The Road

“What team does your daughter play for? Stoke Newington? I didn’t know that they had a cricket club in Stoke Newington…”. It’s a bit of an outlier within the ancient region of Middlesex, and if it wasn’t for the River Lea, there would have been a case for registering the club with Essex. Some of the neuro-syphilitic foxhunters in charge of Middlesex for the last 2000 years would have certainly preferred that.

I remember once, at the age of 12 or so, she played for East London Boroughs, made up almost entirely of Stokey players, against Ealing, and between the innings I overheard a chat between the umpire and someone he knew. He was asked:

“What game are you umpiring?” – and he said: “Stoke Newington against civilisation.”  I was tempted to ask him if he can explain to me how I can get to the local lyceum, where Aristotle famously taught Alexander  –  when I studied Philosophy back in Germany I had read so much about Ealing, and I couldn’t believe my luck to be finally here.

That dinosaur hadn’t heard of, and will still not have heard of, demographical changes and developments in recent times, and if he had, it wouldn’t matter anyway. After all, it is old money that determines what is acceptable and what isn’t. In Ealing Town they have oak trees, in the east we have poplars.*

When the Yorkshire racism row started, with Azeem Rafiq accusing the county setup of being structurally racist, I hoped that he wouldn’t confuse anything – being at the end of deprecatory comments about one’s country of origin or skin quality, or being not selected because the selectors in charge only want to be surrounded by fellow Aryans are, if not two entirely different things, at least two issues that should be looked at separately. However I thought that the real problem lies underneath, in the classism of the system, because for a selection into representative cricket, the two most important criteria are a private school upbringing, and a parent who starts sentences with “when I was at the MCC last time, it happened that…”. That white people are naturally also overrepresented in this environment, is no surprise, but players with Asian heritage, who fulfil these criteria, find themselves easily integrated in the hegemonial system.  It helps of course if you are not entirely useless at cricket, but that is not so dependent on natural talent, since you can afford private coaching every day of the week anyway.

On the top of the ladder, the English, with their sense of natural superiority, regularly ask themselves why, with all their entitlement, do they so often lose against Australia, India or New Zealand. Especially, why are the latter so good, if their entire population is only 5 Million people? One could point out that if your selection process focusses on kids from private schools, you restrict your potential pool of players to… let me calculate that quickly… the kids of a population of 5 million people. Ah well…

“What team does your daughter play for? Germany? I didn’t know that they played cricket in Germany…”. It’s a bit of an outlier within the ancient region of … I just figured that this loopy structure, that I set out so cunningly in my mind, won’t lead anywhere.

Unbeknownst to the English cricket aficionado, there are now 54 countries playing women’s cricket listed with the International Cricket Council, 8 of which play in the “Kwibuka” tournament, that is held annually in remembrance of something that I might have to research even more than I have by now, and which I might have difficulties to include in a blog that is mainly jovial if not satiric. I will get there very soon, though.

In the meantime, I have to conclude from my experiences with English and any other cricket is that the latter, especially with tournaments like these or the Fairbreak tournament in Dubai that took place a month ago, is in principle inclusive – nuff said.

And I also have to follow up on a few other questions which come up in a place like this, e.g. why is the sky full of black kites, where is the centre of Kigali if there is any, where is this mosquito that everyone warned me about, what is the real reason for all this tax payers’ money from Europe flooding into this country, how come that it takes about 45 minutes from the order to being served a coffee, why is everybody so friendly, and who was the bloke who asked us about what we are doing here, what do we think about religion, sex, lesbianism, marriage, the royal family, Johnson Boris, age gaps in relationships, smoking weed, education in Rwanda, and pig meat. All to be answered soon.