da cassino： On Tuesday, Canada played its first match in one of the world’s major sportingcompetitions, the cricket World Cup in Southern Africa
da bet nacional： Peter Henshaw14-Feb-2003On Tuesday, Canada played its first match in one of the world’s major sportingcompetitions, the cricket World Cup in Southern Africa. Canada is one offourteen countries playing in a five-week tournament that will be watched byhundreds of millions of people stretched all around the globe. Yet probablymore Kenyans than Canadians will know how Canada’s cricketers faredyesterday. That’s because the cricket World Cup has throngs of avid followersin nearly every participating country except Canada.In popular Canadian perception, cricket is still seen as the preserve ofEnglish gentlemen in white flannels, playing leisurely games that stretch onfor days, enlivened principally by breaks for tea and cucumber sandwiches.Most of the mainstream Canadian media, in common with most Canadians, behaveas if cricket is no more than a tired relic of the British empire, which noteven the British take terribly seriously any more – rather like the monarchy.Relic of empire cricket may well be. It spread by means of globe-spanninghuman and cultural networks which for much of the 19th and 20th centuriesformally linked one third of the world’s population across one third of itssurface. A century ago, cricket was played principally by the British (andabove all the English – a key distinction) who governed, soldiered or settledthe overseas colonies.Cricket even flourished for a time in Canada. In the first ever internationalcricket match, Canada played the United States in New York in 1844. But apartfrom some spasmodic revivals in the 20th century, Canadian cricket wassubsequently overwhelmed by baseball – backed as it was by the Americancultural and media juggernaut.By contrast, cricket established itself as a predominant spectator sport inthe other settler dominions of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa,still amongst the world’s top cricketing nations. Ironically, it is Englandwhose cricketing stature has slipped to decidedly second rank.The real strength of world cricket lies not in the old ,,white °/°° empire but inthe game’s popularity amongst African and South Asian populations, both intheir home countries and in their scattered diasporas. The West Indies have,since the 1950s, produced some of the world’s most brilliant players andsuccessful teams. From what was once “British India” have come players andteams as talented as any, with India and Pakistan long ranked amongst theworld’s best. Even Sri Lanka occasionally surprises its way to the top, as itdid in 1996 when it won the World Cup. Bangladesh and Kenya – Canada’s firsttwo opponents at this year’s World Cup – are only beginning to show theirpotential. And although the South African national squad is still dominatedby men of British and Dutch descent, there is widespread support for cricketamongst the country’s African, South Asian, and mixed-race populations.Canada’s team reflects cricket’s post-colonial realities. Our team’s coach isGus Logie, who played for some of the great West Indies teams from 1978 to1993. He recently replaced Jeff Thomas, the Australian who coached Canadainto the World Cup. Of the fifteen players who make up the team, five wereborn in Canada, most to parents who immigrated from cricket playing countries.Three were born in South Asia, and seven in the West Indies (which forcricketing purposes includes Guyana). Captain Joseph Harris, though born inIndia, developed many of his skills in Barbados. Canadian-born Nicholas deGroot played at top level in Guyana. One the best players, John Davison, grewup in Australia. Ian Billcliff learned to play cricket in New Zealand. Mostof the team, though, have long lived in Canada, and play much of their cricketin the Toronto area.In that most multicultural of cities, with more than 40% of its residentsforeign-born, cricket is far from being a marginal sport. Many of theCanadian Cricket Association’s 12,000 members play in Ontario, along withhundreds more who play outside the Association. In 2001 Toronto hosted theWorld Cup qualifying tournament in which loyal supporters willed Canada’s teamto a thrilling third-place finish, beating Scotland to earn the final spot inthis year’s World Cup event.In light of this, the almost total neglect of cricket in Canada’s Torontobased media is all the more astonishing. Part of the blame perhaps lies incricket’s sometimes arcane rules and rituals. Yet cricket can hardly beconsidered more complicated than baseball or gridiron football, and everyCanadian newspaper and broadcaster could surely muster an enthusiastic andknowledgeable cricket correspondent. Another explanation is the continentalparochialism which marginalizes any sport which does not find its leadingprofessional practitioners resident in North America. Cricket isn’t coveredby the Canadian media because the American media aren’t interested. Also atwork, though, is a Canadian colonial complex which scoffs at cricket as animperial relic, rather than embracing it as the essence of post-colonialmulticulturalism. At its worst, this borders on an unconsciously racistassumption that the cultural preoccupations of more recent immigrants are ofno real concern to mainstream Canada. After all, isn’t Canadianmulticulturalism supposed to mean that people of all races can partake of theglories of hockey and Tim Horton’s?Not that we should imagine that Canada is alone in its colonial cricketingcomplex. But where Canadians choose to ignore cricket, other former Britishcolonies choose to excel at it. One thing that unites nearly all cricketingnations is the particular pleasure derived from beating their erstwhilecolonial masters at their own game. What Wayne Gretzky said about Canada andinternational hockey is doubly true with respect to England and cricket.Everyone loves to beat England.The working out of this colonial complex is not always amusing or benign. OnFebruary 13, England is scheduled to play its World Cup opener againstZimbabwe in the latter’s capital city of Harare. But a storm has erupted overwhether England should play there when President Robert Mugabe is busystarving and terrorizing millions of his own people. Mugabe has made Britainand “British settlers” (many of whom have been in Africa longer than theaverage Canadian’s ancestors have been in Canada) the scapegoat for hiscountry’s problems. Despite strong calls from the British public andgovernment for the match to be moved to neighbouring South Africa, theInternational Cricket Council and the World Cup organizing committee have dugin their heels, and insisted that the match should proceed. Zimbabwe hasraised the stakes by refusing to play in any match rescheduled outside thecountry. Thabo Mbeki and his government in South Africa have backedZimbabwe’s stand on this issue. England’s team, under captain Nasser Hussain,now seem certain to refuse to play. What, I wonder, would Canada have done ifit had been scheduled to play in Zimbabwe?If Canadians were able to watch the cricket World Cup without mortgagingtheir homes to a satellite or cable monopoly, they would see an engaging andentertaining sporting festival. There will be no drawn-out five-day Testmatches here. The games are all one-day affairs played between teams inuniforms so colourful as to make baseball look boring and conservative. Thetournament begins with the teams divided into two groups of seven. The topmatches will be played in scenic grounds before multi-racial audiencesnumbering in the tens of thousands. Canada’s cricketers will enjoy suchgrounds in Durban, Cape Town and Paarl, but will be lucky to see manyspectators. And they have about as much chance of beating the big fish inGroup B – South Africa and the West Indies – as Scotland would have of beatingCanada in Olympic hockey. Even the slightly lesser fish in the group, SriLanka and New Zealand, will be impossibly beyond reach. But against the twoother “minnows”, Bangladesh and Kenya, Canada stands a real chance, especiallyin a one-day format famous for producing upsets.The best thing that could happen to Canada’s cricketers, though, would be forCanadians simply to raise their sporting gaze beyond North America and noticethat the World Cup is happening at all.Peter Henshaw is a research professor in history at the University of WesternOntario, and the author of The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and SouthAfrica since the Boer War (Cambridge University Press, 2003)This article was published in Canada by the London Free Press on February 12,2002.
