs later, when Mohinder Amarnath lifted Larry Gomes’s slow bowling twice to the boundary for four, he glanced round with a twinkle of satisfaction.
Amarnath had enjoyed a roller-coaster of an international career, having been dropped and reinstated to the Indian Test side five times already. Early on, he had been humiliated by fast bowlers in various parts of the world. Insult was added to injury when his famous Test playing father, Lala, let it be known he would not allow his son to don the protective helmet which was then coming into fashion. At Lord’s in 1983, his head ensconced in helmeted safety, Armanath displayed little in the way of stylish strokeplay but kept his nerve and stayed around longer than anyone besides Tamil opener Krishnamachari Srikkanth, whose 38 (which included a hook for six off a Roberts bouncer) ended up being the highest score in the match.
When Kapil Dev was out for a disappointing 9, the Indian gentleman in front uttered a sigh of resignation and consoled himself with snacks from one of those cylindrical steel tiffin carriers one sees everywhere in India. He offered us creamy Indian sweets which the black youth devoured gratefully. Normally they turned their noses up at anything besides Jamaica patties or Big Macs.
When the Indians were all out for 183, the only question seemed how long it would take the West Indies to knock off the runs and which of their star batsmen would shine. In the morning I had been discreetly pulling for the Indians. I wanted them to compile a decent score and make a match of it. Now I found myself filled with passion for the West Indies. I wanted to see a blistering batting display and the completion in some style of what seemed a one-sided contest. Though Greenidge was out early, the confidence of the West Indies supporters remained high. They had great batsmen still to come and they were facing a bowling attack made up of utility players like the worthy veteran Madan Lal, who normally spent his summers in the Lancashire League.
Their faith seemed more than justified when Richards struck Lal for three fours in his first over. There was something about Richards’s strokes as they sent the ball sizzling across the outfield that was different from anything else we had seen that day. Greatness was at the wicket and promised to transform what had until now been a desultory competition. This was what my youthful party had been waiting for. As Richards’s shots flew to all corners of the ground, they exchanged broad grins and nodded knowingly to one another. Our Indian friend turned around to congratulate the young men, as if the achievement were theirs. On 50 for 1, the West Indies, it seemed, were coasting to victory.
Then, out of nowhere, the mild-looking Madan Lal took his revenge. Richards mistimed a hook. The ball sailed high out of our field of vision. We all peered ahead, wondering where it would come down. Then we saw Kapil running back, nearly stumbling, and at the last moment grabbing a brilliant catch over his shoulder. Greatness was out for 33.
Among my party, stunned disbelief was followed by silent grief. Around us, the Indian spectators went wild. All were on their feet, cheering and chanting and embracing. The affable factory worker from Wolverhampton was suddenly a raving red-eyed patriot, dancing ecstatically on his toes, his fists held aloft as if he had just personally KO’d the world heavyweight champion.
I couldn’t stop giggling. It was such a marvellous reversal of fortune. Infatuated with the moment, hopelessly opportunistic in my cricket attachments, I became then and there a wholehearted Indian supporter. I slapped the man from Wolverhampton on the back.
The remainder of the match went India’s way, despite flickers of resistance from Dujon and Marshall. As so often in cricket, there was no single moment when all hope for the West Indies was lost or all anxiety for the Indians allayed. Imperceptibly, the West Indies slipped to defeat and India edged towards victory, helped by skilful, if unspectacular bowling by Lal and Amarnath (an unlikely but worthy Man of the Match). When the West Indies lost their last wicket for a meagre 140, Indian spectators swarmed on to the field. In the commentary box, I later learned, Farokh Engineer shouted: ‘Give ’em a holiday, Mrs Gandhi.’
I wanted to share in the Indian celebration, but had to return home with the council van and some rather morose young men. I didn’t let their sourness spoil my elation at having witnessed something so completely extraordinary. There is a near-universal delight in the victory of the rank outsider over the heavy favourite, especially as with that victory comes the confounding of pundits and bookmakers. It was the underdog’s triumph that made the World Cup final of 1983 memorable and gave it a special significance to millions.
In the van, Alex, my fellow youth worker, was as down in the mouth as the rest. Surly and sulky, they acted as if they had been swindled. They could not bring themselves to speak well of any of the Indian players or poorly of any of the West Indians. For them, this was a calamity that had nothing to do with cricketing skill and everything to do with the malice of fate. Fortune had frowned on them today as it had so many other times in their lives, and they resented it. I felt for them and yet I had to laugh. These big, hard, nearly-grown young men who made a show of scorning sentimentality of any kind were pictures of child-like self-pity. It was understandable, but seemed so disproportionate. After all, this was only cricket.
Except, of course, there is no such thing as ‘only cricket’. Especially not in a World Cup final played between India and West Indies. Especially not when it is played in the heartland of the old empire, England, and at the headquarters of world cricket, Lord’s. Especially not when it unfolds before a crowd made up of black and Asian workers seeking, through solidarity with a ‘foreign’ Test side, a fleeting triumph over a hostile society. The World Cup final of 1983 was not a great day’s play. Too much that happened on the field depended on error or accident. But no one could deny its global resonance.
That was clear enough from the street parties in Southall that night, when the Indian population (Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims) celebrated their unexpected moment at the top of world cricket with sweets and fireworks. On their return home, the Indian cricketers were feted for months on end. ‘It shows we can do it,’ Mrs Gandhi said, as if she were opening a new high-tech computer factory. Kapil’s praises were sung in all quarters. He was a modern, inspirational captain who had forged a professional team. Even Jimmy Amarnath became, briefly, a national institution.
But India’s joy and Kapil’s glory were short-lived. Within a few months the West Indies exacted a humiliating revenge in a series of Tests and one-day internationals in India. The renaissance of Indian cricket predicted in the wake of the World Cup triumph never transpired. Amarnath was dropped, selected, dropped and selected again. Kapil, less than two years after his World Cup apotheosis, was stripped of the Indian captaincy and even, at one stage in 1985, dropped from the Test side. It was said that the financial rewards which flooded the Indian game after the World Cup victory had corrupted the players. Nowadays, wise old heads agreed, the young men ‘thought only of money’.
The West Indies cricketers were shocked by the defeat (Malcolm Marshall wept that night as sounds of celebratory Indian drumming filled the hotel corridors), but shocked even more by the material rewards heaped on their victorious opponents: flats, cars, jobs and cash. West Indies had won the World Cup twice, had dominated international cricket for the best part of a decade, but had never received compensation on that scale.
A year later, I returned to Lord’s with Alex and Herbie to watch England play West Indies in a one-day international, a prelude to the famous ‘blackwash’. After lunch, Botham was out to a miracle catch by Roger Harper on the square-leg boundary. For years, a clip of it was shown during the title sequence of BBC TV’s cricket coverage, to the accompaniment of its Caribbean-style cricket anthem. Later, when Viv Richards came in to bat, a gang of white kids sitting about ten rows behind us shouted, ‘Get the black bastard!’ Every half-hour or so, the white kids would punctuate the general din with another racist idiocy. They threw paper missiles at a black woman sitting in front of them. At stumps, Richards was 84 not out and West Indies had won by 7 wickets. Alex and Herbie rose calmly and, without exchanging a word, strode up the steps towards the offending white gang, most of them groggy with drink. They singled out the loudest-mouthed of the lot and punched him in the nose. Together the three of us legged it for the turnstiles.
Alex became a senior officer at a local authority. Herbie is a firefighter and union shop steward. Theo became a youth worker. George went to gaol on a burglary charge. Frank was shot dead in the street by some drug-dealers who mistook him for his brother.1
In February 1993, one week after the climax of the Gower affair at the MCC’s Special General Meeting, ICC delegates gathered in London to determine the locale of the next World Cup. After the Lord’s final of 1983, the 1987 cup had been staged in India and Pakistan and the 1992 cup in Australia and New Zealand. The TCCB believed it was once again England’s turn and that the matter had been settled the year before, when the ICC had agreed to rotate the venue for the cup. But the admission of South Africa, pursued for so long with such determination by the English, turned everything upside down.
Nothing if not ambitious, the new United Cricket Board wanted to table its own bid to host the cup. Ali Bacher argued that, in the interests of democracy, South Africa should at least be allowed to take part in a new vote on the venue for the cup. This was a democratic demand, but also a clever one. Bacher pleased the Indians, who wanted their own bid considered on equal terms with the TCCB’s, and at the same time left himself free to back the TCCB bid, and thus repay old favours.
South Africa withdrew its bid, leaving the ICC members to choose between England and a joint proposal from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The subcontinent offered £200,000 in total prize money, plus £250,000 to each full Test member, £125,000 to each of the three qualifying associate members, and £100,000 to each of the other sixteen associates. England offered more or less the same total amount, but proposed to distribute it differently: £250,000 in prize money, £300,000 to full members, £150,000 to the three qualifying associate members and £65,000 to the other associates.
In the run-up to the meeting, the bids were well publicized and hotly debated. In the Daily Telegraph, Christopher Martin-Jenkins spoke for England: ‘There was a time, before money and politics entered the equation, when the community of cricket nations looked no further than the United Kingdom to stage the World Cup.’
In his eagerness to assert England’s traditional pre-eminence, Martin-Jenkins had forgotten that the World Cup was itself a relatively new institution, not an ancient tradition. As for ‘money and politics’, they had always been in the fray. They were the reasons why the first three World Cups, in 1975, 1979 and 1983, had been held in England.
‘England’s simple contention is that it is their turn again,’ said Martin-Jenkins. He regarded it as self-evident that England’s ‘advantages cannot be matched by the rival bidders from a vast and frequently unruly subcontinent’. For a start, England would be ‘more pleasant’ for ‘the indispensable media’. It was also unencumbered (at least in Martin-Jenkins’s view) by the threats of ‘terrorism’ and ‘widespread murders and rioting’. He condemned the ‘blatantly self interested support of a majority of the nineteen associate member countries for the India triumvirate’, but also blamed the TCCB, whose commercial approach to the game had undermined the missionary credentials of the old MCC.
Imran Khan answered Martin-Jenkins. He noted that the combined population of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka totalled over one billion, and that a World Cup staged on the subcontinent would give cricket a chance to reach a massive new audience. Money from the gate, from television and sponsorship would help expand facilities and improve domestic competitions, all of which were in a state of rapid evolution. Staging the cup in Britain would ‘only make the TCCB richer’.
For the representatives of Indian cricket, many of them linked to the Congress government, winning the bid for the World Cup was vital. In December, massed ranks of Hindu nationalists had torn down the historic Babri mosque in Ayodhya in north India. This was one of the most traumatic events in the nation’s forty-five-year history. It precipitated a wave of violence, primarily against Muslims, and unprecedented soul-searching among the Indian intelligentsia. The secular order on which independent India had been built was under stress as never before.
At the ICC meeting, India was represented by Madhav Rao Scindia, its Board President (and a member of the Indian Cabinet), and Jagmohan Dalmiya, supremo of Bengali cricket and BCCI Secretary. Imran Khan represented the Pakistanis. Alan Smith, Doug Insole and Frank Chamberlain spoke for the TCCB. The meeting was chaired by Colin Cowdrey, with John Stephenson acting as secretary. It was to be the last ICC conclave held under the old MCC aegis.
Under the ICC rules, the winning bid had to receive the votes of two thirds of the full members (including at least one of the two founding members) as well as a majority of all votes cast. Ironically, the old requirement for a simple majority had been abandoned, after the awarding of the previous World Cup to Australia and New Zealand, at the TCCB’s request. Its aim had been to prevent the associates determining the venue en bloc.
England’s bid was backed by five full members (the ‘white’ nations, plus West Indies and South Africa); the subcontinental bid had the support of four (the bidding three plus Zimbabwe). The TCCB exerted pressure on Zimbabwe to shift its vote, but this failed, not least because the TCCB, in contrast to the subcontinental boards, had given Zimbabwean cricket little support, either before or after it achieved Test status.
The Indians tried to get the meeting to revert to a simple majority vote. The TCCB warned that it would not consider any such vote to be binding. Seeking advice on the matter, Scindia set up a conference call to a High Court justice in Delhi. Cowdrey, advised by Stephenson, insisted on sticking to the previously-agreed formula.
Deadlocked, the meeting went on for thirteen rancorous hours. It ended after midnight only when England, pressed by Bacher and Clyde Walcott, agreed to withdraw its bid on condition that open bidding would be eliminated and future World Cups would be rotated, with England first on the list. The whole affair revealed England’s fear of global competition and belief that it could maintain its status by protocol.
Stephenson described England’s withdrawal as ‘the most magnanimous, decent and wonderful gesture’. But in an extraordinary press conference, bitter TCCB officials seemed somewhat short on magnanimity. Alan Smith, normally a conscientious devotee of cricket’s cult of official secrecy, let rip:
We endured a fractious and unpleasant meeting. It was beset by procedural wrangling and there was no talk of anything like cricket. It was by a long way the worst meeting I have ever attended ... There seemed a grave danger of the ICC disintegrating. Therefore, in the best interests of the game, England ultimately agreed to withdraw their submission, but only under specific conditions which were felt crucial to the future well-being of international cricket.
Cowdrey declined to comment, as usual, but Scindia made his contempt for the former England amateur clear to the Indian media, in which he accused Cowdrey of abusing his position as chair to England’s advantage. Imran agreed that it had been ‘an unpleasant meeting’ but insisted that this was ‘because there was complete inconsistency’. The last two World Cups, he reminded English readers, had been awarded by simple majority votes. ‘It ceased to be a democratic process,’ said Imran, ‘and that is where the problems lay.’ He also recalled that, in the bidding for the 1992 cup, India and Pakistan had lost out to Australia and New Zealand because the latter had offered the associates more money. No one had complained then.
Martin-Jenkins divided his anger between the TCCB (which had ‘appeased the Oriental lobby’) and India, which he accused (as did Mike Selvey in the Guardian) of ‘buying’ the votes of Zimbabwe and the associate members. Casting aside two hundred years of cricket history, he asserted: ‘Whatever else may have been true about world cricket when it was in the hands of England and Australia, greed and political point-scoring never entered anyone’s heads.’
England ought to have staged the next World Cup, Martin-Jenkins repeated, ‘because it was their turn ... and it is, anyway, the ideal place’. Tony Lewis, reporting from the England tour of India, denounced Indian ‘slipperiness’. He predicted: ‘The ICC is likely to become a commercial mess and a bazaar for backhanders.’ Other critics of the deal, like Selvey, thought ‘the ICC should know where its money is going to’ and implied that it was irresponsible to give the likes of Fiji and Gibraltar £100,000. In The Cricketer, Richard Hutton seethed: ‘Cricket is increasingly the province of Third World politicians whose concern for the good of the game is subservient to their lust for power and influence.’
Hutton noted with suspicion that many of the administrators in the associate countries were of Indian origin. This was, of course, a legacy of empire, in which Indians were often used by the British as middle men and law-enforcers. It was also the result of a new unity forged by the global cable and satellite revolution. What Hutton and the TCCB failed to realize was that Scindia’s power rested on his access to this market: those newspaper-buying, TV-owning, Star-subscribing Indian middle classes and their NRI cousins.
In their rage at England’s eclipse, the English media conveniently forgot that England had ceded its automatic right to host the World Cup after 1983, when Prudential had withdrawn as a sponsor. Back then, the TCCB calculated that a summer featuring a single-nation tour (in keeping with old bilateral tradition of MCC relations with overseas boards) would be more profitable than a World Cup because it would not have to share the revenues among so many parties.
Commercial exploitation of the 1996 World Cup promises to be more intensive than anything seen in cricket up till now. Through satellite television, it will be broadcast to the biggest audience the game has ever known, of which English people will make up only a tiny fraction.2
In November, 1993, the well-laid plans for the World Cup suddenly looked precarious when Pakistan, fearing attacks by anti-Muslim Hindu nationalists, pulled out of the Cricket Association of Bengal’s diamond jubilee tournament at the last minute. That left West Indies, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and India competing for the ‘Hero Cup’ (named after the Indian sponsors). Australia and New Zealand were mutually engaged in a Test series down under. The TCCB had declined the invitation (and the money) on the grounds that it did not want its international cricketers playing ‘too much one-day cricket’. Alone among the national boards, it could afford not to play.
The Indian authorities had sold the television rights for the tournament to TWI, an independent production company (based in Britain and headed by an American) in preference to Doordarshan, the state-run television service. Doordarshan and its friends in the government were not happy. TWI’s equipment was impounded by customs officers and it was denied access to the government-controlled satellite uplink, leaving the first three rounds of the Hero Cup untelevised, with a consequent loss of revenue from ground advertising. TWI, backed by the Indian cricket board, went to court. After some delay, the Supreme Court ruled that Doordarshan be paid a fee of £13,500 a match to provide domestic coverage while TWI supplied the world via the satellite uplink.
The Guardian claimed the affair proved that ‘the volatile politics’ of the subcontinent made the ICC decision to hold the World Cup there ‘bizarre’. David Richards remained confident that the cup would go ahead as planned, but warned: ‘There can be no cricket without television.’ I.S. Bindra, the new Chairman of the Indian Board, explained to Indian cricket lovers: ‘No one can take the World Cup away from us, but if the government does not change its stand, we might have to give it away to Pakistan and Sri Lanka.’ This was a nightmare scenario for the Indian cricket public, and one for which, Bindra knew, no Indian politician would want to be blamed.
In the past, England had held sway because the hierarchy of empire was bolstered by English domination of the world market. Now, with empire gone and England pushed to the margins of that market, the peremptory assertions of Lord’s were no match for the subcontinental political alliance, and it was no use complaining. The only surprising thing in the whole story was that the ICC meeting should have come as such a shock to the English. After all, it was only another sign of the changing balance of forces in world cricket, a balance in which England carries less and less weight, just as it does in spheres far removed from the cricket field.
Winning the World Cup bid was a much-needed fillip for Indian unity, especially as it was a joint bid with Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It enabled the Congress government to depict India as a go-ahead capitalist power, making its weight felt in the world market. For the cricket authorities, it was also a welcome distraction from the recent poor form of the Indian Test side, which had won only one of its last twenty five matches.
The Indians’ historic tour of South Africa, coinciding with the demolition of the Ayodhya mosque, had been bitterly disappointing. It was alleged that the Indian cricketers had spent too much time boozing with NRIs. More to the point, the administrators’ obsession with the one-day game (a product of that evanescent 1983 World Cup success) had become absurd: India had not played a home Test series for five years. There were calls for Azharuddin’s removal as captain. His only victory in seventeen Tests in charge had been against Sri Lanka. In the end, the selectors reappointed him for the first Test only. At the same time, they dropped five other stars, including Ravi Shastri, a mainstay of the side throughout the eighties.
The England party which arrived in India in mid-January of 1993 was widely touted as the best-prepared touring side in English cricket history. Keith Fletcher had succeeded Micky Stewart as team manager. Whittingdale sponsored training sessions for the tourists at the National Sports Centre at Lilleshall to the tune of £750,000. It even paid for Fletcher to fly to South Africa to watch the Indians in action. On his return, he reported that he had seen ‘nothing, apart from Tendulkar and Prabhakar, to make me feel concerned’.
Tony Lewis believed that English cohesion and professionalism would give them the edge:
India, I guess, will be confident as long as things go their way, otherwise the captain will blame his team, the team disown the captain and the press scarify the lot, while calling for the head of Ajit Wadekar, the cricket manager and the resignation of the whole selection panel ... England must be seen as the better side. Graham Gooch is more assertive and positive than ever before.
The Mirror also had high hopes for the tour. ‘Team manager Keith Fletcher is not the sort of man to whinge or look for excuses,’ Chris Lander told his readers. He reported an early England success this way: ‘England hit-man Chris Lewis sent two Indian batsmen to hospital with successive balls here yesterday – and then warned that there was more to come.’ This was not the tone adopted when West Indians meted out the same treatment to the English.
The preparatory matches against Delhi and a Board President’s XI hinted that the English might be vulnerable to spin. Salisbury, the leg spinner, was called into the squad at the last minute after impressing as a net bowler, an acknowledgement that the best-prepared English team ever might not be the best-balanced. At the same time, news of Gooch’s separation from his wife broke in the British press.
Because of communal violence in Ahmedabad, the first one-day international was transferred to Jaipur. Lander was convinced that the hasty rescheduling was part of an Indian conspiracy to undermine the visitors: ‘England’s cricketers became innocent victims of the Indian rope trick.’ England won, but had their first glimpse of the left-hander Vinod Kambli (who made 100 not out on his twenty-first birthday) in harness with his school friend, Sachin Tendulkar. Together they had put on 164 in twenty-eight overs.
Gooch failed in Jaipur and at the second one day international at Chandigarh, which England lost, then struck a century in a three-day match against an Indian Under-25 XI at Cuttack. This was supposed to be his hundredth hundred, but shortly afterwards the ICC confirmed that matches played by rebel tourists in South Africa would no longer be counted as first-class. Commentators and statisticians were outraged. Gooch struck his familiar posture of world-weary, wounded innocence. Once again, he had become a martyr at the hands of scheming Third World politicians.
According to Lander, India had become the new ‘killing fields’. He warned that the English cricketers might get caught up in ‘an escalating war between extreme Hindu and Muslim groups’. Robin Smith said his wife was worried. ‘If the trouble gets any worse the authorities must put the safety of the players first,’ he said, ‘even if it means calling off the tour.’
A strike by Indian Airlines pilots (which led to Scindia’s resignation as Civil Aviation Minister) compelled the English squad, and accompanying journalists, to undertake the journey to Calcutta by rail. It was a nine-hour haul. No press report was now complete without tales of rat-catching in the railway carriages and the discomforts of Indian train travel. ‘It’s a bloody nuisance,’ Fletcher complained, ‘India is too big a country for us to have to keep getting about by train.’
On arriving in Calcutta, England found its ranks depleted. DeFreitas was out with a groin injury. Atherton was struck by a ‘mystery virus’. Gooch was ill but decided to play anyway. The day before the first Test, the Indian selectors named their squad, which included three spinners: Kumble, Raju and Chauhan. It was clear what they expected of the pitch. Bishan Bedi urged: ‘Gooch must have faith in his spin specialists.’ Instead, England chose four seamers plus Salisbury. Fletcher justified the selection: ‘Remember how well the Indians play spin bowling.’ Alec Stewart kept wicket and opened the batting. The defensive approach showed that, already, the English tourists lacked confidence in their own resources.
Azharuddin won the toss. India batted and were at one point 93 for 3. Then Tendulkar and Azharuddin added 123 at a run a minute. Azharuddin went on to make 182 off 197 balls. After the Indians were all out for 371 (Hick, the part-time off-spinner, was the most successful England bowler with 3 for 19), Stewart, having kept wicket for nine hours, was bowled by Prabhakar for a duck. Gooch, in his one hundredth Test appearance, was out cheaply to Raju. Gatting top scored with 33 (off 143 deliveries) and England were all out for 163. Each of the Indian spinners took three wickets (and not one fell to an LBW decision).
Following on, Gooch was soon stumped off the leg-spinner Kumble. Smith was hopelessly at sea against the spinners and was caught behind off Chauhan for 8. Gatting top-scored again with 81, but England were all out for 286. The Indian spinners took eight wickets between them and sent down ninety per cent of the overs. The Indian batsmen then scored the 79 runs needed to win for the loss of two wickets, both of which fell to Hick’s off-spin.
‘England have only themselves to blame for their defeat in the first Test,’ Gavaskar observed, ‘for they went into the match with a defeatist attitude.’ The India team manager, Ajit Wadekar, agreed: ‘You are so predictable, you guys. We told you the pitch at Eden Gardens will turn ... and still we knew you would come up with the same old fast medium stuff. And we knew you would all be lunging at the spinners with the good old British forward defensive stroke.’
Dexter blamed Calcutta’s air pollution. He announced that he would be commissioning a study into smog levels in Indian cities, thus earning a rebuke from the Indian government. Fletcher tried to explain the omission of Tufnell, England’s most aggressive slow bowler, on a spinner’s pitch: ‘The lad has struggled a bit. He hasn’t bowled well. Cricket is sixty per cent mental. It’s not an easy tour. He hasn’t looked happy in India but if you are in a country you have to go out and make the most of it.’ According to Geoff Arnold, the England bowling coach, Tufnell’s difficulties were ‘more a problem with India than anything else’.
In the three-day match against the Rest of India at Vishakhapatnam, Tufnell was no-balled twice in one over. When, in the same over, wicket-keeper Richard Blakey missed a chance to stump Tendulkar, the left-armer went berserk, kicking his cap and abusing the umpire. He was fined £500 by Bob Bennett, the England Tour Manager. Tufnell then took four wickets for three runs in a brilliant spell on the final day of the match and was included in the side for the Madras Test.
The evening before the match, eight of the England side shared a dish of prawns in their hotel’s Chinese restaurant. The next morning, three of them, Gatting, Smith and Gooch, were ill. The tourists blamed the prawns, but the hotel management accused the England players of ‘greed’ and ‘over-indulgence’. Though Atherton was now fit, and was the only regular opener in the side apart from the stricken Gooch, he was not selected. A queasy Robin Smith was deputed to open with Stewart, who would act as captain. Blakey was brought in as a wicket keeper and batted at six.
India won the toss again. After the first Test, the British media had predicted that the home side would sit on its lead and play defensive cricket on flat surfaces. Instead, they were on the attack throughout. In the first innings, opener Navjot Sidhu hit a century, Kambli 59 and Tendulkar a stroke-filled 165. Amre, batting at six, made 78 and Kapil at seven added 66. During the course of a long first day in the field, England used four substitutes, one of whom, Emburey, dropped Amre fourth ball. India declared at 560 for 6. Tufnell had bowled forty-one overs for 132 runs and failed to take a wicket. Salisbury had taken 2 for 142.
The stark poverty of English spin became apparent when India took the field. Despite decent scores from Stewart (74 in 312 minutes), Hick (64) and Fairbrother (83), England were all out for 286. The spinners took all the wickets and bowled all but seven of the overs. England followed on, for the second successive Test. Kapil soon removed Stewart and Hick, opening the way for the spinners. At one point, England were 99 for 6. Then Lewis smashed 117 off 112 balls, one of the few displays of aggressive cricket from an England player throughout the tour. England were eventually bowled out for 252, and India had clinched the series.
Fletcher blamed losing the toss for the defeat. Others complained about Professor RS Rathore’s inept umpiring, but his only real victim was Salisbury in the first innings. The Mirror decided to replay the previous summer’s attack on the Pakistanis. After India’s huge first innings total, it screamed: ‘CHEATS! Indian Test cricketers scuffed up wicket.’ Lander warned, ‘a massive new international storm was brewing’ and reported that ‘four Indian cricketers were warned for pitch scuffing’. Stewart and Blakey, it was reported, were furious. Their protests were linked with Allan Lamb’s ‘brave’ stand against ball tampering. The four offenders were named as Tendulkar, Kapil, More and Amre. Umpire VK Ramaswamy admitted he had asked some Indian players to be careful about running on the pitch, but insisted he had issued no warning. Cammie Smith, the ICC match referee, dismissed the incident.
‘CHICKEN MADRAS’ was the Mirror’s comment on the Indian victory. Its sub-headline, ‘Test shame’, was ambiguous: did it refer to Indian ‘cheating’ or the England performance? Lander now laid into the ‘the disgraceful shambles of a Test team which Graham Gooch’s men have become in barely a fortnight’. The Sun blamed the ‘poisoned prawns’. Boycott lambasted the TCCB’s policy of producing flat pitches; he insisted the Indian bowlers were ‘quite ordinary’ and that the problem was that the English batsmen had ‘neither technique nor temperament to cope’. Botham blamed Gooch for keeping out Gower. Gooch told reporters he had only one message for his beaten side: ‘You are now playing for your pride.’ But there was little of that in evidence.
Food and drink were flown in from Britain. The England cricketers feasted on tinned tuna, corned beef, boiled ham and baked beans. Bennett was photographed cooking a meal of spam and eggs for the players over a portable stove. The Daily Star sent out food parcels. According to the Mirror, the England dressing room resembled ‘an army field tent’. When Indian customs officials held up an emergency delivery from the England sponsors, Tetley Bitter, the Sun’s headline exclaimed: BREWERY WHO COULDN’T ORGANISE A P* * * UP IN THE PUNJAB.
Meanwhile, the England management aired complaints about the 9.30am Test starts (which had been requested by the TCCB), about the foul smell emanating from the canal next to the Madras Test ground, about the bedlam of the Indian cricket crowds. Off-spinner Chauhan was accused, anonymously, of ‘chucking’. Fletcher remained unimpressed by any of the Indian spinners: ‘They are good bowlers but not outstanding ones.’ A gala celebrating sixty years of Test cricket between England and India was held at the elite Cricket Club of India in Bombay. The England players failed to show, despite an appeal from Sunil Gavaskar.
For the third Test in Bombay, India were unchanged again. Gooch was back. Emburey was recalled and Salisbury dropped. Blakey was retained, despite a poor match in Madras, so that Stewart could open with Gooch. Atherton came in at 3. Gooch finally won a toss but was soon out to Kapil for 4. Not long after, Stewart and Atherton found themselves at the same end. After mutual hesitation, Stewart walked. When Blakey was out for 1, England stood at 118 for 6. Thanks to Graeme Hick’s 178 – his long-awaited first Test century – England were all out for 347.
In the field, England were inept. Blakey missed a stumping chance. Emburey bowled without variety and Tufnell without control. Kambli exploded before his home-town crowd. Dropped by Gooch at slip on 119, he went on to make 224, the highest score by an Indian batsman against England. While he was at the wicket with Tendulkar, Azharuddin, Amre and Kapil, the Indians scored at one run a minute. To cap it all, the tail-enders Kumble and Chauhan both clouted sixes off the tiring Emburey. India were all out for 591, their highest score against England in a home Test.
England were left a day and a half to score 244 to avoid an innings defeat. Prabhakar removed Stewart, Gooch and Atherton to reduce England 34 for 3. The spinners dealt with Gatting, Smith and Hick, all of whom resisted for a period only to succumb when they seemed well set. The luckless Blakey went for a duck, again. England were all out for 229, India won the Test by an innings and 15 runs, and the series 3–0.
‘Shame of Bombay whitewash’ ran the back-page headline in the Sun, which dubbed the England squad ‘Bombay Potatoes’. The Mirror lead was ‘Cowboys and Indians’. Lander called on Fletcher and Dexter to resign. Gooch confessed, ‘It’s not just that we have lost but that we have lost badly,’ then added, ‘I am not prepared to accept defeat and failure.’ It was hard to see that he had much choice. India had won every match in a Test series for the first time in its history.
Four one-day internationals remained. England won the first in Bangalore and the second in Jamshedpur, where someone in the crowd threw a nail at Devon Malcolm. ‘It’s now become dangerous for players fielding anywhere near the boundary,’ said Fletcher. The flight back to Delhi was even more perilous. The pilot had to negotiate a safe landing after detecting a brake failure. ‘Miracle escape for England stars as plane is crippled’, announced the Mirror.
The two final one-day matches were at Gwalior, heartland of Scindia’s patrimony. In the first, England scored 256, including 129 from Robin Smith. Sidhu responded with 134 and Azhar with 74, enabling India to win by three wickets. A stone was thrown at Stewart; police with lathis waded into the crowd. The Mirror construed this as ‘Battered Stew stops a riot’. In the final match, Hick scored a century and England made 265 for 4, but thanks to Azhar’s 95 off sixty-three balls, India passed them with two overs remaining. The one-day series, which at one point England had led 2–1, was drawn 3–3.
Overall, this was possibly the worst ever performance by a touring team in India and certainly the worst ever performance by England against India. Following the collapse of its professional strategy, the England Committee fell back on a parody of the old amateurism, with its obsessive concern for appearances. ‘We have to look at the whole matter of facial hair,’ Dexter commented when he left the TCCB meeting held at the end of the series. Gooch’s trademark stubble had offended the county chairmen, as had England’s casual attire at post-match ceremonies.
Nothing reveals the essence of English insularity like the spectacle of Englishmen abroad. In India in 1993, the England squad set what Gavaskar described as a ‘world record’ for excuses. Indian food, pitches, umpires, transport, even the Indian air were all cited as reasons for English failure. The Indian cricket crowds were too noisy and too big. The firecrackers were distracting. The banners were intimidating. The Indian wicket-keeper put off the English batsmen by encouraging his bowlers with repeated cries of ‘shabash!’ (well done).
From the beginning, the English media portrayed the Indian tour as an ordeal. David Hopps in the Guardian called it ‘an extreme test of forbearance’. In the Independent, Martin Johnson prepared readers for the Indian experience with a series of diarrhoea jokes. Of course, complaints about diet and illness have long been common among Western travellers in India. But the English are not the only ones to suffer this kind of disadvantage away from home. Food in Britain often makes visiting Indians and Pakistanis ill. It is not only the work of local microbes to which foreign visitors have little tolerance; it is also a hazard of eating without local guidance at restaurants in strange towns. The isolation of the English players in first-class hotels meant that when they did expose themselves momentarily to Indian conditions, they were vulnerable. In future, the English might consider going to India early (they already do this for tours of the West Indies) so that they have time to adjust to the sheer physical and cultural strangeness of the place. They might even try to enjoy the country.
Tufnell’s verdict on India summed up the collective derision in which the host country was held by the visiting English: he told reporters he had ‘done the elephant and done the poverty and might as well go home’. Bennett and Fletcher restricted extra-curricular social activities to a minimum. In India, Gooch explained with a resigned shrug, you are mostly ‘confined to your hotel’. It was as if they were travelling in a country at war.
The complaints about ‘designer’ pitches and lost tosses were a futile protest against the game’s autochthony. These had always been the chances of cricket, in England as elsewhere. When they came England’s way in the course of the series, they were not taken. England simply failed to adapt to overseas conditions – though visiting players succeed in doing this in England every summer, displaying more resilience and ingenuity than the English players showed in India.
Fletcher’s all-round suspicion of India and things Indian, above all its umpires, imbued his players with an inhibiting paranoia. He let the media know that he wanted to play an extra batsman as ‘insurance against debatable umpiring decisions’. Emburey alleged that Indian batsmen were never given out LBW in India, hardly an encouragement to English bowlers. At the third Test in Bombay, one of the BBC radio commentators sagely assured listeners in Britain, ‘Tendulkar will not be leg before in this match’. Soon after, he was LBW to Tufnell for 78.
Most Indian cricket supporters are happy to admit that some of their umpires are useless, just as they are willing to tell any visitor who shows an interest how corrupt and incompetent their politicians are. In the past, the Indian complaint against Indian umpires was that they bent over too far to favour the visiting side, especially if that side came from the MCC. It was said that the umpires were overawed by the English amateurs and were therefore out of step with the spirit of independence. All that has changed. England now have to take their chances like other visiting teams.
As with the complaints about the violence and the politics, the assumption behind the whining and whinging about food, travel, pitches and umpires was that England and English cricket were normative. India was treated as a land of fathomless mystery and deceit. Peter Roebuck spelled out the mundane reality: ‘There is no secret to winning games here, or anywhere else. To win, a team must take wickets quickly and score runs quickly.’
England did neither. Critics of the tour selection felt vindicated. Gower and Russell had been sorely missed. Stewart’s play suffered as ever greater responsibilities were heaped on him. The vaunted professionalism championed by the England Committee wilted under pressure. Outside the controlled conditions of the Lilleshall laboratory, it disintegrated. Fielding was sloppy and field placings defensive and unimaginative. For all the expert coaching, the England cricketers displayed lack of technique in both batting and bowling on turning wickets. Unlike John Lever in 1976–77, the medium-pacers failed to swing the ball. The decision to take along Geoff Arnold, a seamer, as the squad’s bowling coach, in preference to Norman Gifford or another spinner, was an indication that Fletcher and Gooch wanted to play cricket in India as if India were England. When it turned out not to be, they complained.
What marked the English players out was not so much their failure to adapt to India as their making such a drama out of it. It was as if this was the only way they could assert their Englishness. In begrudging the home side credit for its achievement, they betrayed a profound loss of English confidence in striding the world stage. They seemed unaware that in belittling the Indian success, they belittled themselves.
The frustrations of the side were embodied in Gooch and Fletcher, the Essex men abroad. Before the tour, Gooch had said, ‘Fletch is the overriding reason I want to go to India.’ Fletcher had been his captain in India in 1981–82, when plans were finalized for the rebel tour to South Africa. Among Gooch’s reasons for going to South Africa were what he called the ‘unspeakably tedious cricket and endless dull evenings’ of the Indian tour. During that tour (England lost the six Test series to India 10), Fletcher had knocked down his stumps after being given out and been forced to apologize. Not surprisingly, with this background, the captain and team manager became the 1993 tour’s chief whingers and whiners, setting the tone for the rest of the squad.
Ill and bored, Gooch failed where he had succeeded in previous series: leading from the front. His image as the no-nonsense NCO of English cricket was never in keeping with reality. In 1986, he had wanted to withdraw from the England party in the West Indies after he became the focus of anti-apartheid demonstrators. A few years later, he resigned the Essex captaincy because it was affecting his batting form. Far from being a modest servant of the game, seeking fair treatment and nothing else, Gooch was self-involved and self-pitying. India brought out the worst in him. He explained: ‘Tours today have three priorities: playing cricket, preparing to play cricket and travelling to play cricket.’ Unlike Greig in 1976–77 or Phil Edmonds on the 1984–85 tour, Gooch displayed none of the humour to which Indian crowds so readily warm.
As they went down to defeat after defeat, Fletcher and Gooch seemed bereft of ideas or inspiration. From the beginning, their tactics were predicated on damage-limitation. Over the course of the Test series, England scored their runs at 2.35 an over. India scored at 3.17 an over. In the field, India’s over rates were faster than England’s. The English needed to take risks to win, but refused to do so. At the same time, they refused to take responsibility for defeat.
Gooch and Fletcher had shared, with many in Britain, a blind belief that only rigorous professionalism could overcome hostile world conditions. Instead, it led to a siege mentality. Failure left Gooch, Fletcher and Dexter bewildered. That is why they took refuge in feeble distractions: smog, prawns and facial hair.
In their self-imposed isolation, their sullen conviction that they were being hard done by, the England side in India were a projection of the embattled majority abroad – a bizarre historical inversion of empire. The media, which had gleefully assisted in creating this negative English identity, now turned against its standard-bearers. The demonization of the Pakistanis gave way to a kind of delirious national self-flagellation. The Sun gloated: ‘Gooch and Co crack up when chips are down.’ Botham called for the return of Lamb, Gower and himself to ‘restore pride’ in the upcoming Ashes. Boycott complained, ‘We should have had more fire in our bellies, more passion.’ The England side in India became not only the apt representatives of a small nation bewildered by the larger world, but also the ideal object for its self-disgust.
In contrast, India was rejuvenated. Its captain was a Muslim from Hyderabad, in the south. One of its openers, Sidhu, was a Sikh from the Punjab, in the north. Kambli, its new batting star, was a Dalit from Bombay, in the west. In their elan and unity on the field, the Indian team transcended the country’s dithering politicians and repudiated the demagogues of its embattled majority. And it did so through a return to traditional Indian strengths on the cricket field: spin bowling and attacking strokeplay, all of which looked handsome on Star TV. This was the first Test series to be covered solely on satellite in both domestic and overseas markets.
In February 1994, Javed Ansari in India Today looked back over India’s highly successful year in international cricket. He saw the England tour as a turning point: ‘The jousting of egos, the sulks, the groupism have abated, even if temporarily. The crux surely is that this Indian team, tired of abuse, frustrated by defeat, has eventually understood that a common collective purpose is the basis of any success.’
But he warned that India’s future in an unprotected world market remained uncertain:
Squashing Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and a pathetic England doesn’t really mean that the Indian team has qualified to sit alongside Zeus in Mount Olympus. Countries like South Africa, Pakistan, the West Indies and Australia are further up and India not only needs to pass them but to do so without the benefit of home crowds, tailor-made pitches and neighbourhood umpires.
In February and March of 1993, two nations, India and England, had passed each other on the cricket field in a fog of mutual self preoccupation. For me, England’s defeat brought to mind Marx’s remarks on the role of the Sepoys (Indian soldiers trained by and serving under the British) in the Indian Mutiny: ‘There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended but by the offender himself.’
In 1993, cricket, not for the first or last time, was such an instrument.
Coda: England in Sri Lanka
‘How peaceful things are here, in complete contrast to the three Tests in India,’ the BBC radio commentator observed at the start of the one-off Test against Sri Lanka at the Sinhalese Sports Club. ‘There are only a few thousand spectators here today in Colombo, hardly any banners and the wicket is green, just like home.’
The small crowd at the Test was the result of a scheduling clash. The same day, 20,000 spectators packed another Colombo cricket ground to watch Royal College v. St Thomas, the island’s equivalent to Eton v. Harrow. Strangely, Sri Lankan cricket was still swathed in a Victorian ethos. On a tour of Australia in 1989, captain Arjuna Ranatunga objected to racist sledging: ‘There is no abuse for players in Sri Lanka; we play like gentlemen. We came here as gentlemen, we play as gentlemen and we want to go home as gentlemen.’
In eleven years of Test cricket, Sri Lanka had won three out of forty-three Tests. Since its admission as a full member of the ICC, it had been shabbily treated by some of the longer-established Test countries, notably England, which had granted it only infrequent one-off Tests. Because of civil war and the accompanying terror and counter-terror, no Test cricket was played in the country between 1987 and 1992.
But 1992–93 had already been Sri Lanka’s most successful international season ever. In August, they had won two out of three internationals against Australia and drawn all three Tests, coming within sixteen runs of winning the first. In December, after a Tamil suicide bomb had killed five people in Colombo, half the New Zealand touring party had returned home. Sri Lanka beat the depleted side in the one-day series and won one and drew one of the two Tests.
The Sri Lankans were looking forward to the England visit, but the same could not be said of the English. Gooch had bailed out, as planned, after the last one-day match in India. Stewart led the ragged party on to the final leg of the tour. As well as captaining the side, he was asked to open the batting and keep wicket.
In the first one-day international, Sri Lanka compiled 250 for 5 in forty-seven overs. The English bowling was sloppy. DeFreitas went for 25 in three overs. There were 25 extras. The fielding was described in the press as ‘shoddy and petulant’. The last ball of the innings produced three byes: Stewart rolled at the stumps, missed, and then Jarvis, following through, also rolled and missed. England were then dismissed in their first innings for 170 in 36.1 overs.
In the Test match, having won the toss, England batted unadventurously in high temperatures. After their Indian trauma, the batsmen seemed wary of the most innocuous balls. Scyld Berry thought the ‘England team seem programmed, rather than prepared’. He could detect ‘little sign of wit or will to win’. Smith’s 128 – his first century for England overseas – was a painful effort, coming in 338 balls and 448 minutes. England reached 316 for 4 but were then all out for 380. The spinners, Warnaweera and Muralitharan, took four wickets each.
The Sri Lankan openers, Hathurusinghe and Mahanama, made 99 together in 102 minutes. The top six batsmen all scored between 43 and 93. Tillekeratne and Muralitharan put on 83 for the ninth wicket. Sri Lanka were all out for 469.
England’s second innings was inept and bad-tempered. Gatting and Stewart both objected to being given out caught. Fairbrother, run out for three, also protested. The bails were already off when Warnaweera knocked out the middle stump. Under Law 28.1.c, the umpire correctly gave the batsman out. Emburey and Lewis grafted for the team’s top scores. Caught down the leg side off Warnaweera, Tufnell ended the English innings with another show of dissent.
Sri Lanka were left the best part of a day to score 140. Emburey and Tufnell had them worried at 61 for 4, but Tillekeratne and Ranatunga, batting with dash and assurance, took the side nearly home. With four runs still needed, Ranatunga was caught at short leg. Jayasuriya came in and hit Tufnell first ball for six over midwicket. Sri Lanka had won their first Test victory over England.
‘THIRD RATE’ was the Mirror’s verdict on ‘another day of England shame’. Lander described it as ‘one of the blackest days in England’s 116-year Test history’. During the Test, he reported, ‘England degenerated from a team of honest tryers into a rabble’. But the Mirror could not leave it at that. Lander claimed that Alex Stewart was ‘on the war path’ over Sri Lankan ‘chucking’. Pressed on the allegation, Fletcher failed either to clear or condemn the Sri Lankans: ‘I cannot tell you how they do it, or why our spinners cannot make the ball fizz and go the way they seem to be able to.’
By this time, most of the cricket press had grown weary of Fletcher’s whinging. Lander alone was persuaded that England had been ‘sorted out by a pair of “chuckers”. They were victims, too, of some sub-standard international umpiring.’
Warnaweera’s quick off-cutters were widely suspect in Sri Lanka and had already been queried by Martin Crowe at the end of 1992. He had been called for chucking five times in Sri Lanka, but not once on his tours of India and New Zealand. Muralitharan, the only Tamil in the team, also came under suspicion. When he bowled, his elbow appeared bent, but that is not the same as ‘chucking’, which is notoriously difficult to define. When he had toured England in 1991, no one had objected to his action and he had never been called in Sri Lanka.
According to Counterpoint, a local English-language magazine which campaigns for human rights and a peaceful solution to the island’s internal strife, Warnaweera’s ‘chucks did not account for any dismissals in this Test – but chucks there certainly were’. Only Tufnell’s dismissal in the second innings, the magazine felt, was due to umpiring error. It praised the ‘superb team effort’ that had brought Sri Lanka this historic triumph, but also noted that Sri Lanka had yet to win a Test away from home. It called for neutral umpires and asked: ‘Why are we so desperate to win no matter what? With the talent at our disposal we don’t need to have to resort to cheating ...’
In the final one-day international in Moratuwa, down the coast from Colombo, neither Muralitharan nor Warnaweera played. Sri Lanka won the toss and inserted England on a turning pitch. The left-hander Jayasuriya, known mainly as a batsman, took 6 for 29. England were all out for 180. Sri Lanka raced to 183 for 2 in 35.2 overs. Towards the end of the innings, Aravinda de Silva hit Salisbury (who had not played since Madras) high over his head. Smith ran round and called for the catch. He missed, slid, damaged his knee and had to be carried off. De Silva then hit two fours and a six off the next three balls. He finished the match with a fourth six. England’s humiliation was complete.
Sri Lanka’s demands for a three-Test series in England now seem undeniable.3 Their cricketers had batted in the classical mould, with nimble footwork and straight bats. Their captaincy, bowling and fielding made the best of limited resources, exposing England’s failure to do the same. The writing was on the wall for the England Committee. The Ashes defeat the following summer simply put it up in neon for all to see.
In London, I listened to the news of England’s demise on the morning radio. Meditating on this extreme inversion of the imperial order, I ate breakfast, read the paper and set off for the House of Commons, where I had an appointment with Dennis Skinner to talk about the current state of the Labour Party. Skinner was cheerful, which isn’t always the case. I asked him what was up. ‘Sri Lanka beat England,’ he snorted.
Skinner is well known as a republican and class fighter. Rooted in the miners’ culture of Derbyshire, caustic, irascible, uncompromising, Skinner seems a quintessentially English figure. He is that, but he is also a figure of opposition, and an internationalist who insists: ‘I would go anywhere to fight for the workers of the world, but I won’t put on a uniform to fight for the Queen and the ruling class.’
Knowing he was a cricket aficionado who in his youth had bowled in the Bassetlaw League, and intrigued to see how he would fare on the Tebbit test, I asked him whom he supported in Test cricket.
‘Anyone but England,’ he replied, without a moment’s hesitation.4
Between 1878 and 1980, England played 554 Tests, winning thirty-six per cent, losing just over twenty-five per cent and drawing just under thirty-five per cent. Between 1980 and 1993, England played 141 Tests, winning twenty-one per cent, losing thirty-eight per cent and drawing thirty-nine per cent. In the same period, they lost five series to Australia, five to West Indies, three to Pakistan and three to India. Up till 1980, England had lost only one Test to New Zealand; between 1980 and 1993 it lost three more, and won only six. Of Test-playing nations, only Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe have poorer playing records over the same period. India may not have won as many Tests as England, but it has lost far fewer, and not only at home.
English cricket neatly mirrors the decline of Britain as an economic and political power, but it does more than that. It also encapsulates the neurotic struggle to come to terms with that decline.
The game became English in the late eighteenth century because it embodied the profound changes taking place in England at that time. It became imperial because while being English it was also universal and adaptable. English remains the language of world cricket. It peppers the Hindi and Urdu Test commentary. Cricket English has the charm of a world jargon, excluding the uninitiated but including all cricket lovers, of whatever nation. Cricket values, above all, fair play, are supposed to be international, yet they are also supposed to be English.
And there’s the rub. Defeat at the hands of former colonies, getting ‘beaten at our own game’, explodes what Benedict Anderson calls ‘the fundamental contradiction of English official nationalism, i.e. the inner incompatibility of empire and nation’.
Unlike its Scottish or Welsh cousins, English nationalism has few popular icons, and nothing like the USA’s Fourth of July. England may have the first national anthem, ‘God Save the King’, but it is a hymn not to a nation, but to a sovereign monarch. The country’s flag is a ‘jack’, something stuck on the mast of a boat to signal the national presence on the high seas and in foreign lands. It has never had the popular potency of the tricolour or the stars and stripes. It is a projection of imperial power, not the symbol of a people. What kind of England can it evoke? Mainly, it seems, an England whose identity consists in dominating others. Take that away and what is left? The projection of empire becomes a projection of loss of empire. The Union Jack becomes a token of vanished dominance, which is why the British National Party has appropriated it with such ease. Similarly, the England flag flown at Test matches, the red cross of St George, has become not the emblem of Spenser but of the National Front and a gaggle of cranky right-wing English nationalists. The fascists have been able to purloin these national symbols so easily because they do not really belong to anyone else. It has always been much harder for the far right in America to get exclusive possession of the flag, though it has tried.
In the days of Shakespeare and Milton, English nationalism spoke in revolutionary tones. But with its adaptation by empire, it was purged of all democratic content. The English Revolution, the English Jacobins, the Chartists were all swept from popular memory. English nationalism became the cult of a dynastic, imperial state.
Gutted of democracy, English nationalism rested on a sense of moral superiority underpinned by the crude reality of military and economic dominance. The hierarchy of empire was seen as a natural one, with the English at the top, and top among them, the landed elite. Other nationalisms formed during the nineteenth century embodied aspirations for change, for a transformation in the nation’s internal life and its relations with other peoples. English nationalism embodied a veneration of the status quo.
Cricket proved the ideal vehicle for the national/imperial ideology which crystallized at the end of the nineteenth century. This was not ‘by accident’, as Rowland Bowen thought. Because of the game’s early origins, cricket combined an egalitarian premise with a deeply hierarchical culture. Its transitional nature made it a peculiarly suitable vehicle for an ‘Englishness’ in transition from the native heath to world dominance. As it spread through the empire, it provided the English with a global image of themselves. It was an index of English supremacy, just as it later became an index of English decline.
The ‘sporting’ pretensions of the British empire were to shape the resistance to it. In the long run, they also rebounded on English nationalism and English cricket themselves. If the nation is defined as the ruler of an empire, and this empire is justified as the embodiment of universal civilized values, including the rule of law and cricket, what happens when that empire collapses, when others lay claim to those values? What is left of ‘England’ and ‘Englishness’?
All this helps explain the inner weakness and brittleness of English chauvinism today. It rests on a national identity with a hole in the centre. This hollowness is only enlarged when ‘England’ is used as a trope for the United Kingdom (as it is in cricket). Once again, it becomes a cypher for a state, not the name of a people.
Paradoxically, the empire cut Britain off from the world. It raised insularity to a transcendent virtue, and reinforced native empirical traditions, while stripping them of radicalism. Fair play and the unwritten constitution became the highest expressions of a pragmatic nation. Empiricism may have saved the English, as Orwell thought, from irrational authority and mysticism, but it also confined all arguments to an appeal to ‘common sense’, which often proves as arbitrary as any religious cult.
The legendary English insularity has become a way of relating to the outside world. Where the solipsism of Americans makes it hard for them to know where their own country ends and others begin, the English are intensely conscious of national borders, and intensely self-conscious about being ‘English’ in foreign lands. Here the crusty cricket commentator muttering about the food in India and the lager swilling lad donning Union Jack shorts in Spain are at one. Beer cans and baked beans became totems of identity in an alien land.
Once the world ceases to reflect the ‘natural’ superiority of the English, ‘Englishness’ passes into a kind of permanent crisis. Without empire, little is left but an assertion of racial continuity. This is why national decline has been accompanied by increasingly racist and exclusivist invocations of ‘England’ and ‘Britain’. Under its impact, English nationalism has become much more unrestrained and vulgar.
In the absence of other expressions of national identity, sport takes on a special importance. The imperial cult of ‘manly’ games has become the last redoubt of English national identity in a world that doesn’t give a damn about England. The violent machismo of the football nationalists is simply the old public-school cult, denuded of middle-class hypocrisies and cool, imperial confidence. The old racists were smugly superior; the new ones are riddled with fear and anxiety.
England and English cricket do not much like David Richards’s ‘shrinking world’. The island experience has become a cross to bear. It only makes the larger world look more menacing as it closes in. The angst of this experience is all too apparent in England’s recent Test performances.
With its defensive forward prod and its seam-up trundlers, its pragmatic professionalism and resentment of decline, its endless hesitancy and crippling fear of failure, English cricket is a mirror of what Englishness has become. It epitomizes the shift from a nationalism based on dominance to one based on insecurity.
The amateur legacy has become an instrument of self-torture. English masochism is indulged by endlessly measuring present realities against a largely fictional past. Instead of giving strength and purpose, the national past – felt now only as a sense of loss – saps confidence and feeds self-doubt. This is one good reason for a sweeping reassessment of the English past, including the past of English cricket.
The neurosis of English cricket – visible in selection, in captaincy, in the whole approach of a generation of English players – is rooted in the trauma of national decline. Where players from other countries often find positive inspiration in representing their nations, for English players, national representation is an inhibiting burden. What haunts English cricketers is not so much the insatiable demand for national success, as the sheer pregnancy of meaning in national failure.
It seems as if history exerts a double squeeze on English cricket, top and bottom: lumbering the national side with a heavy burden of representation, while narrowing the game’s popular base.
I sat in the 800-year-old ruins of a Native American ball court in Arizona, wearing my New York Yankee baseball cap (made in Korea) and thinking about cricket.
The ball game played here had a pedigree that makes cricket look like a parvenu. For some 2,000 years it was played over a one-million square-mile area, stretching from the isthmus of Panama to the south west of today’s United States. It was played by both kings and commoners. At the height of its popularity, 16,000 rubber balls were imported every year from the coastal jungles to the Aztec capitals in central Mexico. Only a few days before my visit to the ruin, the descendants of the ancient Mayan rubber tappers had staged an armed rebellion against the Mexican state. Their anger was directed at the North American Free Trade Agreement, a symbol of the global market which threatened to destroy what was left of their traditional economy and enslave them, as surely as the conquistadors had done, to the economic priorities of a foreign elite.
When they first encountered the ancient game, the Spanish, to whom rubber was unknown, were awed by the bouncing balls, which seemed to have a life of their own. Players struck the ball with their hips, buttocks or knees (all of which were padded). The object was to direct the rapidly moving ball through the iron hoops attached to the side walls of the stone court.
The elite constructed ball courts for their own and for public use. They hired and played with professionals. Because of the complex scoring method, games were long. There was gambling on results. Sometimes, the game was used as an augury, a way of divining the will of the gods. It served also as a substitute for war or a means of settling civil conflicts. Rulers played it to acquire territory or tribute. Over the centuries, it also acquired a hieratic significance. It became the centrepiece of numerous religious rites, some of which involved human sacrifice.
The imagery of decapitation is carved all over the Central American ball courts. The ancient myths make clear that the ball game was a means of linking life on earth with the underworld where the deities resided. The ball symbolized the severed head, which was seen as animated and autonomous, forever seeking reunion with its headless body, often represented by the ball court itself. Both ball and head evoked the movements of sun and moon, rising out of and setting into the underworld.
As a game of constant motion (made possible by the rubber ball) it not only evoked the change of seasons, it was actually held responsible for them. Playing the game and performing its accompanying ritual were essential to appease the gods and preserve universal order.
What a terrible burden for a ball game!
The ball-game cult was a common denominator through otherwise diverse societies. Though its meaning changed over time and space, it remained a single recognizable game. It was the game itself that the people of pre-Conquest Central America must have loved, not its political and religious encumbrances.
Sitting in the ruins, I felt sorry that any game should be so bowed down. I felt convinced that the Central American ball game had a lesson for cricket: sport becomes more beautiful, more human, the more it liberates itself from ritual and tradition, the more it becomes itself without apologies.
I started to wonder: what if there were no cricket? What if it passed into history, as Rowland Bowen said it would, as the Central American ball game had? There are so many things I would miss.
A leg-spinner leaving a batsman floundering (the Schadenfreude of the googly), the arc of a straight six, the crisp, dismissive sound of a square cut, the sudden savagery of a stump uprooted by pace. The unredeemable tragedies of the dropped slip catch or mistimed hook. The humour of the game. The hapless tail-ender flat-footedly hoiking the unplayable fast bowler for six over midwicket. Sitting in the stands, missing the fall of a wicket, distracted by an article in the newspaper or some movement in the clouds, looking up, embarrassed, and wondering what has happened.
The solace of an empty county ground on a bright weekday morning.
What I would miss most of all would be the sublime waste of an entire day on something with no redeeming purpose whatsoever. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that this whole book was nothing but an elaborate attempt to justify that waste.
It seems that cricket will never be left to be just cricket. It is always asked to ‘stand for’ something more than itself. Here the anti-colonialist CLR James and the imperialist Lord Harris were in agreement. James was, in the end, a cricket traditionalist, for all his revolutionary commitment. His tortuous celebration of the public school games ethos tells us much about James, but also much about the contradictory role of cricket in colonial society. His highest claim on behalf of Frank Worrell was that he was a worthy disciple of the master who inspired Tom Brown’s School Days.
Cricket is its own end. It is not, nor should it be, a means to an end: to private profit or national aggrandizement. The baggage of higher purpose, a telltale sign of English capital’s perennial need to seek a noble rationale for its beastliness, weighs down on the game, suppressing its delightfully pointless beauty.
Benedict Anderson argues that the power of nationality lies in the fact that you cannot choose it. It elevates a personal destiny to a cause. My experience has made me wary of and fascinated by all nationalisms. I admit to having no loyalty whatsoever to the spirits people invoke when they pronounce the sacred names of ‘England’ or ‘America’. So I suppose my loyalty, in the end, is to cricket, the game itself, that marvellous universal. It is a loyalty I never chose, which is why I am helpless in its grip.
Maybe I wind up at one with the old amateur ideologists, believing that what matters is playing the game, not winning or losing, not taking sides. Orwell defined ‘serious sport’ as ‘war minus the shooting’. For that reason, he detested it, though for the same reason, many others love it. But the whole idea of sport as a substitute for war seems to me profoundly degrading. The equation trivializes both activities. Cricket is superior to war, not a substitute for it. It is self-evidently a more rational and mutually beneficial species of inter-national interaction. Those who would reduce it to war, or use it for warlike purposes, betray it. And nations which would use it to aggrandize themselves at the expense of others, will find, in the end, that the game itself springs surprising revenges. For all the tensions that run through it, cricket is an affirmation of a shared world. At times, its level playing field even points to a higher democracy, beyond nation and market.
Some will say that I have been as guilty as anyone of imposing my own prejudices on the game. But as the black cricketers in South Africa have taught us, it is impossible and undesirable to compartmentalize our lives, to separate our love of the game from our other loves (or hates). One of cricket’s genuine claims is that it engages the whole human being, body, mind and heart. Much as we might like the game to become, once again, merely a game, any human activity as complex as cricket will always carry meanings and invite interpretation. Our aim should be to ensure that those meanings and interpretations are not a burden on but an extrapolation of the game’s democratic essence. We cannot return to a pristine cricket which never existed. Instead, we should see in the game’s inclusive premises, its autochthonous open-endedness, a rich realm of human possibility – a realm in which even England can find a place.
I do not believe that English cricket is doomed or that English Test teams will know only failure. But the revival of English cricket will have to mean a lot more than winning Test matches. Indeed, I suspect that learning new ways of losing Test matches will be part of the road to salvation. Revival is about more people playing the game, getting more joy out of it, seizing and remaking it for their own purposes, just as the elite seized and remade the peasant game in the eighteenth century. It is about playing the game to a higher standard, a standard not judged by winning or losing, but by degrees of invention and imagination. It is about exploring the limits of the game, and transgressing them.
I do not feel I have wandered far from cricket in this book. It was cricket itself which took me on all these excursions, which asked the questions, then contradicted the answers. The multiform, polysemous nature of the game kept slipping through my fingers. I have often felt as if I was trying to take a snapshot of a creature forever on the wing. I have come back again and again to the triangle of cricket, nation, market. For two hundred years, nation and market have nurtured and guided, pummelled and cudgelled cricket. Often, they have squabbled over it. And sometimes, gloriously, cricket has burst the boundaries they try to impose on it.