Few cricket books are brilliant, fewer are iconoclastic. Anyone but England is essential.
For some English cricket writers, whose souls it incised, marinated in the chilli of their own words and slow-roasted in a tandoor, it is a source of great irritation. For others around the world – that is, readers from places once colonised by the British, readers to whom Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘Inglan is a bitch’ is not an affront – it is different. Drinking from the well of hypocrisies it excavated is a profound nourishment. It explains so much. It explains how inextricable the big themes – race, nation, commerce, class – are from cricket’s traditions, and so why the game seems to permanently teeter on the brink of some culture clash or other. It explains in part the dysfunction of the cricket in their own lands by their own hands. Even a game so capacious as ours cannot quite carry the burdens placed upon it.
‘By their own hands’ I have written above, but the formulation is off. Individual and country, community and state, team and nation, governors and the people, these are precisely the conflations that Mike Marqusee warns against. Indeed, cricket’s original trauma, he argues, was its abduction early in life by an elite that fashioned it into shorthand for the glories of England and Empire, for honour and fair play. ‘No sport is so besotted with its past as cricket,’ he tells us. Except, to mangle Hartley and Faulkner, the past is not a foreign country; it is not even past. It is a mythology continuously made present.
‘The Englishness is in the lie,’ writes Marqusee in one of the book’s well-quoted passages, ‘in the cult of the honest yeomen and the village green, in denial of cricket’s origin in commerce, politics, patronage and an urban society. The tyranny of mere wealth, on which the English eighteenth-century achievement rested, had to be wrapped in something finer, and at least in appearance, older.’ Over those foundations he places the columns of apartheid and Packer and Tebbit, West Indian bouncers and Pakistani reverse swing. We watch the construction of this great house of hypocrisy with the fascination of those living in it too long.
Marqusee was a ‘deracinated New York Marxist Jew’, with books on Ali, Dylan, Zionism and Labour politics, with interests that included, to name three of scores, reggae, Pakistani pop and India’s anti-caste struggle. No writer brought the world into cricket as he did. It came with a width not of citation but of understanding. One misses it as one misses the trademark innings of a retired batsman.
I write this a few months after one of cricket’s most extraordinary passages of play. Four sixes from the final four balls of a match to win West Indies a world title against England in Kolkata. Marqusee would have noted that the bowler, Ben Stokes, born and raised in New Zealand until the age of twelve, was from a declining proportion of internationals to have come through a state school in England. He might have found something to explore in the England captain, Eoin Morgan, who was born in Dublin and first played for Ireland. The batsman, Carlos Brathwaite, was of Barbados, the most fecund cricket-patch of the twentieth century fallen on drier times. He would certainly have elaborated on the things to which the West Indies captain, Darren Sammy, motioned in his victory speech: the team spirit that rose from a long-running pay battle with their West Indies cricket board, and the English commentator who described his team as ‘short on brains’. He would have much to say about the tournament hosts, India, whose financial muscle rather than English imperial entitlement now dictated the direction of the sport – the incipient stages of which shift he chronicled in his memorable 1996 book War Minus the Shooting.
Anyone but England, first published in 1994, was a response to cricket’s inequities. The difference between Marqusee and almost every other critic was that he did not see inequity as a departure; there were parallels in cricket’s distant past, and here they are in the book in your hands.
One might not always agree with him, but agreement is a cheap kind of engagement. ‘We need not accept the analysis,’ CLR James writes of an art critic in Beyond a Boundary. ‘It is sufficient if it throws some light.’ Anyone but England remains one of cricket’s most illuminating books.
The sour comments of English cricket writers suggest that they understand the concerns of the book rather differently from readers around the world, and in a way reinforce its point. Even they grant it the concession that the book is ‘necessary’, as though it were as simple as that. A book waiting to be written is never written until it is written because it is not so easily written. Anyone but England comes from a vision all its own. Nobody else could have written it.
— Rahul Bhattacharya 2016