Sugary excerpt from Pankaj Mishra’s on Cricket, literature, Oliver O’ Neill’s novel Netherland :
One of O'Neill's masterstrokes is to make Hans, a rather banal financial analyst, a cricket purist in a tainted world. Hans can't decide whether the invasion of Iraq is a good or a bad thing. A self-confessed "ethical-political idiot", he is a dullard as husband and lover. But out on the cricket pitch he becomes a figure of solitary moral splendour, making a last defence of civilisation against the barbarians with the straight drive, the cut and the pull.
Adrift in post-9/11 New York, Hans meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian buccaneer of part-Indian ancestry, who wants to "civilise" America by introducing it to cricket's manifold refinements. Chuck is keenly aware of cricket's "moral angle": "You ask people to agree to complicated rules and regulations. That's like a crash course in democracy." Deploring America's political isolation, he says: "Americans cannot really see the world. They think they can, but they can't. I don't need to tell you that. Look at the problems we are having. It's a mess, and it's going to get worse. I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims . . . With the New York Cricket Club we could start a whole new chapter in US history."
At the same time, Chuck wants to make a killing from cricket : he harbours a fantasy of hosting the rivalry between India and Pakistan in Brooklyn. "I am talking about advertising . . . Global TV rights. Coca-Cola, Nike, they're all desperate to get at the south Asian market." In the novel's most inspired casting, O'Neill turns cricket's colonial son into its radical revolutionary (a decision promptly vindicated by reality: it is British Asians and other globalised Indians rather than the old fogeys at Lord's who have Americanised or "baseballed" cricket with the Indian Premier League's Twenty20 format).
I hate Cricket more than I hate Rugby (the reason why Rugby comes only second on my list of hated sport is that the Haka of the New Zealand’s All Blacks makes at least the first 4 minutes of their games worth watching). However, I agree that sport can say a lot about a country, its culture, and its ability to grow and modernize through the difficult introspection, which forces it to slow down and to focus on quality not quantity. One of the reasons why America doesn’t like soccer football is because in my opinion it likes to be different and to feel separated from the world and that moreover it believes it doesn’t believe that there is a point to playing with a ball if there is either no goals, no hits or no violence. America is a country that likes to score more than it likes the elegance and the beauty of a player gesture. That is the reason why for Americans view football compares to the ballet, a girly something where there is no action and not enough goals.
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