Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC): Historical Context (original) (raw)

2023, Holding up a Mirror to Cricket

Cricket venerates both its history and its literary culture. English cricket’s long period of development establishes cricket as a link to the nation’s past. But insofar as all history is narrative, and historians are in the business of selecting topics and information out of which they fashion those narratives, our game is also highly selective in what it chooses to recall. Nostalgic visions of Lord’s as the ‘home of cricket’, MCC as the originator and arbiter of the game’s rules, and the English as the original cricket nation are symbols of prestige. They mix in the national imaginary with picture-postcards of cricket played in white flannels on pristine village greens; a link to an earlier and ‘simpler’ time. Furthermore, when looking beyond England, to the fact that cricket is now a global game played by a very diverse range of people, we perhaps too easily trade on the notion that ‘cricket brings people together’. The ‘Spirit of Cricket’ set out in the preamble to the laws of the game states that cricket “brings together people from different nationalities, cultures and religions.” Whilst undoubtedly true - cricket is a shared heritage and shared language that crosses boundaries of nation, religion and ethnicity - it is also too simplistic. By way of example consider the Barbados Cricket Buckle, an engraved belt buckle from the 1780s that depicts a slave, unmistakably in bondage, with bat in hand, in front of a set of stumps. It was found in a riverbed in the north of England in the 1970s. How it got there is unknown, but the artefact reminds us - despite the overwhelming emphasis in public discourse still being on the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 - of Britain’s long history as one of the world’s biggest slave empires. It is also a striking depiction of how cricket was passed on and adopted often in the most unequal of contexts. Cricket ‘bringing people together’ takes on a different meaning when looked at from this perspective. As such, we believe that cricket needs to engage more frankly with the fact that, despite conjuring images of tradition, continuity, and togetherness, cricket’s history is also replete with tensions and social conflicts, even histories of brutality and oppression. Struggles have been waged between the rural and the urban; social classes; ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’; north and south; private and state educated; men and women; and, perhaps most starkly of all, between White colonisers and ‘non-White’ peoples, dating from the age of the British slave trade and imperialism but resonating far beyond, into the postcolonial age. Most often, these conflicts have revolved around questions of power and control by an elite group. In this respect, cricket has often operated on the basis of barriers to access, and historically-excluded groups have been forced to go to extraordinary lengths to gain admittance to the privileged spaces of the playing field, the club, the dressing room, and the management committee. Importantly, these problems are far from being isolated in a distant past. Stereotypes about ‘racial characteristics’, the ‘proper’ role of men and women in the game, as well as tropes about class and regional differences have all been handed down over the generations. We believe that it is vital for the game to develop a more critical and self-aware approach, to be more cognisant of the ways in which both its past and present are imbued with social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions. We approach this task in the spirit of the great Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, who famously prefaced his treatise on Caribbean cricket and colonialism – Beyond a Boundary (1963) – by asking “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?” In other words, if we are to understand the nature and extent of (in)equity in cricket, our sense of what cricket history is must go beyond ‘the game’: dates, scorecards, names and numbers. Developing a better sense of cricket history reveals many of the unspoken assumptions, inherited from the past, that have enabled particular groups of people to dominate the game in terms of power and access to resources, whilst others have remained at the margins. It can also help everyone in the game gain a better understanding of where contemporary injustices have come from. We offer a historical context for the key themes that underpin the Commission’s Terms of Reference, and in doing so develop three central arguments: ● Cricket has not simply ‘reflected’ conflicts in wider society, it has frequently been central to fostering or reproducing those conflicts. ● Typically, elite social groups have commanded most of the power and control within cricket, and have resisted change. ● Although cricket has a long history, the period after about 1860 up to World War I was pivotal in terms of establishing the idea that cricket exemplified a specific version of Englishness – White, middle to upper class, profoundly male-dominated – with this image exported throughout Britain’s empire.