标题: 2022.07.25 板球如何征服世界 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-7-29 23:52 标题: 2022.07.25 板球如何征服世界 The Economist reads | How cricket conquered the world
What to read to understand cricket
Our Washington bureau chief recommends five books on the game
DELHI, INDIA - OCTOBER 26: A boy is seen playing cricket against a setting sun at India Gate on October 26, 2011 in Delhi, India. (Photo by Clive Mason/Getty Images)
Jul 25th 2022
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This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit our collection to discover “The Economist reads” guides, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.
FOR AT LEAST two centuries, America’s closest thing to a national pastime was cricket. The game was played up and down the east coast throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. George Washington played it at Valley Forge. The first international fixture in any sport was a cricket match between America and Canada, in Manhattan in 1844. On the first day an estimated 20,000 people watched it. Few Americans know this history. The late 19th century saw a deep-pocketed campaign to establish baseball—a simpler bat-and-ball game—as the country’s first professional sport. Baseball’s promoters raided cricket clubs for talent while traducing cricket as a foreign affectation. And because history is written by the victors, that calumny has stuck. “Cricket is basically baseball on valium,” Robin Williams quipped.
It is getting harder for Americans to maintain such nonsense. In July their improving national men’s cricket side, dominated by the sons of South Asian migrants, narrowly missed out on qualifying for the 2022 World Cup in T20 cricket—a three-hour format that is more action-packed than most baseball games. In 2024, America will co-host the biennial T20 tournament, for which its side is therefore guaranteed qualification. Cricketing developments in India, the game’s biggest market, have meanwhile captivated American business. Last month Disney had to bid $3bn to retain the tv rights to India’s domestic T20 tournament. As Americans re-engage with their country’s first sporting love, what should they read? Here is an introductory list.
Beyond a Boundary. By C.L.R. James. Duke University Press; 291 pages; $44.95. Vintage; £10.99
In 1963 the Trinidadian Marxist scholar C.L.R. James asked a question that has come to define sport’s place in social history: “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?” Part autobiography, part social and political analysis of the late-colonial West Indies, “Beyond a Boundary” describes the contradictions of British colonial rule, as manifested in cricket. The game was infused with racial and class-based chauvinism; James, a good club cricketer, was barred from joining white teams. He in turn disdained teams of dark-skinned “plebeians” for one of his own “brown-skinned middle class”. Yet cricket was also a primary vehicle for oppressed colonials to shine—be they great players, such as the author’s friend Learie Constantine, or merely Matthew Bondman, a local ne’er do-well, much admired for his batting. Teasing out such paradoxes has become a mainstay of serious sports writing; James’s genius lies, beyond the power of his political analysis, in his ability to extend his themes into the smallest details of cricket’s rhythms and form.
A Social History of English Cricket. By Sir Derek Birley. Aurum Press; 400 pages; $17.99
Had the French aristocracy played cricket with their peasants, the British historian G.M. Trevelyan claimed, their chateaux would not have been burned. Few national mythologies are more entrenched than the notion of England’s class-riven society being bound by cricket love. It was a creation of the self-obsessed and sports-loving Victorians. To explain Britain’s global power, they identified a unique British genius, and claimed cricket encapsulated it. A highly romanticised strain of post-Victorian cricket writing, led by Neville Cardus, the son of a Manchester prostitute, cemented this idea of cricket as the nation’s soul. There is no better debunker of it than Derek Birley, a former vice-chancellor of the University of Ulster who wrote excellent cricket histories in his free time. His most comprehensive, “A Social History of English Cricket”, published in 1999, chronicles the game’s rustic origins, its promotion by well-heeled gamblers and emergence, by the late 18th century, as a preoccupation of polite society. He describes its use as a symbol and instrument of British imperialism—and the class tensions it revealed back home. It is true that, until 1963, in English first-class cricket gentlemen “amateurs” played alongside working-class “players”. But if that might gladden Trevelyan’s heart, it made cricket more a showcase of social divisions than a vehicle to overcome them.
Mystery Spinner: The Story of Jack Iverson. By Gideon Haigh. Text Publishing; 400 pages; $9.99. Aurum Press; £12
While mid-century English cricket writing was mired in romanticism, England’s great cricketing rival, Australia, launched a more hard-nosed, realistic literary tradition. It was led by Ray Robinson and Jack Fingleton, who played 18 Test matches for Australia, then turned out to be even better at writing than he was at cricket. Their literary inheritor is Gideon Haigh, the best living cricket writer. A 56-year-old Melburnian who supports England (the land of his birth), he has written over 40 books on cricket and business. It is hard to choose between the best of them; but none is more remarkable than “Mystery Spinner”, an exhaustively researched biography of one of elite sport’s strangest lives. Jack Iverson, a small-time estate agent, played his first competitive cricket match in Melbourne in 1946 at the age of 31. An almost unplayable bowler, he was within four years playing for Australia. The mystery of his bowling was a unique grip—he held the ball between his thumb and an exaggeratedly crooked middle finger—which allowed him to spin it three ways with no perceptible change in his action. He took 21 wickets in five Test matches. Then batsmen got used to his method, making him much less effective, and he left cricket almost as abruptly as he had entered it. He committed suicide aged 58.
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A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport. By Ramachandra Guha. Picador; 200 pages £8.99
The best first line of any cricket book appears in Ashis Nandy’s “The Tao of Cricket”: “Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British.” Ramachandra Guha, one of India’s most eminent historians, has no truck with that. In the best of his several cricket books he describes how Indians were not drawn to cricket’s tantric rhythms but to the high status the British attached to the game. The first Indian cricketers, in mid-19th-century Bombay, were Parsis, members of a fire-worshipping business community who attached themselves to the British. But that in turn piqued the curiosity of the Parsis’ Hindu rivals, and their Muslim rivals—and so the politics of cricket and prestige was injected into Indian society. This gave rise, between 1912 and 1930, to one of the most viscerally followed sport tournaments ever held, the Bombay Quadrangular, which pitted teams of whites, Parsis, Hindus and Muslims against each other. It was cancelled amid the mass protests occasioned by Mohandas Gandhi’s Salt March, even as some nationalist leaders were attacking cricket as a foreign imposition. Gandhi, who had played the game as a boy, objected only to Bombay’s divisive caste-based tournament. But it was revived due to public demand—with soon an additional team of Buddhists, Indian Christians and Jews. Indians were already far too besotted with the British game to relinquish it.
Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer. By Sujit Mukerjee. Ravi Dayal Publishers; 178 pages; $14.95
A hundred ghosted autobiographies of the world’s best cricketers are not worth this slim volume by a far more modest player. Sujit Mukerjee was a literary critic and translator of Bengali into English who in the 1950s also played a handful of first-class games for the Indian state of Bihar, a cricketing backwater. He was at peace with his mediocrity. Attending state trials as a 21-year-old taught him, he wrote, “beyond doubt that this was about the most I was meant to achieve”. Yet the realisation did nothing to blunt his love of playing the game, and of memorialising the play. Cricket, he believed, elicited a “heady mix of memory and desire” and “no memory can be more vivid, no desire more enduring, than those embodying the cricket one has seen and known and played oneself.” The cricket details he mines are of their place and time. He writes of rattling long train journeys across India to lose cricket matches. He describes in awe Father Kevin Cleary, the cricket-mad priest who coached his school team and played, “if not as a man of God, certainly as a preceptor of the game.” But the extremity of his cricket obsessiveness is timeless and, across much of the world, general.
The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India. By James Astill. Bloomsbury; 304 pages; $27 and £18.99
Our Washington bureau chief wrote this award-winning social history of Indian cricket. It describes India’s corrupt cricket politics, the explosive growth of television ownership that nationalised the game, and the consolation that poor slum-dwellers and villagers find in it. He has previously argued in these pages that Americans would still be playing a lot of cricket if it weren’t for the civil war. ■
经济学人》读后感|板球如何征服世界
了解板球应该读什么书
我们的华盛顿分社社长推荐了五本关于板球运动的书籍
印度德里-10月26日：2011年10月26日，在印度德里，一个男孩在印度门迎着夕阳玩板球。(Photo by Clive Mason/Getty Images)
2022年7月25日
