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By Robert Winder |
CricInfo.com, April 3, 2005: THE West Indies tour of England in the summer of 2004 was marked above all by an absence. There was a missing guest at the feast and, until the astonishing finale at the Oval, when the Champions Trophy ended in a raucous blare of trumpet and conch, it hovered over the summer like a rain cloud, or an elegy.
The sad fact, much remarked on by commentators, was that few of Britain's West Indians watched the games from the stands. At a time when Barbados and Antigua have become home matches for scarlet-faced Barmy foot-soldiers, the domestic venues were Caribbean-free. For atmosphere they relied on fancy dress: the grounds were alive with Elvis lookalikes, Heidi replicas, nuns and Vikings. The series felt like an extended rag week - there was none of the clamour that used to carry across the ocean the atmosphere of the tropics.
It could not be called a new phenomenon. After a noisy crescendo in the mid-1980s, the West Indian element in English stadiums has been dissolving for a generation. But now the silence was resounding: the exodus seemed complete. And it felt prompted by something more serious than a mere dip in the team's form. Form, as we are so often told, is temporary, and West Indies may rediscover it any day. But the evaporation of their English support felt deeper, like a permanent loss.
Not long ago, in the heyday of Clive Lloyd's fast-bowling quartets, the England fans could look forward to a home-grown Holding or Marshall of their own. The size and fervour of the migrant population made it seem inevitable. More than a dozen players of Anglo-Caribbean descent have played Test cricket for England since Roland Butcher paved the way 24 years ago, but in the 1990s the flood slowed to a trickle, and now that appears to have dried up.
The English have a soft spot for narratives of decline, but it might be misleading to wonder, in the case of West Indian cricket, how far the mighty have fallen. The real surprise is that the team rose so high, that such a small and poor archipelago should have produced as many superlative sides. In the years after liberation, cricket was the fortunate beneficiary of a brilliant flowering: the invincibles of Sobers, Lloyd and Richards were ruthless, athletic, haughty, joyful, violent and charismatic. It was a rare, perhaps unrepeatable, eruption of energy.
In this light, it is no surprise that the spirit of cricket, its centre of gravity, should have moved on. Cricket has always had a migrant soul: the flame has been carried from country to country, from continent to continent, sometimes by rare individuals (Ranjitsinhji, D'Oliveira, Constantine) and sometimes by larger demographic commotions. No one should expect it to stand still now.
Cricket - English cricket, at any rate - has often liked to portray itself as a reservoir of eternal verities, mostly of a rustic sort: the sound of willow on leather, the smell of mown grass, the splash of applause for an incoming batsman, the lethal rattle of bails and the murmur of the crowd at Lord's. Modern cricket is changing rapidly, however, and supposedly stable qualities such as these - along with the imperial proposal that cricket is a byword for fair play and gentlemanly rectitude - are losing their hold. The game is shorter; crowds are noisier; run-rates are rising; fielding is more agile; and the umpire's decision is no longer final. These amendments may be symptoms of a deeper realignment. Beneath the local fluctuations and the press of modern marketing we can detect an insistent thrum.
This is only the latest in a sequence of such commotions. To recap: the game matured in 18th-century Britain and was escorted across the seas by imperial travellers and troops, who found it well-suited to hot climates and a stirring colonial pageant, fragrant with reminders of home. In Calcutta, Melbourne, Barbados and Cape Town, it became an emblem of British power, a calling, almost a vocation.
Wherever the game took root, it gained fresh accents or tendencies. Like a rare seedling transplanted into richer soils, it flowered in surprising ways, acquiring a subtle set of local characteristics that became, in the end, national clichés. West Indies brought free-flowing, beach-cricket euphoria and supernatural fast bowling. India contributed dextrous batsmen and guileful spinners. Pakistan gave us haughty and temperamental virtuosi, while Australia and South Africa continued to stand for a tough and busy approach - cricket as a white-knuckle virility test.
IT WASN'T always a question of novelty: emerging nations often gave new life to old precepts. New Zealand aspired to an all-for-one team ethic that would have brought tears to the eyes of a Victorian Brigadier. The intimidating bowling of Lloyd's West Indians was a new and improved version of Bodyline. And the shimmering strokeplay of the Sri Lankans who won the 1996 World Cup had distinct Caribbean echoes - Calypso cricket bathed in coconut milk. It has been a constant process of refreshment and renewal, and it is still going on today.
So what next? Unusually, it isn't hard to say. Cricket feels overwhelmingly an Indian sport - played by Indian players, cherished by Indian fans, spread by the Indian diaspora, administered by Indian magnates, and financed by Indian eyeballs, by the scale of the television audience in the subcontinent itself.
And the subcontinent is a historic engine of migration. The resulting diaspora is carrying the flame all over the world - even into cricket's proudest heartlands. There are now two dozen British Asian players in county cricket, compared to the remaining handful of Caribbean descent.
Quite why Britain's Indian and Pakistani children should have remained faithful to cricket, at a time when their West Indian compatriots have lapsed, is one of those questions to which there can be no simple answer. It could be to do with the fabled discipline of family life in these communities, or to the more energetic and alluring nationalisms at play in Delhi and Karachi. It may be simply that these are, to a greater extent than the West Indies, sporting monocultures where cricket has few rivals. Or it might be that the wider circumstances of life in Britain have proved helpful.
It is often said, by those unsympathetic to large-scale immigration, that immigrants should strive to "fit in". But the opposite may also be true - those who assimilate the least can end up fitting in as smoothly as anyone. Indian and Pakistani families in Britain have imported their own culture (religion, language, food and manners) with more enthusiasm and resolve than Caribbean peoples, whose heritage has in any case been fractured by slavery. The social and commercial trajectory of Indian and Pakistani life in Britain has also been more conducive to self-sufficiency: the corner shops and restaurants have grown into retail dynasties. All of which translates into an Indian, or subcontinental, ability to sustain themselves as independent enclaves, with their own priorities and tastes - including cricket.
Whatever the causes, the symptoms are inescapable. It only takes a brief look at Wisden's smallest print - at the entries for universities, schools and youth cricket - to see the vitality of Asian-inspired cricket. And a look at the Round the World section will reveal that this is a phenomenon extending to the farthest corners of the cricketing map. It even extends to the West Indies itself: more than half the Under-19 team that reached their World Cup final in 2004 were of Asian descent.
It goes without saying that the keepers of cricket's flame have the power to change it. Under English sovereignty the watchword was restraint. The West Indian influence rendered it a more vivacious and frightening affair: an ecstatic bullring. Under Indian guidance it may become more raucous still, and shorter. Whatever the consequences, cricket's torchbearers are now Asian. The game's migratory reflexes have carried us a long way.
Robert Winder is the author of Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (Little, Brown).