Tharoor: A look at cricket around the world (Oct 1995)

Exclusive to the Canadian Cricketer

STUMPED IN SINGAPORE, SCORELESS IN SWITZERLAND

Award-winning novelist Shashi Tharoor takes a light-hearted look at two unlikely cricketing outposts.

Cricket in Canada? When I first heard of the phenomenon I had visions of fur-clad Inuit trying to turn chinamen upon the Arctic wastes, and scorecards bearing the regular notation "snow stopped play". Enlightenment soon followed, however: in the course of a peripatetic life, I learned not only that Canadians played cricket, but I ended up playing the game myself in two less likely countries, Singapore and Switzerland.

If ever Singapore gets around to nominating a national sport, you can be pretty sure it won`t be cricket. Most Singaporeans appear to believe that the term applies either to a noisy insect or a trademark cigarette-lighter. So the fact that, every Sunday, I would dress up like a poor relation of the Great Gatsby and venture hopefully into the drizzle clutching my bat invariably mystified my Singaporean friends. Bats, of course, they associated more with vampires than umpires and the notion that anyone would spend the best part of his Sunday on an uneven field in undignified pursuit of five-and-a-half ounces of cork provoked widespread disbelief. "You mean they still play cricket here?" exclaimed one Singaporean. "I thought that ended with the Japanese occupation!"

In fact, there were twenty teams in the two Sunday leagues run by the Singapore Cricket Association when I was there in the early 1980s, and innumerable others playing "friendly" matches on Saturdays. They ranged from the sometimes plebeian Patricians to the tavernless Tanglin Taverners, from the Non-Benders who chased every ball to Schoolboys who didn`t, and from the two teams of the lite Singapore Cricket Club to the more esoteric acronyms of SAFSA and SPASA (known to the initiated as the Armed Forces and the Polytechnic, respectively).

"I do not play cricket", Oscar Wilde once wrote, "because it requires me to assume such indecent postures". Most Singaporeans, a notoriously serious and straitlaced breed whose recreations are golf and economic growth, appear to share his disdain. The Archbishop of Canterbury who described cricket as "organised loafing" and the Nobel Prize-winning author who termed cricketers "flannelled fools" would have felt right at home in Singapore. Many a local utilitarian with the national devotion to statistics pointed out to me that cricket simply wasn`t cost-efficient enough. The amount of space and time it took to give twenty-two players a game could, I was reliably informed, be more productively allocated to one hundred squash players, two hundred swimmers or three hundred joggers. When I responded that eighty-eight cricketers could have more fun and exercise in the space taken up by the Prime Minister`s daily game of golf, the silence that greeted me could have made central air-conditioning obsolete.

Of course, neither Singaporeans nor Swiss, law-abiding citizens to a fault, can be expected to approve of any sport that is based on the principle of hit-and-run. So, expatriates tend to dominate the game in both countries. But cricket has a surprising long pedigree in Switzerland. The Geneva Cricket Club`s wine label (yes, they are a rather refined lot, these Swiss cricketers) bears an illustration of a cricket match being played on the city`s Plainpalais field in 1817. Nearly two centuries later, the game continues to flourish in Geneva, having survived interrup- tions during the two World Wars. The present Geneva Cricket Club (G.C.C.), revived in 1955, plays in a well-equipped stadium which offers underground parking to sportsmen and the luxury of bowling (and fielding) on astroturf. The environs of this international city also house the cricketers of CERN, the Centre Europen de la Rcherche Nuclaire, where a hefty six might dent the casing of the world`s biggest proton synchrotron accelerator. An amiable lot (I played for them for four years), the CERN cricketers tend to be at their best during the expansive tea breaks for which they (and their gifted, if long-suffering, spouses) are deservingly famous. There is also an assortment of teams from the other major cities Q Basel, Bern, Winterthur, Zug and, of course, Zurich, which supports not one but two Sri Lankan elevens, neither of which is on speaking terms with the other The Swiss teams are organised in an annual competition for the 40-over Brennan Cup; named for the former Australian Ambassador who donated it, and they even boast an annual journal, named Q what else Q Swissden.

Though neither the climate nor the quality of the wicket comes close to the ideal that every good Swiss would wish to aspire to, cricket in Switzerland Q a country of diplomatic conferences - has found its own place in the scheme of international exchange. Here, British-educated Swiss returning from South Africa (and a few South African migrs) field alongside Indians both east and West; Pakistani and Sri Lankan refugees shatter the stumps of Indian diplomats and United Nations officials; irrelevant Pommies hit sixes off irreverent antipodeans. And they all retire to their convivial beer at the end of the game. Even if, in most cases, they don`t have a pavilion to drink them in.

____________________________________________________________________________ Shashi Tharoor, an Indian novelist (`The Great Indian Novel, Show Business) and commentator, has worked for the United Nations in both Singapore and Switzerland. He currently lives in New York where he hasn`t seen enough cricket to write about.

COPYRIGHT THE CANADIAN CRICKETER REPRODUCTION OF THIS ARTICLE IN PART OR WHOLE IN ANY FORM IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN WITHOUT PRIOR PERMISSION OF THE EDITOR.