Politics
Cricket World Cup - How to revive the game: go to war with New Zealand
Published 14 June 1999
After watching the India-Pakistan grudge match on Tuesday, it became quite clear to me what steps the England and Wales Cricket Board needs to take to revive this country's flagging enthusiasm for the game. Either England has to go to war with its opponents in this summer's Test series - though the likelihood of there being a sudden stand-off between us and New Zealand must be remote - or we invite the Serbs here for a rubber. We might even win that, though you can bet that Slobo would spend an awful lot of time trying to influence the third umpire.
Or, best of all, we could simply invite India and Pakistan to hang around here until early September and play a five-match series. There would be no trouble filling the grounds, and not just, I suspect, with those who have an atavistic link with the Subcontinent. The bill for police overtime would be vast, but the greatly enhanced profits of the grounds staging the Tests would soon cover that, with a dividend to spare. And above all, the notion would be created that cricket is, or should be, an exciting pastime.
I'm glad India won. This is not just because the Pakistanis served a libel writ on me in 1992 when I suggested they had an history of institutionalised cheating at cricket (a statement I regarded then and still do regard as being as anodyne as suggesting that the Ayatollah is a Muslim), but because India were the underdogs and, well, we British love those, don't we? While the culture of the cricket-lover is pretty much the same in both countries - with players' houses besieged by angry mobs when a side does badly and sporting heroes elevated to the status of film stars when they win - the pressure of this never seems to affect the Indians in the way it affects the Pakistanis.
There is a discipline and fundamental propriety about the way the Indians play the game that makes them refreshing to watch. When you watch Pakistan you can never relax for the thought of all the hidden agendas that are probably being played out before you. Nonetheless, as I write, it looks as though India will fail to qualify for the semi-finals while Pakistan go through. I hope I am wrong, but by the time you read this you will know whether Pakistan have succumbed to Zimbabwe and whether miracles do, after all, happen.
It still looks to me as though South Africa, the side I would always have put my mortgage on, are going to be in the final at Lord's on 20 June, come what may. The machine-like way in which they have pulverised one opponent after another - with the exception of plucky little Zimbabwe - has led me to think further about the politics of the game, prompted also by the India v Pakistan experience. The Indian coach said before that match that politics had no place in cricket, and how right he was. For that very reason it was always absurd, during the apartheid years, that the colour of a cricketer's skin should have been the first consideration in deciding whether or not he could play for South Africa.
Yet we know that the departure from office of the saintly Mandela is accompanied by an increase in the demand from the sporting authorities in South Africa that a new and equally absurd form of discrimination should prevail. Irrespective of whether they are good enough to play at international level, black players should, the commissars argue, be included in the national cricket side. It is clear to anyone who knows the slightest thing about the game that the present South African side is picked entirely on merit; and that to select it according to the political demands of tokenism might be wonderful for those who have to play against South Africa but would be devastating to the magnificent operation into which the country's international side has been forged in under a decade back at the top.
It is certainly a legacy of apartheid that there are so few good black cricketers. Until the last days of racial discrimination there were few serious attempts to foster cricket among blacks. That has all changed: the opportunities are there for black cricketers, but fewer and fewer wish to take them. Soccer (as, it appears, in this country) is increasingly the sport of choice. If black boys and men were still being ruthlessly excluded from cricket clubs and denied coaching, the authorities would have every right to act. They aren't, and all that would be achieved by a new round of intervention in team selection would be the demoralisation of those who have done so much for the sport, and the dilution of its quality.
It is quite possible for black players to get to the top, and it is a tragedy on several counts that by far the best of them so far, the fast bowler Makhaya Ntini, should now be off games because he is serving six years for rape. There isn't a lot you can do about that, however much political power you may want to wield.
As the editor of Wisden has suggested, there may be more cause to examine unofficial apartheid in this country than to look for it elsewhere. Most Indians and Pakistanis cheering on "their" sides at Old Trafford are subjects of the Queen and, therefore, qualified to play for England. It is hard to believe that societies that, on the Subcontinent, produce such a wealth of talent suddenly cease to do so when transplanted here.
I would be quite happy to see 11 Asians turning out for England if they were better than any comparable 11 white Englishmen and if they wanted to win for their adopted country just as much as they wanted the countries of their origin to win at Old Trafford. I suspect Lord Tebbit's cricket test doesn't work once you are playing instead of spectating. I hear that the Yorkshire leagues are full of first-rate players who never seem to get any further. Why? And if some of these new Britons, with their palpable massive enthusiasm for the game, had got further, would England really have departed this competition at the earliest stage?
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