For 40 years, refusing or threatening to refuse to play cricket has been one of the diplomatic tactics at Britain’s disposal for showing disapproval of anti-democratic governments. Eventually, after long argument and political fence-sitting in both cases, South Africa and Zimbabwe were tested by the withdrawal of Test matches. But in the case of England’s tour of India, the way of demonstrating resistance to tyrannical politics is to carry on playing cricket. The model of sporting politics established by the African crises is disconcertingly reversed — from a perspective of protest, the only option is to go.
Understandably, some cricketers and their loved ones point out another crucial difference between the cases. Sending players to South Africa and Zimbabwe during their periods of most disgusting governance would have placed them in moral rather than physical danger.
In the Indian instance, even if we buy the need to side with a friendly elected government, the obstacle to touring is recent and appalling violence specifically targeted against tourists, including those from the UK.
PHOTO: AP
That stark fact challenges the analogy most favored by those certain the tour should continue — that Australia continued playing in England throughout the summer of the London attacks in 2005 even though, it is now reported, the baggy green caps pleaded for the Lord’s Test to be suspended because of fears for the players’ shopping wives. The Aussies were apparently told to stop being such wimps.
For some, this parallel exposes a double standard whereby England is seen as a basically civilized country in which the occasional massacre by psychopaths must stoically be ignored, while similar violence on the subcontinent underlines the fact that the place is just not to be trusted, confirming a long tradition of sub-racist mutterings from England cricketers about gastric and other discomforts.
Yet this argument, though testing, isn’t quite a match. The terrorist intervention in London was indiscriminate to the extent that the killers, presumed Islamists, were prepared to murder Muslims. In that Ashes year, Londoners and Australian cricketers were taking equal risks, with the latter rather less likely to travel on public transport. But the suggestion from the Mumbai atrocities that western targets were specifically being sought could put you off your cover drive. It has also persuasively been argued that the England squad, before their tour was interrupted, saw Indian television coverage of the sieges far more graphic than the sanitized images screened here.
Further complications arise from the shape of the game and the psychology of cricketers. When soccer teams were required to play in Belfast, Israel or Egypt at times of high violence, it was possible to fly them in and out within a few hours, a period during which maximum security and reasonable team spirits are relatively easy to maintain. But the leisurely rhythms that make cricket so attractive to those who love it make it much harder to safeguard the bodies and minds of teams.
And, mentally, there’s strong evidence that cricketers are different from other athletes. David Frith’s unsettling book, By His Own Hand, explored the curiously high suicide rate among top-class cricketers, while Marcus Trescothick’s just-published autobiography explains how the batsman’s England career was ended by near-suicidal depression that began, as it happened, on a tour of then-peaceful India. Both volumes suggest that the problem with cricket is that, while theoretically a team game, it is an individual and introspective sport at the moments of greatest pressure — the batsman alone at the wicket, the bowler running in, both alone in hotel rooms for weeks on end. It’s a game that attracts and exacerbates worriers.
Human sympathy, though, is finally defeated by political reality. The Indian authorities will strongly suspect that, if cricket were a leading US sport, any New York Test match scheduled for the weeks after 9/11 would have gone ahead as a gesture of democratic solidarity, with the only concession to terrorism being a shift of location upstate and secret service protection. This view is tough to refute and, in offering their own version of the solution that would have been found for England v the US, India probably has to be accommodated.
However, cricketers who have misgivings about performing under such circumstances should not be dismissed as wimps. The traditional features of the sport — length, leisureliness and lack of physical barriers between players and crowd — conspire to make it irrelevant in the aftermath of a bloodbath. Of all sports, cricket allows most time for thinking and the negative thoughts that some of the squad will be suffering can not simply be dismissed.
After a genuinely borderline deliberation, the umpire’s finger is raised in favor of the England team going out there. For the same reasons that they boycotted South Africa and Zimbabwe, they have to visit India. But every England cricket administrator should be required to read Trescothick’s memoirs and understand the difficulty of what they are asking.
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