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

77 страница из 87

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.