Lonely at the World Cup

a good idea to summon the “minnows” to battle with the masters, won’t brutal 200-run defeats dent their confidence and take the fight out of them as they try to gain for themselves full-fledged Test status?

Both questions are often asked by the same person, sometimes in one long breath, this yearning and disdain for debutants being two sides of the same coin. At the heart of the questioning is concern about cricket’s inability to expand to newer territories. How is it that cricket’s World Cup is inevitably a celebration of the same men we have been watching so keenly the rest of the year? I mean, is anybody even considering Bermuda’s chances? And can we possibly work up some excitement about fast bowling in the shadow of windmills in the Netherlands, who are actually routine entrants now?

Once again, football provides the telling contrast. In a lovely anticipation of World Cup 2006, The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, 32 writers each took one country, using its team’s mere presence in Germany to leap into aspects of its sporting culture and idiosyncrasies. Assigned to Brazil, novelist John Lanchester naturally felt entitled to the biggest question: “Why do we fall in love with football?” He immediately ventured an answer: “Most of the writing about being a football fan is about group experiences or collective experiences, the process of being one of a crowd willing your team on… in the overall run of writing about a football, most of it is about the epiphenomenon of being a fan rather than the phenomenon of the game itself. It’s strange but true. Golf writing is about playing golf; cricket writing is about cricket and baseball writing about baseball; but most football writing is about being a fan.”

Therein lies cricket’s problem. It is not that it doesn’t find competition in newer territories, but that it struggles to find for itself interested fans there in addition to expatriates from cricket’s traditional rivals. The reason, cricket historians have consistently argued, has to do with the game’s imperial past. It was taken to the colonies by the British, giving the settlers a way of connecting with the home country. In turn the subjects taking to the game found it gave them an arena in which to play the masters on the basis of established, egalitarian rules. (Recall in Lagaan’s match-up between the flannelled sahibs and barefooted Indians, the flawless neutrality of the umpires. Though you do have to wonder at the English’s ability to spread the game far and wide when Scotland still struggles to qualify for the round of 16.)

And devoid of that context, that background of political inequality being challenged on the field, Australian writer Gideon Haigh argued, cricket will fail to imbue new aspirants with the patience for its leisurely rhythms.

You can take the game to a place like Sharjah as it was so long with some of the most exciting one-day internationals of the 1980s and 1990s played in the desert city, but all you get in the stands are folks finding temporary remedy for homesickness for the subcontinent.

But as the World Cup comes to the Caribbean, it’s time to also show off cricket’s unique territorial achievement. Other countries in other sports have teams; in the West Indies a cricket team has its own “country”. There was once a West Indies Federation for just a while — between 1958 and 1962 — of ten territories in the English-speaking Caribbean. The Windies cricket team preceded and persisted beyond this brief unity, which many on the islands and the imperial powers in London thought would gather economic and political viability.

Cricket was before, during and after a way of asserting nationhood — or a way of humanising a subject people as Tim Hector, the late Antiguan writer and political activist, so eloquently argued. In 1950, Clyde Walcott claimed immense self-belief for West Indian immigrants in Britain from the win at Lord’s. C.L.R. James invoked Frank Worrell’s team of 1960 to announce the West Indians’ public entry into “the comity of nations”. And much later Viv Richards would say, “Cricket has always been politics and especially for us in the Caribbean.”

But the federation did not last long, with most prominent resistance coming from the two biggest entities in the unit, Trinidad and Jamaica, the very two countries in the English-speaking Caribbean which have of late fielded squads in the finals of the football world cup. But ask fans at the cricket ground at the Queen’s Park Oval in Port of Spain or at Sabina Park in Kingston whether a joint football team is possible, and they’ll stare in horror. Ask them if separate cricket teams are advised, especially since Barbadians routinely complain of discrimination, and they’ll be equally horrified. Exceptionalism is cricket’s preserve alone.

Any wonder it’s so lonely at the World Cup?