Cricket, and it's inherent racism

2020’s seen both good and bad, and we’re seeing it happen at the same time with this horrible pandemic coinciding with possibly the strongest equal rights movement in half a century, at least in my knowledge. I’ve been keeping track of what’s going on, while trying to find ways in which I could relate to it as well, mainly through my own experiences, both in the past as well as the present.

Cricket was the latest sport to make an ‘empty stadium comeback’ last week, which while making for an odd viewing experience, has still been welcomed by fans around the world, including myself. As I’ve written in a few previous blog posts, it’s the sport that I’ve watched the most and for the longest amount of time- 25 years which to a lot of people is just what one match feels like. It’s a unique sport for several reasons, but also because it is still almost exclusively played by countries that are part of the British Commonwealth, and hasn’t been able to achieve the sort of global expansion that other sports that originated in Britain have. This has in turn led to a very clear demarcation between the 9-10 teams that play the sport at the highest level, a demarcation that is still rooted in colonialism and its hangover, even though the days of the British Empire are long gone.

One of the reasons why it never caught on in the USA, despite having been played there in its infancy, is because of its reputation as a game for the ‘posh upper-class’. As Stephen Fry put it, it’s possibly the only game that still has ‘laws’ and not ‘rules’. It also has a tea break, which is a misleading term given how it’s played today, but the fact that it’s still called that still alienates it in the minds of anyone who is introduced to it. Anyway, coming back to the Americans, they saw it as almost an imposition of the British who they had so valiantly kicked out of their country, and so wanted nothing to do with it. There’s still this underlying notion that prevails even today, that cricket is an English game, Lords is the ‘Mecca of Cricket’, and it must be played with a ‘gentleman’s spirit’, all pretty patronizing and off-putting. The British took it around the world in the days of their colonial pomp, and make that known even today. No batsman has ever 'made it' in the eyes of the British cricket fan and media until they’ve scored runs in England, preferably at Lords. I mean, it’s all very well to score runs in India, but can these natives do it where it really matters, in the cold, dreary, morose English summer? This is not just an English problem though. It’s a sentiment expressed by the Australians as well, and to a lesser extent by the New Zealanders and South Africans. Notice something similar among those 4 countries? Yes, they are ‘white’ countries. South Africa is not, but their cricket team, officials and the media are still predominantly white in a country that has spent a quarter of a century out of Apartheid.

The epicenter of cricket has shifted to South Asia, a fact that's difficult to digest for its colonial masters

It’s also a sport that has completely been taken over by South Asian audiences in the past 20-30 years, with a large chunk of that coming from India. Quite simply, in terms of numbers as well as economic terms, India is the lifeline of cricket. Cricket is easily the No.1 sport in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh too, but money talks and India has a lot of it in the cricketing world. The IPL has completely changed the way cricket is played and consumed, and that’s something that stings the white masters of the game. How could THEY become the lifeblood of OUR game, is a sentiment that while not explicitly expressed, certainly comes across in almost every article written about Indian cricket. And so Indian cricket and specifically the BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) is to blame for everything that’s wrong with cricket. Corruption? BCCI. Ruining Test Cricket? BCCI. Bringing money into the game? BCCI. It’s lapped up by certain sections of the Indian media too, which is disheartening to see. We still suffer from a colonial hangover, of wanting the BBC or the Sky Sports commentary team to praise Indian cricket because Harsha Bhogle is not enough. The BCCI is not the most ethically run organization in the world, and they do have a few blots on their record, but no one in the ‘white countries’ recognizes the good they have done for the game either, basically helping to sustain it while they struggle to deal with dwindling audiences in their own countries.

South Asian teams are always written about differently in the global cricket media. The Pakistani team has been called ‘mercurial’ for years because it would hurt to say that they’re an exceptionally talented team that sometimes has bad days like every team does. An Indian team winning at home has always won by doctoring the pitches, on those Indian ‘dustbowls’ that didn’t give the poor opposing batsmen a chance. Sadly, the age-old tactic of ‘divide and rule’ has reared its ugly head in cricket too. There is an Australian ‘journalist’ whose entire online presence is based on pitting Indian fans against Pakistani fans, which is of course brushed off as harmless humour. A lot of people have seen through that, but, unfortunately, not everyone has. Indians and Pakistanis don’t need more reasons to hate one another, and it is disappointing to see the lack of unity at least in terms of cricket fandom, that Pakistani fans don’t realize that if it were them who was the economic powerhouse of the game, there would be the same outrage by the white media, which Indian fans would then rejoice in. It’s a never-ending cycle, and we do have to take some of the blame for it.

It’s still a sport I enjoy, and I do try to put aside these thoughts and just enjoy it for what it is. In my own life, I’m trying to ignore what people say or think about me, so it would be quite hypocritical for it to affect my cricket watching experience, something which I enjoy doing. But it’s also something I wanted to get off my chest, and this seemed like an opportune moment to write about it, and so you just spent 5 minutes of reading about it.

Thank you for reading!