The Empire Bowls Back

On Tuesday, Canada played its first match in one of the world's major sporting competitions, the cricket World Cup in Southern Africa. Canada is one of fourteen countries playing in a five-week tournament that will be watched by hundreds of millions of people stretched all around the globe. Yet probably more Kenyans than Canadians will know how Canada's cricketers fared yesterday. That's because the cricket World Cup has throngs of avid followers in nearly every participating country except Canada.

In popular Canadian perception, cricket is still seen as the preserve of English gentlemen in white flannels, playing leisurely games that stretch on for days, enlivened principally by breaks for tea and cucumber sandwiches. Most of the mainstream Canadian media, in common with most Canadians, behave as if cricket is no more than a tired relic of the British empire, which not even the British take terribly seriously any more - rather like the monarchy.

Relic of empire cricket may well be. It spread by means of globe-spanning human and cultural networks which for much of the 19th and 20th centuries formally linked one third of the world's population across one third of its surface. A century ago, cricket was played principally by the British (and above all the English - a key distinction) who governed, soldiered or settled the overseas colonies.

Cricket even flourished for a time in Canada. In the first ever international cricket match, Canada played the United States in New York in 1844. But apart from some spasmodic revivals in the 20th century, Canadian cricket was subsequently overwhelmed by baseball - backed as it was by the American cultural and media juggernaut.

By contrast, cricket established itself as a predominant spectator sport in the other settler dominions of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, still amongst the world's top cricketing nations. Ironically, it is England whose cricketing stature has slipped to decidedly second rank.

The real strength of world cricket lies not in the old ,,white °/°° empire but in the game's popularity amongst African and South Asian populations, both in their home countries and in their scattered diasporas. The West Indies have, since the 1950s, produced some of the world's most brilliant players and successful teams. From what was once "British India" have come players and teams as talented as any, with India and Pakistan long ranked amongst the world's best. Even Sri Lanka occasionally surprises its way to the top, as it did in 1996 when it won the World Cup. Bangladesh and Kenya - Canada's first two opponents at this year's World Cup - are only beginning to show their potential. And although the South African national squad is still dominated by men of British and Dutch descent, there is widespread support for cricket amongst the country's African, South Asian, and mixed-race populations.

Canada's team reflects cricket's post-colonial realities. Our team's coach is Gus Logie, who played for some of the great West Indies teams from 1978 to 1993. He recently replaced Jeff Thomas, the Australian who coached Canada into the World Cup. Of the fifteen players who make up the team, five were born in Canada, most to parents who immigrated from cricket playing countries. Three were born in South Asia, and seven in the West Indies (which for cricketing purposes includes Guyana). Captain Joseph Harris, though born in India, developed many of his skills in Barbados. Canadian-born Nicholas de Groot played at top level in Guyana. One the best players, John Davison, grew up in Australia. Ian Billcliff learned to play cricket in New Zealand. Most of the team, though, have long lived in Canada, and play much of their cricket in the Toronto area.

In that most multicultural of cities, with more than 40% of its residents foreign-born, cricket is far from being a marginal sport. Many of the Canadian Cricket Association's 12,000 members play in Ontario, along with hundreds more who play outside the Association. In 2001 Toronto hosted the World Cup qualifying tournament in which loyal supporters willed Canada's team to a thrilling third-place finish, beating Scotland to earn the final spot in this 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 in cricket's sometimes arcane rules and rituals. Yet cricket can hardly be considered more complicated than baseball or gridiron football, and every Canadian newspaper and broadcaster could surely muster an enthusiastic and knowledgeable cricket correspondent. Another explanation is the continental parochialism which marginalizes any sport which does not find its leading professional practitioners resident in North America. Cricket isn't covered by the Canadian media because the American media aren't interested. Also at work, though, is a Canadian colonial complex which scoffs at cricket as an imperial relic, rather than embracing it as the essence of post-colonial multiculturalism. At its worst, this borders on an unconsciously racist assumption that the cultural preoccupations of more recent immigrants are of no real concern to mainstream Canada. After all, isn't Canadian multiculturalism supposed to mean that people of all races can partake of the glories of hockey and Tim Horton's?

Not that we should imagine that Canada is alone in its colonial cricketing complex. But where Canadians choose to ignore cricket, other former British colonies choose to excel at it. One thing that unites nearly all cricketing nations is the particular pleasure derived from beating their erstwhile colonial masters at their own game. What Wayne Gretzky said about Canada and international 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. On February 13, England is scheduled to play its World Cup opener against Zimbabwe in the latter's capital city of Harare. But a storm has erupted over whether England should play there when President Robert Mugabe is busy starving and terrorizing millions of his own people. Mugabe has made Britain and "British settlers" (many of whom have been in Africa longer than the average Canadian's ancestors have been in Canada) the scapegoat for his country's problems. Despite strong calls from the British public and government for the match to be moved to neighbouring South Africa, the International Cricket Council and the World Cup organizing committee have dug in their heels, and insisted that the match should proceed. Zimbabwe has raised the stakes by refusing to play in any match rescheduled outside the country. Thabo Mbeki and his government in South Africa have backed Zimbabwe'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 if it had been scheduled to play in Zimbabwe?

If Canadians were able to watch the cricket World Cup without mortgaging their homes to a satellite or cable monopoly, they would see an engaging and entertaining sporting festival. There will be no drawn-out five-day Test matches here. The games are all one-day affairs played between teams in uniforms so colourful as to make baseball look boring and conservative. The tournament begins with the teams divided into two groups of seven. The top matches will be played in scenic grounds before multi-racial audiences numbering in the tens of thousands. Canada's cricketers will enjoy such grounds in Durban, Cape Town and Paarl, but will be lucky to see many spectators. And they have about as much chance of beating the big fish in Group B - South Africa and the West Indies - as Scotland would have of beating Canada in Olympic hockey. Even the slightly lesser fish in the group, Sri Lanka and New Zealand, will be impossibly beyond reach. But against the two other "minnows", Bangladesh and Kenya, Canada stands a real chance, especially in a one-day format famous for producing upsets.

The best thing that could happen to Canada's cricketers, though, would be for Canadians simply to raise their sporting gaze beyond North America and notice that the World Cup is happening at all.

Peter Henshaw is a research professor in history at the University of Western Ontario, and the author of The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

This article was published in Canada by the London Free Press on February 12, 2002.