A racist game
Evidence of racism in Scottish cricket shames the sport I love - but there is hope at the grass roots.
CRICKET is the greatest of all games. I’m sorry to say this to all the footballers, golfers, and the rest of you who persist with other inferior sports, but this debate has been settled.
Name me another sport that, like cricket in the mid-1860s, used to organise games between wounded servicemen in which the one-legged would take on the one-armed? (apparently, the one-legged were usually the winners). In which other sport have the two teams played for ten full days and then agreed a draw because the boat home was leaving and one of the teams would be marooned if they didn’t call it quits (England v South Africa in 1939)?
Most sports have ‘half-time’. Fools. Only in cricket did we have the genius to understand that the turnaround at the mid-point of a game might be an opportunity to have a delicious tea. I began playing cricket with my brother in the back garden in the 1970s. Forty years on, I’m still smitten, occasionally dragging my creaking limbs around our local club in Glasgow. Me and my fellow cricket nuts feel we are part of a tribe, revelling in our obscure and ridiculous statistics, proud of the fact that, to the great unwashed, it seems such a perverse and eccentric pastime. Ok, that it is a perverse and eccentric pastime. Still now, on catching the sight of green grass, white sightscreens and 13 mostly stationary figures grazing in the outfield, I feel the need to stop, to watch, to breathe, and to take in something that feels timeless and almost sacred.
Cricket in Scotland has – wrongly – often been seen as something of an interloper, an invasive species which somehow does not belong here, like Japanese knotweed. And, of course, a sport which relies on the absence of rain is always going to find Scotland stony ground. But cricket here hasn’t just survived, it has thrived. That has been down to its popularity: more than 15,000 people are estimated to play every summer. It’s also thanks to infusion of Pakistani and Indian immigrants who settled in Scotland and brought their love of the game with them. Consequently, playing cricket in the west coast of Scotland has, for me, always been a happily multicultural experience; among the fondest cricketing experiences of my playing career was turning out for the Renfrewshire side Kilmacolm in the mid-1990s when the proprietor of the local Indian restaurant organised the tea. It’s fair to say that post-interval there was some sub optimal play, as both teams attempted to digest the smorgasbord of Bhajis, Samosas, Naan breads, and curry that we had just gorged on.
So I love cricket. And Scottish cricket has been good to me. All of which makes it hard to read the conclusions of this week’s devastating report into racism in the Scottish game. Commissioned following complaints by two former Scotland players, Majid Haq and Qasim Sheikh, the ‘Changing the Boundaries’ review concluded that institutional racism was rife in the sport. Among an anonymous survey carried out as part of the review, 62% who responded said they had experienced, seen, or had reported evidence of racism, inequalities, or discrimination. In total, 488 examples of institutional racism were uncovered. Cricket Scotland, the body which oversee the sport, has been put into special measures.
The anecdotes that emerge from the report are all too painful and, for those who have observed racism around the UK, all too familiar. Speaking on Monday, as the review was published, Mr Sheikh noted how, when playing for the national team, he was referred to as “you lot”. Anonymous participants cited how the excuse of “banter” was given to justify racist language. One participant reflected how a “white, predominantly male, middle class” atmosphere prevailed. The report concluded the sport’s governing authorities had a lack of diversity or anti-racist training, no consistent process for handling racist incidents, while people who did raise issues were “side-lined or ignored”. Class reared its head too: privately educated white Scots somehow get selected while Pakistani immigrants don’t. As with revelations of racism at Yorkshire County Cricket club, we see revealed an entrenched culture failing to accept, integrate and promote those deemed different.
A few conversations with Scottish Pakistani and Indian friends yesterday made clear they see the verdict of “institutional racism” as justified. It’s important to understand what that means. The phrase comes originally from Sir William McPherson’s report into the Metropolitan Police in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence murder. It is, Sir William declared: “The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin.” He added: “It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racial stereotyping.”
That last sentence is highly relevant to this matter, I think. There are upfront racists in Scottish cricket, just as there are across Scottish society: I was told a story yesterday of one club committee member who declined to sign a Pakistani-born professional because he was deemed “one of them”. The deeper problem is that discrimination occurs often through omission too: when ‘unwitting prejudice and ignorance’ leads to organisations not acting when necessary. In other words, it happens when people who would never consider themselves racist are plain thoughtless. Cricket Scotland’s failure has been – and seemingly still is - a failure of imagination: an inability to understand the world as seen from the perspective of other racial groups, and to act.
Cricket Scotland is not alone in that failure. It can be seen more widely. I see it in myself. I like to think of myself as colour-blind: my own wife is Asian and my children are mixed race. But when I say I am colour-blind, I mean not just that I’m blind to the difference in skin tone within my family but also blind - or at least less switched on - to the fact of race as something that still sadly matters. A few unpleasant incidents with my wife and my own children have reminded me it does. The Cricket Scotland report confirms as much.
But while the report is indeed a wake-up call, I take heart from the evidence of grass-roots tolerance at my local club. Later this week, my youngest son will be back there, where his brilliant Scottish-Pakistani coach will once again be trying get him to play with a straight bat. I’m looking forward to watching his team - made up of kids with parents from Scotland and the sub-continent - playing their hearts out. It has been a bad week for our game. But, even in rainy Scotland, I feel confident this wonderful sport will prosper.
ENDS
This article first appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail, 27th July 2022