Sign In
0 Items (
Search
Comments (11)
The un-bylined author of this Essential Reading item wasn’t the only one to draw a very large breath upon the news that the US national cricket team (above) recently beat Pakistan in the T20 World Cup. Such a result by a cricketing minnow (the US made the tournament only because it was a co-host of the event) against a powerful, although notoriously fickle, cricketing nation (Pakistan finished second in the previous cup), was unthinkable, even in the ersatz, lottery-level, shortened form of the game, and must as ER concluded, be evidence that the End Times are nigh.
Actually, it signifies nothing quite so momentous, just more of the End of Western Civilisation Days as the West goes to hell in a woke handbasket courtesy of self-inflicted mass immigration.
Quintessentially English, and bequeathed to and embraced by its colonial prodigies (Anglo and non-Anglo alike), cricket has thrived throughout most of the Anglosphere with the notable exception of the US, where gridiron, baseball, basketball and ice hockey thumb an American Revolutionary nose at the old empire it fought an actual war to be rid of.
It took until the 1930s and 1940s for the first inroads to be made into the US by cricket with the founding of the Hollywood Cricket Club (below) by expatriate English actors when the likes of Boris Karloff (highly prone to the LBW dismissal), David Niven and (the Tasmanian-cum-honorary Brit) Errol Flynn (usually drunk or late to a game) donned the whites, joined by such American stars as British-born Cary Grant and a young Elizabeth Taylor served tea and Olivia de Havilland lunched on cucumber sandwiches.
That’s all changed now and cricket in the US is more like Bollywood than the Golden Age of Hollywood thanks to the massive inflow of Indian immigrants. As a result of these foreigners simply being on American soil, what is called the ‘American’ cricket team is largely the American franchise of Indian cricket – at least six players on the US team are of Indian descent, including several who are in the U.S. on temporary work (H1-B) visas that allow companies to hire (cheap) overseas labour.
These six ringers (out of eleven in a cricket team) include such apple-pie-Americans as bowler Saurabh Netravalkar (who, like many foreign students, came to find work and stayed on), batsman Monank Patel and bowler Nosthush Kenjige, who all played crucial roles in getting ‘America’ over the line against Pakistan.
Note, also, that the Indian, and other sub-continental Asian, diaspora is propping up some of the other cricketing minnows in the World Cup – “the majority of cricket players in Oman”, for example, are “expatriates from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka whilst … fewer than 100 of the 780 players in the senior national league are Omani nationals”, whilst the Ugandan team includes three Indian-origin players.
‘Progressive’ immigrant enthusiasts are cock-a-hoop over the Indian-supplemented US victory over Pakistan, declaring it a victory for immigration, “America’s most potent superpower”. Our no-borders ideologues really can’t help themselves, turning a sporting entertainment and national cultural signifier into a vehicle for delivering a simplistic, globalist, ‘One-World’ anti-nationalist message at all opportunities: immigration good, borders bad. So cop that you ethnocentrists, racists and bigots who query the national credentials of the ‘US’ cricket team.
But this jibe is gratuitous. Cricket is firmly part of the national identity, culture and history of the old British Empire bastions of the game but can a synthetic USA team, half of which consists of immigrants, ever achieve the same status? Cricket has a certain level of popularity Stateside, but take away the demographic cohort of South Asian immigrants and it has not sunk any organic roots in US sporting culture.
Partly that is due to the nature of the game which doesn’t gel with Americans’ taste for shorter, more action-packed sports. With its five-day Test matches that can peter out to tedious draws, and with more time being spent with nothing happening than any actual sporting drama, cricket is not to the liking of American sports nuts. Having watched an English county cricket match for several hours with his hosts whilst visiting that country, Groucho Marx, when asked “are you enjoying it?”, replied, “It’s great. When does it start?” The pace of the long-form game would have prejudiced many Americans against it, even in the bastardised, twenty-over slogfest format.
The forced celebration of the surprise win by ‘America’ over Pakistan by all the correct-thinking Good People is about proving their ‘anti-racist’ credentials whilst bagging political conservatives as despicable racists. Meanwhile, those folks who want to keep politics out of sport are criticised by implication for having insufficient woke ardour.
This is wide of the stumps, however, since, if those who quibble with the multi-culti, pro-immigration message are crude racists who don’t like black or brown people, how does that explain the popularity and admiration in Australia, England and New Zealand of, say, the powerhouse West Indies team of the 1970s (Richards, Lloyd, Marshall, Roberts, Holding, Garner, etc.) which laid waste to all other cricketing nations? Of course, the charge of ‘racism’ is never levelled against the non-white cricketing nations of the Commonwealth which are about as non-Diverse as you can get and still pass woke muster. Only Anglo Westerners can be ‘racist’, personally or ‘structurally’, don’t you know.
So, if the West Indies cricket team is allowed to be identifiably West Indian, and the Indians Indian, and the Pakistanis Pakistani, why should not the US, Australia, etc. also be allowed to be identifiably American or Australian in demographic makeup, as Australia (but not the US), miraculously, still is, despite the passing infatuation of Australian cricketing officials with ‘taking the knee’ to honour a black career criminal and drug addict, and despite a certain Australian opening batsman who shills for some of his more disreputable co-religionists in Gaza. Or is ‘diversity’ a one-way street with demographic dilution only meant to be aimed at oppressive, non-coloured countries like Australia and the USA?
That’s just not cricket.
Many of us can be loosely defined as migrants to our present country and therefore on the invite list to play the lovely game of cricket. Has anyone in Australia ever been banned from official cricket for reasons like ethnicity or religious belief?
The question here is whether some of the US victory team came to the US with the intent of forming an ethnic cricket team. In older times, people migrated to find a better life through freedom of expression, hard work, better oppurtinity, fear of bad countrymen and so on.
But migration from a thirst for playing cricket?
We live in strange times. It could be stranger if Australian cricket authorities were asked to include a team of Muslims living in Australia. Volunteers, not conscripts, I mean. Geoff S.
From what I am about to say it will be obvious that I am not a cricket fan but I can’t help but relate the following.
.
I have heard that the English were very religious so they invented cricket to give themselves an idea of eternity.
T20? It’s not cricket.
pgang. I more or less agree. I am a cricket lover and T20 cricket doesn’t grab me in the way Test cricket does and never will as it’s too abbreviated to be real cricket. But when I do watch a T20 game, it tends to get me in as it is still cricket in the way a good Beatles cover band is still true to what the Beatles were. Cricket has to grow to survive and if T20s are the best vehicle for that journey, that’s fine with me..
Test, Test.
Probably worth noting that the West Indies played Tests from 1928 but did not have a non-white captain until Frank Worrell brought his team to Australia in 1960.
Not surprising since the West Indies were British colonies and social discrimination between blacks and whites certainly existed Frank Worrell replaced white Gerry Alexander as captain who became his vice-captain on the tour.
18 June, 2024
I agree that the idea that “the US” beat Pakistan is ridiculous; I have thought it could be interesting if India ends up playing India at some point. However, while there is probably some wokeness in the whole thing (when is there not, nowadays?) it seems to me that the author is drawing a bit of a long bow. Where, exactly, would the US find white Americans who could play on the team? My brother has played in a league in California; but he was the only white chap on the team and would have had no interest in or ability to play had he grown up in America instead of Australia; and he is not good enough to play on the “national” team. He thinks it unlikely that cricket will ever become a very popular game with those whose heritage does not include it.
Cricket was actually played far longer ago in the US than the 1930s; it is mentioned in Little Women. But it obviously never took off, and why would it now? Like with Tim-Tams (which have also been introduced there), why would Americans select an unknown type when they already have so much variety of the familiar? My brother knows that Tim-Tams are superior to many American “cookies,” and that cricket is superior to other sport, because he grew up with both. Nobody but Indian businessmen, however, are likely to have the interest and money necessary to truly promote something so radical. It seems to me that this is not so much a matter of identity politics as of the obscene amount of money that India finds to support cricket, while a large portion of its population lives in slums.
By the way my understanding is that at least some of those on the “US” team were born in the States. While they don’t look like Americans to me, they actually are just as much citizens as were the Nisei (second-generation Japanese) who fought for America in the Second World War–whether or not they have the same sense of loyalty as those soldiers did.
Cricket, in my opinion, is the best game in the world; but I accept the fact that few of my compatriots are ever likely to think so. And as for the warped mixture of cricket and baseball that is being presented to them as cricket–why would THAT attract them? I don’t care that much for baseball, but at least it is a genuine sport. This “slogfest format,” as the author rightly terms it, is a completely artificial format created because too many of those in the traditional cricketing countries have no more regard for this noble game than do Americans. How many Australians (not counting those who have given up on the game because of its forays into identity politics), put forth the effort to attend even one day of a Sheffield Shield match a year?
I no longer do so Rebekah, because the social agenda browbeating just makes my viewing of the game a chore, like I am at school again. It is no longer enjoyable with the brainwashing and propaganda. Ricky Ponting’s team, and the dulcet tones of commentators Richie Benaud and Tony Greig on Nine’s Wide World of Sports was the last of my cherished memories before I lost interest in WA and test cricket for good. I also find it interesting when the Indian cricket team plays in Australia, how enthusiastic the Indian diaspora here supports their native country. And what of the country that has given them high paid jobs, housing, space, clean food and water, healthcare?? Their cultures and nations remain perfectly intact, while the West must accommodate and change to it’s own detriment. It’s the way of the world,
A few things here. It’s not unusual these days for national sports teams to have members born elsewhere or who are first generation. It’s quite common at the Olympics, check out the British or Canadian track and field teams or for that matter the French soccer team. Go back in time and the Soviet Union did well out of weightlifters, boxers, gymnasts etc from its former satellites who for the most part went along for the ride and never thought of themselves as Russian.
It is also true in cricket. England often has players born in South Africa, the subcontinent and New Zealand while the Kiwis have done well out of some Saffer and Indian imports. One of our best batters is Pakistani.
Now it would be good if the USA team had more native-born players but with the remarkable success of this team, allied to their own T20 league that pulled good crowds last year, they might have a starting point. The US has 335 million people, get just a 10th of them interested in cricket and you have a market of around 33 million mostly well-off fans.
It might be worth noting that six of Australia first Test team, the one that beat England at the MCG in 1877 in a game that gave birth to Test cricket, were not born in Australia. Four of the XI were born in England, one in Ireland and another in India (he was part of the British raj but born in India all the same).
A few things from the column. Americans do it’s said prefer ‘action-packed’ sports but I watched a fair bit of baseball during my last trip to the US and it really is for the most part tedious and worse, 90% of the players have more or less the same barrel-chested build. Basketball is very athletic but has way too many stoppages and grid-iron is like being at a meeting that should have been done in 40 minutes but instead drags on for two hours.
Finally, a minor point. The great West Indies team noted in the column played in the ’80s and for the first bit of the ’90s. They were surely, the greatest ever Test team. One of their current players is white by the way. He is of Portuguese heritage.
1888
I agree Phil. When Western nations seek out to develop new lands it is described by revisionists as ‘colonialism’, when non-Western nations empty their slums, it is ‘progressive and strengthening’. Absolute hypocrisy. Certainly, America’s freedoms are a drawcard for immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, particularly the petroleum gas state of Texas and IT hub of California’s Silicon Valley. They are mobile, tenacious, and often better educated than a great number of poor American kids (one has to be to complete for resources against 1.5 billion of their fellow inhabitants). They have strong relationships with each other, look out for each other’s best interests, and don’t let anything stand in their way. America is the ultimate attraction for go-getters, and allows for this self-made culture. Young Western folk will be left behind if they don’t grab the bull by the horns, though becoming difficult with the West’s guilt mongering and browbeating of its innocent youth.
I have heard of large swathes of the IT workforce in Silicon Valley flying back to India, Bangladesh and Pakistan at the end of their working week. What a ridiculous labour set-up. Alas, so the saying goes, ‘you can take the man out of India, but you can’t take India out of the man’. I am reminded of a story that involved an elephant at an Indian wedding in Texas collapsing a bridge and marriage stage, consequently injuring several of the guests. I understand everything is ‘Big in Texas’, but I would have thought the use of elephants for giant parties would be somewhat on the nose in a Western country? Only in America!