Hi Ho All,

Yesterday Bilal wrote ...
> My interest in cricket was hugely damaged by the kind of cross fire
> between the so called Indian block (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka,
> Bangladesh) and the Other world (Aussies, Kiwis, England) that followed.
>
> As a cricket fan I truly hope that like Asia Cup in Karachi we have a
> successful ICC Champions Trophy in Pakistan in Sept. 2008. This event
> surely can help in getting rid of a lot of this off field non-sense
> and get back to cricket.

... and only today did I remember something that I had been meaning to
post for a week now. It is a book review of a novel which, set in New
York, is about bringing together the various cultural groups that are
currently at loggerheads in the world through our great game. I can't
wait to read it.

For all sorts of reasons it rings bells with me about what is good in
not just our game and those who play it, but what is potentially good in
all of us when we look at, understand and embrace the cultural
differences we choose to have. To do all this, using cricket at its core
is a master stroke for me as I have always felt there is something
bigger and better about this game that is not only a pleasure to play
and watch, but has an effect on those players and spectators.

If others here have read it or do read it then please pass on your thoughts.

Cheers
Christopher


http://content-aus.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/358238.html

*'Cricket is my athletic mother tongue'*

* Joseph O'Neill's cricket-themed novel /Netherland/ has fetched him
comparisons to Fitzgerald and Naipaul *


Andrew Miller

June 27, 2008




For all the wealth of literature that cricket has generated over the
years, there is a surprising gap in the fiction genre. /Test Kill/ by
Ted Dexter springs to mind, along with Malcolm Knox's superb debut
novel, /Adult Book/, but pound for pound there have been comparatively
few attempts. Perhaps no one has felt they can better the narrative that
unfolds in your average cricket match. Or perhaps they just haven't
found the right canvas yet.

Because here's a thing. A new novel has just emerged that is taking the
American literary scene by storm. The / New York Times/ has described it
as "the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of
fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World
Trade Center fell," while the legendary James Wood, arguably the most
influential critic of them all, has hailed the work as a post-colonial
masterpiece, and happily bracketed the author alongside such luminaries
as VS Naipaul, F Scott Fitzgerald and Salman Rushdie. High praise
indeed. And cricket, remarkably, is right at the novel's core.

Not any ordinary cricket, mind you, for the hybrid form of the game
around which /Netherland/, by Joseph O'Neill, revolves is far removed
from the genteel pastime from whence the game sprang. New York cricket,
or "bush" cricket, as it is dismissively referred to by the book's Dutch
narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a barely noticed subculture played out
on matting wickets in scrubby park wastelands, almost exclusively by
immigrants from South Asia and the West Indies. "Cricket in New York is
exotic, marginal and invisible," says the author, O'Neill. "It makes for
interesting fictional territory."

It is a territory that O'Neill knows inside-out. As an Irishman of
Turkish descent who grew up in Holland and was educated at Cambridge
University, he is a very different brand of immigrant to the men who
make up the majority of New York cricketers. And yet, after moving to
America in 1998, he was drawn to the game in precisely the manner of
everyone else with whom he plays. Cricket, as he puts it, is his
"athletic mother tongue" - even if he took to, say, baseball, he could
never hope to have the same understanding of its intricacies. And so,
every weekend for the past decade, Staten Island CC, which was founded
in 1872 and is the oldest cricket club in the country, has provided
O'Neill and countless others with a very particular slice of home comfort.

O'Neill is a barrister by profession but has written two previous
novels, as well as a family history, /Blood-Dark Track/, which addresses
the fate of his Turkish and Irish grandfathers during World War II, and
was nominated as one of The / Economist's/ Books of the Year for 2002.
"People who knew me were very worried when they heard I was writing
about cricket," he told Cricinfo. "It does seem a very marginal literary
theme, but apparently not." Far from it, as his end product handsomely
reveals. The novel revolves around two main protagonists. There's van
den Broek, a wealthy financial analyst who drifts listlessly back to his
childhood passion, following the loss of his mother and the September
11-induced meltdown of his marriage. Then there is the Trinidadian
dreamer, Chuck Ramkissoon, a shady yet gregarious beacon of optimism,
who has delusions of grandeur that will, we learn from the first
chapter, lead to his murder, but whose plausibility, ambition and vision
embody that great yet tarnished ideal of the American Dream. The novel
has more than a touch of /The Great Gatsby/ as the pair collide, and
ultimately collude - unwittingly on van den Broek's part, as he tries to
piece together the fragments of his own broken dreams.












Ramkissoon is the dominant personality in the book, and his ultimate
goal is to build a world-class cricket stadium, right in the heart of
New York City. "All people, Americans, whoever, are at their most
civilised when they're playing cricket," he explains to van den Broek.
"What's the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace?
They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral
angle... I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and
Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York
Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S. history. Why not?"

"It is a classic American enterprise in its ambition and dreaminess,"
says O'Neill, although the author's own experiences in the city's
leagues have led him to believe that the notion is not entirely
fanciful. "Cricket, like all great sports, is a great connective tissue
between various otherwise unconnected groups," he says. "I would have
very little in common with Pakistani immigrants in New York City, and
even West Indian immigrants, if it wasn't for cricket."

"And yet, if you know cricket, you know the difference between someone
from Jamaica and someone from Florida, or the difference between a
Bangladeshi and a Trinidadian East Indian," he says. "Just the fact of
cricket is a fantastic way of bringing people together. So the dreamer
at the centre of my novel really is onto something. He really does think
that if White America wants to have something in common with the Muslim
world, cricket can act as one of those bridges."

Ultimately, however, Ramkissoon's ambition ends in failure, and for that
reason O'Neill is keen to re-emphasise that, regardless of the
cricketing content, his novel should ultimately be regarded as an
American product. "The force of cricket as a countercultural activity
resonates more strongly if you are an American reader being confronted
with this alien activity," he says. "You can't write a novel about
cricket unless you plug into an old, possibly suspect tradition of
English literature, but this is not really about that at all. Cricket is
drifting very quickly away from its 19th century, Tom-Brown's-schooldays
view of itself, to the extent that that idea doesn't exist at all.

For O'Neill, there is a clear sense of regret, maybe even frustration,
that an opportunity for East-West understanding lies unwanted beneath
America's nose. "Cricket is a metaphor for the boundaries of American
perception," he says. "It's an invisible thing that they cannot see or
understand, and the plight of the American cricketer, in terms of his
visibility in the culture and in the eyes of his adopted country, in
some ways resonates with the problem that the rest of the world has in
its dealings with the United States."

The political force of the novel is carried for the most part by Hans'
estranged wife, Rachel, who returns to London in disgust at the USA's
hawkish response to 9/11, leaving her husband ashamed at his own
passionless response. But for van den Broek - and for the cricket fans
who pick up this book - the theme of loss and regret is most poignantly
addressed on the field of play, for which O'Neill reserves his most
poetically sumptuous descriptions.

One passage in particular is worth quoting in full, for if there has
been a more vivid portrait of the game's traditional rhythms, I have yet
to hear it: "The American adaptation," O'Neill writes, "is devoid of the
beauty of cricket played on a lawn of appropriate dimensions, where the
white-clad ring of infielders, swanning figures on the vast oval, again
and again converge in unison toward the batsman and again and again
scatter back to their starting points, a repetition of pulmonary rhythm,
as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors."




In the cricketing sense, van den Broek is a clear autobiographical
representation of his author. O'Neill played at age group level for
Holland (a connection that is alluded to when Hans uses Cricinfo's
scorecards to track his former team-mates' performances in the 2003
World Cup). And both learned their games on the billiard-green outfields
of Houdt Braef Standt CC, where orthodoxy was rewarded by runs, and
where hitting the ball in the air was a sin beyond compare. In a pivotal
passage of the novel, van den Broek is urged by Ramkissoon to adapt his
style and take the aerial route, to score the runs that are permanently
denied to him when he plays his natural game.

"When we love sport, we don't just love throwing the ball and running
around, we love all the complicated meanings buried in the activity,"
says O'Neill. "Hans is just nostalgic. To transform himself as a
cricketer is to put more distance between himself and his childhood
days, when he would play out dot-balls and occupy the crease while his
mother watched him from the sidelines."

Yet, as van den Broek meditates on his dislocation, he realises that the
game he knew and loved in his youth is already shrinking over the
horizon. "The game is speeding up and heading east," says O'Neill. "In
the novel it's clear how Hans is in love with the visual spectacle of
the game, the white on green, and the slowness of its rhythms. I love
that too, but all those connotations are disappearing, and in New York
City, they have long since been absent."

The notion of America as a dream destination, O'Neill concludes, has
lost its currency thanks to economic globalisation, and the nation's
critics have queued up to praise /Netherland/ for the soul-baring manner
in which it portrays this fact. But the themes of this novel seem
equally pertinent to the sport at its core. Cricket is no longer the
game that has been faithfully documented for centuries.

/*Andrew Miller is UK editor of Cricinfo*/