Rajpal's Column

16th April 2000

In balmy days, talk of batting and betting

By Rajpal Abeynayake

But, the seasonal languor was broken both by fighting and from an unexpected quarter. South African sportsman, Hanse Cronje was, whatever one might hold against him, quite good in his timing. He let loose the match - fixing and betting scandal thing. Not that this matters any to us, who are caught up with apocalyptic concerns of our own.

But in Sri Lanka, there is laziness. Languor is Sri Lankan as war and cricket are. In times of war, there is a genuine sense of un-involvment here, which is also a part of the story.

It's reminiscent of the aphorism of taking the horse to the water. You can take the horse to the water, but can you make it drink? You can tell Sri Lankans there is a war, and that it's deadly serious, but can you make Sri Lankans lose their sense of glorious detachment? Sri Lankans don't have to be escapist, they are not involved anyway — period. There is plenty else to worry about — such as Hansie Cronje's behaviour for example.

So, let's get down to this betting business at hand. Cronje, the South African skipper, was too good to be true anyway. The halo around him became even more brilliant, particularly when South Africa " lost'' the World Cup semi-final by a ridiculous tie.

His demeanour suggested that he plays a gentleman's game, which made him a great anachronism in contemporary cricket. After all, here was a white man , who was not Australian or British. He belonged to an ex-oppressor class. But, his sordid dealings, or so the exposure says, was with the Indians. All English writers on cricket say this with great élan and with a great sense of purpose. It was not Cronje that undid Cronje. It was the sub- continent.

The repository of boorishness in the gentleman's game of cricket is still in that part of the world. Whenever the sub-continent is involved, cricket is just not cricket. A small thesis can be done this way about English and Australian cricket journalists, the writing of which would be great fun both as an academic exercise and an exercise in getting some jollies out of real life.

Something like writing a serious paper about Sri Lankan Burghers, or some exotic tribe in the Amazon jungles for example.

All that is politically correct in British and Australian newspapers, end where the sports pages begin.

The Cronje story is another important story for them, in terms of saying that brown nations are misfits at cricket, and that something has to be done about the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition in the sport.

In the offices of the Telegraph, or the Australian Age for instance, it is still widely suspected that cricket has to be exorcised of the sub- continental devil, before it is played the way it was supposed to be. So, anyway, while this man Hanse Cronje was being roasted in the papers in Pretoria and Durban and all those places that love to love a white, the colour- blind British papers were generally being nonchalantly apologist for the bloke. He hadn't really fallen according to these authorities cocooned in the pubs and pavilions in London. He had just transgressed, under tremendous pressure, and made a human error and finally succumbed to tremendous temptation. One writer in the Telegraph, in his comment, also made the point that the Indian police had confessed to him that "any team can be bought except Australia and England.'' (!)

The Indian cop, if he was quoted correctly, was probably making the pronouncement tongue in cheek, but then, it's difficult for these lily white boys of the British establishment to catch this kind of crude sub-continental sense of the ironic, eh what? But, an explanation is owed here to the uninitiated. It was not many months ago, that an Australian athlete ( cricketer, bowler of leg-spin ) called Shane Warne confessed that he had taken money from bookmakers.

He was then promptly retained by the Australian Cricket Board, post - confession. Another Australian cricketer was involved, but that's a detail.

But this team that has Warne in it cannot be bought, and with that sort of wisdom that is imparted in the columns of the British cricket writers, we can now begin the process of resting our case.

Which is: Any observer of cricket in London today, be he the Editor of the Wisden, or any cricket writer peddling his art, has to be studied for displaying various qualities such as nostalgia and sentimentality in pathological excess. Basically, it's all a very quaint thing.

Old British crusties, want to treat sport as an arena when the need to be politically correct does not arise. In other words — in the sports pages, white gentlemen can still be cranky and racist. Sport, of all things, is the last bastion of good old fashioned colonialism, where the British and their allies can re-create an interregnum in history — a period in the past in which the British were ridiculously obnoxious.

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