Indian supporters felt every comment. And we probably only heard or read about a quarter of them. I did not realise until much later, when books such as Mike Marqusee’s Anyone But England and Simon Lister’s Fire in Babylon were released, just how bad the commentary and views published had really been. Seven-foot monsters, devilish-looking, vengeance, violence, brutalising, thuggery, viciousness, ugly. Shut your eyes. Hear those words and those phrases. Not describing slavery, colonialism or apartheid, but cricket. Twitter language. YouTube comments. Comments that can easily be traced to age-old stereotypes of black folks.
If you can’t beat them on the field of play, change the rules of the game. How else do you undermine a movement? The media mediates, sways public opinion. There were calls for changes. Increase the over rate. Sanctions. Reduce the number of non-English players in the County Championship. Reduce bouncers. The media and authorities conspired to undermine the impact and indeed the legacy of the West Indies.
The West Indies never stood a chance. No infrastructure. No sway. Still dependent, colonialised. Beginning of the end. The West Indies never controlled the narrative, never had control of the game in the areas where it really mattered. They always had a cricket board with no money, a board that bowed to bigger boards, aboard someone else’s ship.
The colonial attitude of the establishment had not just been confined to the West Indies team. As a West Indies fan, I never followed the black players who represented the English national team. They felt like traitors, sell-outs. But those black players had been subjected to just as much hostility from the press as the West Indies team. And they were meant to be allies.
In 1980, Barbadian Roland Butcher became the first black cricketer to represent England. Through the eighties, a steady trickle of black players like Gladstone Small, Wilf Slack, Monte Lynch, Norman Cowans, Phil DeFreitas and Devon Malcolm played for England, alongside several white foreign-born cricketers. The eighties had been a bad decade for English cricket. An emerging narrative through this period had been the English team’s identity crisis, born from the ‘foreign’ make-up of the team.
You could hear it in the commentary. You could see it in the press coverage. Nothing quite as blatant or emotive as the boos on a football pitch. But similar criticisms you’d hear about black footballers and whether they were loyal to England, bled for England.
In 1990, Tory MP Norman Tebbit would crystalise the sentiment when he questioned which side Britain’s Asian population would cheer for in a game of cricket. The Tebbit test brought to the surface the issues of belonging and national identity when he said, ‘Are they still harking back to where you came from or where you are?’17 For Tebbit, living in England meant supporting England over one’s place of birth. By giving up your culture, this would signify true loyalty to England. As the story evolved, Tebbit would apply the theory to second-generation blacks too.
To me and my friends, Tebbit’s question sounded archaic and of little relevance to us. Like many of the kids at my school, I supported the West Indies in cricket, Brazil in football and Great Britain in basketball. Sugar Ray Leonard was my favourite boxer. For me, shared experiences remained stronger than a shared birthplace. I felt safer around my black and Asian peers than white. Practically all the conflict I had faced during school had been the result of anti-black racism. I couldn’t support England, because England rarely supported me. Not every black person felt the same, however. Tebbit’s theory seemed to target people of colour. Not a nationality test. A colour test.
Tebbit’s test mirrored much of casual racist commentary of the eighties. I couldn’t think of a time, a moment, when I was watching cricket through the eighties and regularly buying cricket publications, that white foreigners had faced as much scrutiny. For much of the eighties, black English players, like the footballers, stayed mute.
Years later, when former civil servant Robert Henderson penned an essay in Wisden Cricket Monthly in July 1995 entitled ‘Is it in the blood?’, the casual racism and elitism of English cricket surfaced once more. Henderson, who referred to black people in the article as ‘negroes’, claimed that ‘a coloured England-qualified player feels satisfaction (perhaps subconsciously) at seeing England humiliated, because of post imperial myths of oppression and exploitation’. Myths. He would go on to say that ‘mixed groups’ would never ‘develop the same camaraderie as eleven unequivocal Englishmen’, describing foreign-born English players as ‘interlopers’ and describing West Indians based in England as ‘generally resentful and separatist’.
The article was widely condemned by cricket legends such as Ian Botham, David Gower and Michael Atherton, who would resign from Wisden’s editorial board as a result. Black cricketers like fast bowler Devon Malcolm and all-rounder Phil DeFreitas, implicated in Henderson’s piece, would later successfully sue the publication (despite being advised otherwise by cricket’s players’ union). But the cricket authorities had been at pains to cover up the fact that the legendary publication had just published an ill-informed, ill-researched piece of racist propaganda. That Frith, Wisden’s editor, couldn’t see it, was hardly surprising. Frith once said that Jamaican-born Devon Malcolm ‘acts, thinks, sounds and looks like a Jamaican. This hits the English cricket lover where it hurts.’18 What qualified Frith to know what a Jamaican acts like, how they think, what they looked like, I don’t know. I’ve never read all of Frith’s articles. But I cannot remember him condemning South African-English players like Allan Lamb or Robin Smith for sounding South African. Did they look like typical South Africans? Translated: Malcolm is black and that hits the English cricket lover where it hurts. Even allowing for the time, the politics of the English press seemed embarrassingly dated, perversely discriminatory, lacking in self-reflection, humility or understanding. They may have known black players, been friends with them, gone to the West Indies, eaten jerk chicken and rice and peas, but they had little conception of what it meant to be black. They made little attempt to find out. The message seemed to be that blackness could not equal Englishness. Worse still, in my mind it felt as if these writers and commentators were implying that English identity was some sort of proxy for racial purity.
Malcolm would later say in his autobiography You Guys Are History!, ‘My kids had all been born in England, for heaven’s sake. They went to integrated schools and had white godparents. We all considered England our home, and colour wasn’t an issue in our choice of friends at school.’
Phil DeFrietas, who also had his Englishness questioned by journalists throughout his career, continued to play for the national team despite threats from the National Front to kill him and his family if he played for England. DeFreitas turned down the opportunity of going on a ‘rebel’ tour of South Africa during apartheid when white national team members sacrificed their England careers temporarily to cash in on the riches offered by the racially corrupt regime. DeFreitas, in his autobiography Daffy, said that he never had the ‘desire to play for West Indies’ and given that he had learnt the game here, he felt he had a debt to pay to England. Not all black folks the same. Just like white English folks, there will be some who will die for England, and others who will not. The problem had less to do with black players and their motivations and much more to do with England and its own fragile state. That appeared to be the barrier, or at least a rarely questioned barrier, to true cohesion.
England attributed their failure to a crisis of identity because they were trying so hard to hold on to the idea of Empire as the bonding force for the team. But this conception was now dated. Imaginary. The past. The English team no longer reflected England’s imagined self. And that’s what really hurt.
My PE teacher and cricket coach in secondary school clearly did not, in my view, see blackness and Britishness as compatible. A stout, flushed-face man, more darts player than athlete, he often verbally abused pupils with his breathy, sour tones. I found him intimidating. I did not join the school football team in my first year because of his constant shouting and bullying. When, for the first time, he umpired one of our cricket matches, I had been captain. I dropped an easy catch. ‘Why the hell were you made captain, Beardwell?’ he shouted. Always called me that, Beardwell, with a dismissive tone.
He assumed I supported the West Indies. So, he would mock me and every other black kid during PE lessons when they lost. Can’t remember ever