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

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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.