by Tan Copsey
For many of you this post will seem utterly incomprehensible, but for Indian, Kiwi, and English oD staffers, the arrival of the 2007 cricket world cup is a pants-wettingly exciting prospect. In an attempt to make our obsession seem slightly relevant to the site we are running an inkling predictive market here, and in this post I will endeavour to explore the political side of Cricket.
Racism, massive corruption, mysterious suicides, the frightening spectre of robber-baron capitalism, bombings, and political boycotts (and not just Geoffrey ba-dumpsh), cricket has it all, and to top it off is framed by the over-arching legacy of British colonialism, so how could a political junkie resist? Surely, bar the boredom and cheating, this is the game for you?
The very first world cup, held in England in 1975, notably did not feature cricketing heavyweights South Africa, who were banned due to apartheid, and only first appeared in 1992. Memorably the ’96 world cup featured an incident where India lost their Semi-Final with Sri Lanka after rioting fans prevented the game from being completed. Whilst the most recent world cup was seriously affected by sporting boycotts of Zimbabwe and Kenya – it really didn’t help that these nations were co-hosts with South Africa, and that as a result Kenya bizarrely made the semi-finals.
In this world cup we have any number of grudge matches to look forward to, including the mother of them all, a very likely India-Pakistan match in the super 8. In the short term a group containing India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka should be feisty. Netherlands-South Africa evokes not entirely fond memories of the Boer war, England-New Zealand may hinge on bitterness about ‘butter mountains’ (or not), whilst Bangladesh vs Bermuda well…. Ok so I have no conceivable political angle on that one, but all the other options involved England and then we’re back to colonialism.
And so until the basketball world cup features North-South Korea derbies, the US and Cuba play ball in a real baseball world series, a newly independent Basque nation is allowed to play the Spanish at anything, or the US-Iran game at the 1998 football world cup is repeated, nothing tops political cricket.
