‘To Be an Englishman’: Nation, Ethnicity and English Cricket in the Global Age

Abstract

This contribution is concerned with two central issues in contemporary English cricket, both of which touch on notions of ethnicity and nation. Firstly, it explores the paradox in which, on the one hand, cricket has been an enduring motif of an unchanging Englishness while, on the other, particularly since the 1960s, the English cricket authorities have availed themselves of an ever more malleable definition of English nationality. The chapter will briefly trace this malleability historically from the late nineteenth century through to the present day. It then discusses new ideas of ethnicity and nationality and their implications for English cricket. It goes on to assess the relationship to English cricket of various ethnically defined communities; it analyses the controversy in 2003 over whether or not the England cricket team should play in Zimbabwe and closes by commenting on the significance both of the Ashes series played in England in the summer of 2005, which was widely perceived as momentous in its implications, and of the England and Wales Cricket Board's decision to award the contract to televise England Test matches to a satellite TV company. In cricket [there is an ongoing] row about whether the game should go forward to a world of coloured clothing, selling advertising space on the umpire's coat and Rupert Murdoch's money; or stay with the traditions of the BBC, polite applause and the game being run by people who think a chap shouldn't be given out LBW if his father is in the House of Lords. Both have their own agenda, and neither has the interests of the game as its priority. [1] In football, by and large, it's the fans that are racist but in cricket it's the establishment. It's institutionalized racism. The smell of imperialism is in your nostrils all the time. [2]