Читать книгу No Win Race. A Story of Belonging, Britishness and Sport онлайн

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Former Wisden editor Dave Frith once wrote, ‘For me that should be the limit of aggression in Test cricket, but now we are in very serious times and all sorts of things are motivating people – religious belief and racial conviction – and most of all these resentments. And I think it’s rather sad if you need a resentment like that to fire you up. You should glory in the gift that you’ve been given. I mean, he was a born athlete, Viv Richards. He surely could have gone out there and done just as well and retained his cool. I wish he didn’t get angry so often, because I believed in him. But after that evening I was left quite worried, I thought, Well, he’s talking to young kids, and if he preaches that sort of stuff, the world’s not going to be a very peaceful place.’⁸

In Richards, cricket had found a player that had been fundamentally rupturing the status quo. Rupturing the norm. Rupturing every conceivable notion of what a West Indian cricketer could and should be. He had been creating a new blueprint. Changing the narrative away from the compliance demanded by the civilising abolitionists. Richards’ assertiveness was a threat. His politics became a proxy for radicalism. England had for many years treated the West Indies, both politically and in cricket, with contempt. It had not been right, in their eyes, for Richards to be fuelled by oppressions of the past; a past not relevant to the present or to the future.