Cancelling cricket is absurd
It is a simple fact of our blighted land that our institutions, history and traditions, the very essence of what makes us, are dark things. Their longevity is an affront, their conception corrupted, their purpose infamous.
I know this, you know this, because daily we are told it. To risk quoting fascist pamphleteer (trigger warning) William Shakespeare: “Shame and eternal shame, nothing but shame!”
The ruling chatter regime insists upon this. So it must be so. Were we to forget, they send in the suffixes on a regular basis: -ism, -ist and -phobia. Hellhounds three to drag the fearful into the light where, assuming they have not already been torn to pieces, the accused quickly apprehend that a barefoot walk of penitence is the only antidote to damnation. At each step the atoning scourge is wielded on bloodied back.
The reaction among the righteous is Pavlovian. It’s what hellhounds do. They salivate, they bay at the bell, a habit reinforced by long conditioning. And the noise allows the often central issue of institutional incompetence to vault swiftly over the back fence and into the night unobserved. Nothing improves, it simply gets more diverse.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the police. Thems as once were “institutionally racist” but are now largely a somewhat sinister national laughing stock, stepping over your wrestle with a burglar to help the Chicken Lickens of Just Stop Oil cross the road.
Latest to see its own blood seeping through the whites is cricket. A prime candidate. Game of Empire and the MCC, long rooms and stirring public school poetry. “Play up! Play up! And play the game!” The Churchill of sports is central to our story and therefore wrong, very wrong.
In case you missed it while taking a post-lunch snooze with the openers looking comfortable and the ball not doing much, the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) has come up with a 316-page report that, in shocking findings, condemned the nation’s summer game as racist, sexist and elitist. Full house! Sir John Major provides the foreword. Bingo!
Somewhere, a priapic James O’Brien is building himself up to bullying a hapless caller who only wanted to say that he played 30 years man and boy and never saw a thing while keeping for Upper Downington’s 1st XI.
The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), adhering to step one of the crisis mantra “apologise, remediate, explain”, has already said sorry and set about itself with a birch, never pausing for a second to think, “Hang on a minute…”
One can, to a point, understand why. The report has been years in the compilation, sought the views of 4,000 respondents and is, without doubt, comprehensive. Equally, it came after the likes of me and, presumably a good chunk of the ECB, when it said there’s a “gulf” in perceptions of “white middle-class men” and other groups.
Alright, fair dos. Up to a point. It is not, for example, for me to second guess the experiences of England’s Devon Malcolm whose career, he claims, was blighted by incidents of racism, his post-playing attempts to officiate thwarted and whose concerns over the decline of Afro-Caribbean participation in English cricket are based on his own experience with his son at Northampton.
I’m a fan of Big Dev. I was at the Oval when he took 9/57 against South Africa in 1994. That’s 1994. It is, of course, possible that things have changed. One might equally suggest that West Indies cricket itself is some way off the great cricketing power it once was and one of the reasons put forward is high-paying, high-profile American sports catching the eye of potential players. There are also questions over player development and pathways.
Similarly, here in the UK, all sports that fret solipsistically over declining participation ignore the overbearing presence of football. High profile, highly paid and hugely attractive. It sucks away talent in all colours. Brian Clough, Gareth Southgate and those two millionaire social activists Gary Lineker and Phil Neville were all talented cricketers, Neville particularly so.
I merely point out that other reasons might be available than the go-to of racism.
But where Malcolm, me and the black female cricketer Ebony Rainford-Brent might more closely align is in the opportunities presented by class and money. In so many of these social debates this essential point is often buried beneath the weight of focus on the easy claims of colour, sex and the related obsessions of our times.
Cricket costs. The kit is expensive, good coaching either at schools or via the private companies who increasingly manage county access equally so. Netside chats with coaches will soon reveal they know this and lament it but they will, inevitably, focus on the money and the ability. It manifests early. The lad from county primary who doesn’t yet know how to hold a bat will already be alongside the prep school girl who has elegant basic stroke play.
By the time matters reach the fork in the road towards elite opportunity, the statistics in favour of the independently educated present embarrassingly wide odds. The latest Ashes debutant, Josh Tongue, “earmarked for England since he was six“, the product of the King’s School in Worcester, is the latest to prove a point.
But if I might defy the dismissiveness of the ICEC and offer further observations, they are these; cricket is infinitely more than a listing of the deadly sins of modern life and it is more than elite representation. It remains a community adhesive in counties across England, its clubs and village greens are a rare constant in an atomised world. It is largely good-humoured, amateur and inter-generational, the Sunday league home of lads and dads.
My own son’s successful village outfit represented the mélange perfectly. For sure, two or three public schoolboys but also boys from grammar and comprehensive schools, players of Asian descent and, at the point where the cricket was still mixed-sex, girls welcomed and welcomed unblinkingly. The respect and close fellow-feeling wasn’t contrived, it just was.
My daughter’s one flirtation with team sport was in cricket and she loved it.
The confusion with Lord’s as representation of the game is wrong. Even at elite level. The Oval or Headingley are different places. The raucous Hollies at Edgbaston, welcoming Moeen Ali back to test cricket at the ribald expense of Australia’s Nathan Lyon in the first Ashes test, the England team’s surrender of boozy changing room celebrations in deference to Ali’s religion (as Australia have for batsman Usman Khawaja) do not speak to a hidebound sport.
Joe Root it was who stood against homophobic sledging in the West Indies, Ben Stokes who nearly lost everything fighting in defence of two gay men outside a Bristol nightclub.
Yes, the annual Eton v Harrow match may jar, chants about the number of prime ministers each has produced are boorish and entitled. But they are the specific, not the general. The heart of cricket lies elsewhere.
There are, of course, things to be done. Ensuring equality of opportunity for ambition and talent primary among them. But in “Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket” – as the ICEC report is entitled – I can’t help but wonder if it is a reflection distorted. Magnifying ugly features, diminishing the good. Obfuscating the whole.
It isn’t cricket, you know. Catches win matches and they’ve dropped one. A headline moved in the stand.
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