Politics
Cricket World Cup - What do you expect? John Major's twin is in charge
Published 07 June 1999
In recent days I have had a fantasy about the World Cup which, thanks to England's defeat by India and Zimbabwe's remarkable and unexpected crushing of South Africa, may now come true. It is that, at just the moment when their two countries finally get down to nuclear war over Kashmir, the cricketers of India and Pakistan calmly stroll out onto a piece of English turf to take on each other in the equally serious matter of limited-overs cricket.
That will happen - or at least the cricket part of it - on 8 June at Old Trafford. I just wonder what happens to the competition if, come that day, the governments of the two countries order their players not to take the field against each other? The organisers say that all will continue as planned but, given the force of the World Cup so far, I wouldn't put money on it. Perhaps, if there were a boycott, England would be invited to make up the numbers. Cricket is supposed to break down barriers and spread sweetness and light between the countries that play it. They are not, despite India and Pakistan's both having form in this department, supposed to go to war with each other.
With an India supporter's chanting, "stand up if you hate Pakistan" last Saturday, the prospect of pitched battle in the stands or outside Old Trafford will give Mr Plod nightmares. It is also, I suppose, just possible that if the match takes place, things could turn ugly on the field. From time to time the foreign news pages include tales from the Subcontinent of players beating opponents or umpires to death with cricket bats because fortune has gone against them. They take these things bloody seriously out there.
Talking of taking things seriously, we come to the pitiful spectacle of England. Much more of this cricketing degeneracy and the game, modernised though it is, would never stand a chance of challenging soccer as new Labour's team sport of choice.
Yet again the English game has been seen to represent incompetence and failure. That is not a metaphor appropriate for the Blair project. Sadly the Disneyfication of cricket, which the boneheads who run our game said was essential for building support, has instead reduced it by robbing cricket of much of the warm and familiar identity it once had.
I heard the odd hint that South Africa, assured of qualifying for the next round, might go easy on Zimbabwe just to ensure that England were not around to trouble them later in the competition. For two reasons, that must be nonsense. First, the South Africans have such a culture of victory that only by accident could they ever lose. And second, after the mess they made of England a fortnight ago, the suggestion that the South Africans had anything to fear from our boys is absurd. They would rightly have lost more sleep over having to take on the England women.
That said, the upset to the form book that Zimbabwe caused would have been enough, had the South African side been a racehorse, to have it pulled in for drug testing; if, that is, you believe - as did some, it seems, in the England camp - that Zimbabwe could not otherwise have felled the mightiest side in the cup. But they did: and so England will have to look to other excuses.
They had them aplenty, of course, the minute they were sent packing at Edgbaston by the wonderfully entertaining and charismatic Indians. There were dodgy decisions (and Graham Thorpe's lbw was certainly that), and there was Nasser Hussain's unlucky exit in the gloom of Saturday afternoon. But then Hussain's exits always seem to be unlucky, and it is time England allowed for this obligatory fluke of nature by including some players who are not cursed by the devil and who, into the bargain, have the interesting subsidiary talent of being able to play cricket.
Hussain can play; so can Thorpe. For the rest of the batting side, the selectors must now mull over how many can be of use in the forthcoming Test series - and how many are even worth persisting with in this bastardised form of the once-great game. The likes of Adam Hollioake and Andy Flintoff, both of whom have been absurdly overhyped, manifestly need a very long spell in county cricket. In Hollioake's case he should travel there on a one-way ticket.
The England debacle testifies to two overriding problems. The first is that county cricket, as it currently is and as it is about to be (with its two divisions), is no good at all at producing good international players. And the second is that cricket as a form of entertainment has become utterly alien to the culture of the first-class game. The hideous four-day match is about attrition; the one-day game increasingly about cynicism. The dullards who play the first-class game relentlessly convey the impression of hating what they do. No wonder the rest of us find it such a turn-off.
Compare the exuberance and grace of Tendulkar, Ganguly or Dravid with almost anyone you like - or, rather, don't like - in the present England line-up and you will see what I mean. England lose not just because they lack talent, but because too few of them see any point to what they are doing. Cricket, even in its Mickey Mouse form, remains a philosopher's sport. When you see those great Indians, you know they have applied their wit to thinking about the game. What our players are thinking about God only knows: but it seems to be neither the methods of success nor the expectation of victory.
And I could not help but note, when I heard him drone through the list of excuses, that Alec Stewart begins to sound more and more like his fellow Surrey man John Major. I hope that is not the example he is following. Cricket has not yet had its equivalent of the Tories' drubbing on 1 May 1997. To many of us, however, what happened at Edgbaston against India had more than a whiff of Black Wednesday.
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