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The scientific details of how the drug testing works that caught out Floyd Landis.
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sooty shearwaters
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Not much there yet, because it’s still shiny and new. But a good idea.
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Author: Harry
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The ‘cricket test’
Talking about cricket and politics yesterday, one thing I didn’t mention was Norman Tebbit’s famous ‘cricket test’. Tebbit is a Conservative politician, and in an interview in 1990, he said
A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?
I actually think he’s right that it’s an interesting test, even if it’s a mistake to read too much into it. After all, if someone is from a Pakistani family and has grown up with a cricket-mad father telling them stories of Javed Miandad and Imran Khan, it’s natural for them to support Pakistan and that sporting allegiance doesn’t necessarily prove anything about their patriotism. It’s only cricket, after all. And yet you kind of hope that somewhere along the line it would seem natural for them to support England.
The reason I bring it up is that yesterday England were playing Pakistan in Leeds, a city with a large Pakistani community. Playing for England was Sajid Mahmood, and some of the crowd were chanting ‘traitor’ at him. Which seems a bit pointed. It didn’t seem to harm his bowling — the opposite if anything, he took 4 for 22 in eight overs — and he laughed it off afterwards, saying “It was probably my dad down there instigating it!” But still, it’s another example of cricket’s habit of getting dragged into the politics of post-imperial multicultural Britain.
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Cricket and politics
In the comments to my last post about cricket, Scavella mentioned the role of cricket as a ‘vehicle of subversion of empire’. It was always inevitable that cricket would have a political dimension.
For those who aren’t fans, the list of nations that play cricket at the top level is: England, the West Indies*, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. There’s obviously some scope for friction there. For a start, there’s the various kinds of post-colonial baggage in the relationships between England and everyone else. There are local rivalries, whether fairly friendly (Australia and New Zealand) or deadly serious (India and Pakistan). There’s a division between the white cricket nations and the rest, and the awkwardness of South Africa as an ex-white cricket nation trying to produce a more representative team via a quota system. There’s also a psychological division between the Anglophone countries and the Asian countries. The increasing political tension surrounding Islam adds a potential edge to games involving Pakistan and Bangladesh – as indicated by the latest controversy.
What really gives these issues life, perhaps, is the intimacy of the sport. With only ten test-playing nations (only seven before the 1980s), the same teams face each other over and over again. In football, England’s ‘rivalry’ with Argentina consists of about seven matches in 50 years. In the same period, we’ve played 116 tests against Australia, 89 against the West Indies, 60 against India and so on. No match is ever an anonymous one-off against a team you know nothing about. That’s also part of the appeal for the fan; every series brings a long sporting history with it. It can also bring a lot of political issues into the spotlight.
As an example, the liveliest issue over the past few years has been the status of Zimbabwe. Because cricket has historically been a predominately white game in southern Africa, Mugabe’s land reform policies are rather close to home for a lot of people within cricket, and there has been political pressure for England to stop playing Zimbabwe in protest, with the controversy further stirred up by Zimbabwean players protesting against political interference in the sport.
There are always people in these situations who try to insist that politics should be kept out of sport. That’s an understandable aim, not just because part of the pleasure of sport is its inherent unimportance, but because it’s a bit unfair on the sportsmen to burden their actions with such importance. But inevitably politics has a way of getting into everything, whether you want it to or not. Politicians will always try to hijack sporting events if they can see an advantage in it, and sometimes the political overtones are just inevitable anyway.
Just writing all this while listening to the cricket is faintly depressing. I like to think of cricket as being a simple pleasure for long, lazy summer’s days. Ho-hum. Still, England just took another wicket, so that’s good.
*obviously the West Indies isn’t actually a country, but they play as a single cricket team.
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Yet another quick sonnet
I don’t know why I’m posting these really. Certainly not because I claim any merit for them. Still, as with NaPoWriMo, the exercise of writing to a time limit is quite interesting, I think. The need to get something written makes you work with material that, rightly or not, you would normally have rejected out of hand. And the poems have a habit of wriggling away from you in the process of being written.
Writing poetry is always a kind of negotiation – between what you intended to write about, what you can get to work as poetry, and what emerges in the process of writing. Speed-writing just exaggerates that process and leaves it undigested on the page.
It doesn’t help that I’m out of practice. I’m sure if wrote a quick sonnet every day for a fortnight they’d start getting a bit slicker. This one took me 25 minutes. I made a point of doing it in (almost entirely) proper IP this time.
Somewhere a man is lying on a bank
of grass, watching the swallows overhead.
All he can see is blue; the green and dank
entangled grass and thistles round his head
cannot impinge upon his dreams of flight.
He thinks of nothing, but simply follows
the swoop and flicker, finds himself as light
and dancing as the flightpaths of the swallows.It tempts, that casual riding of the air,
it seems to hint at better ways of being;
we want to know that simple empty grace.
But still, remember if you stop and stare;
to see just one thing is to be unseeing.
We need to feel the thistles at our face.
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The beauty of cricket
The beauty of cricket, and the reason it can (sometimes) hold your attention for the whole five days of a test match, is that it’s well balanced. In almost any situation, the fall of a couple of quick wickets would significantly change the balance of the match. So even when there’s nothing very exciting happening (and that’s quite a lot of the time) there’s always the possibility that it’s about to.
photo © badgerswan
That’s probably why it’s always been so popular on the radio – because a large part of the pleasure is in the shifting of the balance between the two teams, and the mood that builds up over passages of play. Of course when something exciting does happen it would be nice to be able to see it, but it certainly works much better than most sports. It helps that they have so much time to talk between balls and between overs.
It’s probably true of all sports, of course, that to be successful they need to establish some kind of pseudo-narrative structure. Tennis, for example, would be a much less enjoyable spectator sport if the scoring system was different. You could argue it would be a fairer reflection of the balance of play if, instead of playing games and sets, they just counted up total points scored and the winner was the first to 75. But the gradual establishment of a lead by one player would have less drama than the current system, with its building up of tension towards the set points.