1. One of the first films I saw on my arrival in England was The Go-Between, a meditation on class, sex and memory scripted by Harold Pinter (from Hartley’s novel) and directed by a leftist American refugee from McCarthyism, Joseph Losey. One of the highlights of the film is a village cricket match in which the denizens of the great house take on the local plebes. It was clear that this was cricket as a form of sublimated class war, but at the time I didn’t appreciate the contrast between the grass-skimming cover-drives of the public school educated upper classes and the leg-side air-born hitting of the untutored locals. I assume credit for this telling detail belongs to the cricket-lover Pinter.
2. In 1995, English cricket finally got its ‘supremo’ when Ray Illingworth was made team manager as well as chairman of selectors. Many were surprised when Illingworth proved capricious and eager to shunt responsibility for failure on to others. But these are and always have been the vices of dictatorship.
3. For Frith’s subsequent misadventures, see Chapter 8.
1. And so it has come to pass. See Chapter 8.
2. Whittingdale lost patience with English cricket in 1996, and withdrew its sponsorship. Other sponsors have come and gone, and new money has come from the communications industry. But the clubby interface between the game and its sponsors endures. When Tetley dropped out in 1997, it was replaced by Vodafone, which had become the thirteenth biggest company in the country after only a decade in business, thanks to the mobile phone boom. The sponsorship deal with Vodafone was quickly and quietly arranged by Lord MacLaurin, who also happened to be a director of the company, and became its Chairman a year later.
3. As of 1998.
4. Watching the World Cup held in south Asia in 1996 has forced me to revise my views on the limited overs format. England, once a leader in the one-day game, slipped back in the nineties; the insistence on the supreme importance of Test cricket, and the concomitant assumption that the one-day game was merely a commercial spin-off, led to complacency and routinism in the English approach to the junior form of the game. Elsewhere, experimentation and tactical adventure flourished. I think the one-day game is still in evolution, and could reveal greater variety and complexity than many of its critics suspect.
5. The MacLaurin report of 1997 went further than previous attempts at reform, but encountered the same resistance and was tangled in the same contradictions as its predecessors. See Chapter 8.
6. The 1998 Wisden at 1472 pages is 96 pages longer than the 1993 edition. There are twenty-three pages devoted to Oxford and Cambridge, 41 pages of ‘schools cricket’ with the same bias as five years ago, five pages on League cricket – of which two are on the Lancashire Leagues – and four pages on women’s cricket.
7. Bridging the first-class and recreational games was one of the aims of the MacLaurin Report of 1997, but its proposals implied not a partnership, but a crude take-over of the latter by the former. See Chapter 8.
1. As of May 1998, it had not. Even Yorkshire’s most dedicated apologists seem to be running out of excuses.
2. In 1996 I met an opening batsman for a team called Khalsa in the Quaid-I-Azam League. His name was Everton and his parents were from the West Indies. I asked him if he thought it was strange that he was an Afro-Caribbean batsman playing for a Sikh side in a Muslim league. ‘I never thought of it that way,’ he said, ‘We’ve got a couple of white lads as well. We just love our cricket, and none of us fits in with the old leagues.’ See Chapter 8.
3. For West Indian cricketers in England during this period, racism was a grim reality, as Learie Constantine explained in his forward to the Daily Worker’s 1950 cricket handbook: ‘West Indies cricketers come to England and find the most refrigerated cricket the world has to show ... The cricket officials were polite, impersonal, never saying two words where one would do or one if silence could serve ... Then there is the wretched colour problem which always affects West Indies touring teams ... off the pitch remarks are overheard that are remembered with hurt for years. I have had some of it and I know.’
4. In 1998, I received a letter from Martyn Stankler, who witnessed this incident. ‘I was the steward on duty in the area where it happened (what you have written is 100% accurate, I have to say) ... I was interviewed at some length by the chief steward about what had happened and for longer periods by the ground manager [who told me] he would take a dim view of anything printed anywhere that was not to his liking ...’ Understandably, Mr Stankler was astonished that ‘one of the most remarkable things (in my view anyway) to have taken place off the field of play at a cricket match’ went unreported in either the local, national or cricket press.
5. In 1994, television cameras showed England captain Mike Atherton removing dirt from his pocket and rubbing it on the ball during the Lord’s Test against South Africa. Eastern Eye printed the freeze-frame on its front page under the headline, ‘GOTCHA!’ – hoisting the tabloids on their own petard. For the strange afterlife of the ball-tampering affair, see Chapter 8.
1. By the mid-eighties, sanctions against South Africa were consistently endorsed by at least 70% of the population, according to opinion polls.
2. In an article in the South African journal Transformation (Issue 33, 1997), Vishnu Padayachee, a professor at the University of Natal, sketched some of the problems encountered by South African cricket since 1992:
‘Despite the enormous changes that have occurred in this country in the last seven years, there are many areas of ordinary life which remain delicately poised between the practise of the past and the promise of the future, where tensions and suspicions still exist, and where therefore a great deal of care and sensitivity needs to be exercised by those who participate in them, in part because their actions do serve as role models for the present and future generations of South Africans. Sport is one such area. But is this sensitivity to issues of race really being displayed?
‘Stereotypes about sports and racial ‘identities’ still persist among many South Africans. Like the Daily News reader who made the following comment in a letter attacking someone who had suggested that cricket has not made significant strides towards non-racialism: ‘The realism of the situation is that generally, blacks in this country do not particularly want to play cricket. The fact that soccer is a giant sport in this country is because blacks want it’ (April 15, 1997). Such examples of racist stereotyping, based on a complete ignorance of the long histories of ‘other-than-white’ sports in this country, are still widespread. Neither are they confined to the more yobbish elements of our society. They will continue to be a barrier to fuller racial integration both in sport and society.
‘No clear programme for sports transformation, development and monitoring was agreed to in the early 1990s as a pre-condition for the ANC’s ‘blessing’ of white-dominated sports. And it has been suggested repeatedly that the ANC’s hasty decision has enabled some of these sports codes to re-establish international links without a concurrent commitment to sports transformation and development. The recent furore over rugby administration and its development programme demonstrates how premature the ANC decision may have been.
‘In cricket noticeably more progress has been made, both in terms of changes in the game’s administration and in cricket development programmes, but many questions still remain over cricket. Why have there not been more black players (Indian, Coloured, African) in cricket teams, at national, provincial and even club levels five years after unification, and despite the fact that South Africans previously classified as Coloured and Indian have played cricket in this country for over 100 years? Are the changes at top of cricket administration really significant, or are people like Ali Bacher and others (who pioneered rebel tours in the isolation era) still in reality calling the shots?
‘In KwaZulu-Natal and elsewhere, a group of (black) cricketers and administrators have constituted themselves into a pressure group (Cogoc) to challenge the cricket authority’s transformation and development programme, and have even spoken (unfortunately in my view) of establishing racial quotas for teams at all levels of the game in order to speed up change.
‘Many South African blacks, including prominent ANC politicians like Finance Minister Trevor Manuel have come out in support of touring sports teams, because of their inability to identify with South African teams. This is of course most clear in rugby, but also increasingly emerging in cricket as well. Thousands of South Africans of Indian origin, for example, but perhaps excluding the young, would fail the Tebbit test if it was applied here. For they enthusiastically support India or Pakistan against South Africa. These people love cricket passionately and many were eager to throw their weight behind the South African cricket team in the early 1990s, and especially during the 1992 world cup. Now many have had a change of heart.
‘When one looks back at recent racial incidents, such as Steve Palframan’s racial abuse of West Indian Franklyn Stephenson, and notices how lightly he got off, one must question the seriousness with which the new cricket authorities are committed to stamping out racial abuse on the field of pay. Incidents such as Allan Donald’s verbal abuse of Indian batsman Rahul Dravid and Shaun Pollock’s ‘overzealous’ send-off of Mohammad Azharuddin in the recent Test series between these countries may be qualitatively different from the Palframan incident but they are nevertheless symptomatic of a deeper ingrained racial socialisation, which is the product of an apartheid upbringing. These incidents sparked in KwaZulu-Natal a huge outcry, as is evident form the letters pages of local newspapers in the following months ...
‘There is a lot that sport, including cricket, still has to do before it can be said to reflect the realities of the new South Africa, and to command the unqualified support of sports-loving South Africans ... If through its cricket, the English establishment still imagines and plays out the rules and values of a long-lost colonial past, is it not the case that through sports like cricket, tennis, bowls and especially rugby, many white South Africans continue to live out the rules and values of their recently-lost apartheid past?’
Padayachee is by no means alone in raising these concerns. In 1997–98, Ali Bacher’s regime, once the envy of the South African sports world (and fellow members of the ICC), came under mounting criticism. At school and club level cricket remains largely segregated. Provincial sides seem reluctant to select players from the old SACB, or from the UCB’s own development programme, and coloured and black players remain confined to the fringe of the national team. Mluleki George, the National Sports Council president, and former Robben Island inmate, commented: ‘The UCB can talk a lot about development, but right now it looks more like a PR exercise than anything else and we’re not seeing results.’
In March 1998, protesters in Port Elizabeth confronted Ali Bacher with a petition, signed by 1,000 local residents, complaining about the absence of blacks in Test and provincial teams. Bacher agreed that ‘in 1998 it cannot be right that South Africa field a team of whites only’ and hinted that more blacks would be selected in future. Soon after, twenty-year old Makhaya Ntini became the first black and the first graduate of the development programme to play Test cricket for South Africa. He had been preceded by Paul Adams, Roger Telemachus, and Herschelle Gibbs, but all these hailed from ‘Cape Coloured’ communities and had learned their cricket at exclusive schools. Ntini, from a Xhosa village on the Eastern Cape, never touched a cricket ball until he was fifteen. His selection was decried by some as a case of ‘reverse racism’. Their ire was unlikely to be assuaged by Bacher’s statement after the selection was announced: ‘At the moment, particularly for matches in South Africa, we simply cannot afford to field a national team without representation from black communities.’ It’s hard enough making a Test debut without also having to shoulder the burden of historic resentments and expectations, but Ntini performed respectably on debut, taking the wicket of Aravinda de Silva, and was selected for the 1998 tour of England.
One of the ironies of the new South Africa is that many of those now clamouring for ‘colour blind’ selection were beneficiaries of the old apartheid order, which was anything but colour blind. Is it surprising that in these conditions, there are calls for ‘affirmative action’ to redress generations of racial discrimination? Many in the black communities simply do not trust whites to select on merit, and the slow and cautious introduction of non-whites into the provincial and Test teams confirms their worst suspicions.
The development programme does seem to have ignited an enthusiasm for cricket in many townships, but movement into high-level club and ultimately representative cricket has remained restricted. The best facilities are still monopolised by private white-dominated clubs and schools. In that context, critics of Bacher have demanded that the UCBSA superintend a much more radical redistribution of resources.
For all its shortcomings, the UCBSA still has lots to teach the ECB when it comes to putting its money where its mouth is. In 1996–97, takings at the gate for the Test and one day series played against India and Australia amounted to R24.5 million (about three million pounds), R4 million of which the UCB placed at the disposal of the development programme and other initiatives to promote cricket among disadvantaged populations. It is inconceivable that the ECB would ever contemplate donating one sixth of its Ashes series revenues, say, to inner-city, state school and black and Asian cricket. But then they’ve never come under the kind of mass political pressure which forged the UCB and still shapes its policies.
3. This bilateralism remains the major obstacle to the construction of a coherent world Test league. However, England are at last embracing the realities of the global one-day circus. In December 1997, it sent a specialist one-day squad to Sharjah – and won the tournament.
4. But this is an immensely complex and contradictory process, and only one among many which ultimately determine a team’s fortunes on the field of play. The passage above has been cited by some critics in support of proposals (like Robert Henderson’s) to enhance the ‘Englishness’ of the England side. But the phenomenon to which I was referring had nothing to do with individual players’ ‘commitment’ to the national cause. On the contrary, it is an argument against any attempt to measure or judge national ‘commitment’, a simple word for what is always a most complex phenomenon. It is also an argument against any attempt to force-feed patriotism to national sides (or spectators). See Chapter 8.
1. Reviewing Anyone but England in the 1995 Wisden, Christopher Booker summed up the foregoing narrative (the only part of the book he liked) as follows: ‘Marqusee’s description of taking a group of cocky, Asian despising London/West Indian layabouts to the final of the 1983 World Cup...’
2. The 1996 World Cup in south Asia proved even more profitable than predicted, and just as tumultuous and controversy-riddled as English critics feared. As a cricket tournament, it was a smashing success. I was lucky enough to attend. My account of this extraordinary event, War Minus the Shooting, was published by Mandarin in 1997.
3. But in 1998 have yet to be granted.
4. Some critics accused me of insinuating that it was ‘politically incorrect’ to support England (a kind of reverse Tebbit test). On the contrary, what I was arguing – and still believe – is that everyone should be at liberty to support, or not support, the teams of their choice. No one should seek to impose his sense of ‘nationhood’ on another or use sport to test another’s patriotism.
Of course there is nothing wrong with supporting England and being vociferous and enthusiastic about it – as long as this passion does not lead to abusing or excluding others. Sport without partisanship would be a dry spectacle. But sporting partisanship that fuels hatred ruins the sporting occasion.
In any case, partisanship is a peculiar beast. As the American comedian Jerry Seinfeld noted, ‘People come back from the game yelling, “We won! We won!!” No: they won; you watched.’ This leap of imagination, this widening of the definition of the self, is indeed comic – precisely because it is so wonderfully human. I am the last person to want to keep it out of cricket, but I do believe that when it is applied to nations (as opposed to cities or towns) it becomes incendiary material and has to be handled with caution. ‘England’ is clearly a far more complex and resonant entity than Arsenal or Manchester United, Somerset or Northamptonshire.
Cricket’s historic tragedy is that Test cricket was formalised before domestic competition (not only in England). Compared to any of its rival team games, cricket places greater relative emphasis on international encounters; being a top cricketer means being a Test or one-day international cricketer. As a result partisanship in cricket is pre-eminently national partisanship, with all its burdens and ambiguities. We cannot go back in time, take the course adopted by football, and thereby undo the damage done by the high Victorian institutionalisation of ‘English cricket’. But we can take a leaf from football’s book. In all the talk about reforming the county game, why are there no proposals for a UEFA Cup-type competition that would bring together the top first-class sides from around the world? I’d love to see Warwickshire take on Bombay, or Surrey up against Western Australia, or Glamorgan battle it out with Karachi or Barbados. This globalisation of the domestic game would enhance the ‘competitiveness’ of county cricket, and in the long run could prove a major money-spinner. However, it would entail a relative reduction in the overweening prestige of Test cricket and a blurring of national boundaries (especially as English counties would employ their overseas stars to maximum advantage). At the moment, the ECB seems unable even to contemplate such horrors.