2 8 What Do They Know Of Cricket...?
“Are you in love with that Ricardo Powell then…?
“…watching Ricardo Powell cutting and driving…giving
the crowd a reason to party!”
Party? For me the words ‘cricket’ and ‘party’ don’t
belong within one hundred yards of one another. This
is not cricket as I know it. My cricket is the John Major
model of church fetes, village greens, and tiny, flaccid,
triangular sandwiches. It’s not just the fact that it is
the most effective natural sedative known to man.
It’s the stuffy, neurotic, backward-looking MiddleEnglandness, of it all. Sad little jowly white men
sipping tea and reminiscing about the good old
days of law and order and The Empire. Spare me.
“That’s my cricket. Cos that’s what it is Dad, like it or
not. It’s a colonial relic: ‘the gentlemen’s game’! All
that bull about ‘sportsmanship’, ‘dash’, ‘grace under
pressure’. All the things that the English have allowed
themselves, in the face of overwhelming evidence to
the contrary, to believe define their national character
for hundreds of years. This is all stuff they dreamt up
in the nineteenth century, while they were buying and
selling and brutalising black Africans in the West Indies,
and we are still celebrating it today?! Isn’t that kind of
perverse?”
“Some history lesson boy. Impressed, very impressed.
Seems like you know a whole lot better than we ever
did. Of course, what the newly ‘free’ blacks should
have done was down tools and gone on strike, eh?
Or gone on one of your marches? Or signed one of
your petitions…?”
“No, but…”
“So, white men imported cricket, and everything it
meant to them, and we started to play it. To you that
makes us self-hating niggers? Fine, but what else did
we know? It’s hundreds of years on, ‘Black and Proud’
and all that, and we are still coming to terms with
ourselves. You can’t just shed centuries of humiliation
and oppression like it’s an old coat. Black West Indians
had to re-discover who they were.”
“By playing at being the coloniser?”
“No. We played their game, its true. Cricket clubs
started to form throughout the region, each one
drawing a membership based on specific racial
characteristics, separate clubs for whites, blacks
and ‘coloureds’ (that’s you son).”
“Thanks.”
“Son, you don’t understand…”
“But I do! In 1838 when the slaves were emancipated,
cricket was exported to the colonies as a means of
reinforcing English values and re-affirming the social
order. The game you love so much started life in the
West Indies as an agent of social control and oppression,
a way of reinforcing the social and racial hierarchies
the Empire was built on, now that black people were
‘free’. An English game, based on English values; on
the lie of the moral superiority and self-control of ‘the
gentleman’. It was only ever a way of keeping the
darkies at an ideological arm’s length, Dad. And not
only do we adopt it; we are still playing it today? Talk
about dancing to the white man’s tune…”
“But now we had a means to compare ourselves with
the colonisers… and to compete with them. But we
made the game ours. Here, take this book: Beyond a
Boundary, by C.L.R. James. Finest book on cricket and
West Indian culture ever written. Look, just a few
pages in he talks about ‘the cut’. This was ours, one
difficult st roke where the batsman strikes across the
underside of the ball so that it angles off into the
vacant space behind him. “It wasn’t just difficult –
it was deliberately difficult. No practical purpose
at all but to show absolute, defiant, mastery of
the game and a refusal to play it safe.