If there is a cricket cliché drilled into fans’ heads by generations of commentators, it must be that of relating to “the glorious uncertainties of the game.” But that too echoes ancient Indian thought, as I have pointed out in The Great Indian Novel. Indian fatalists instinctively understand that it is precisely when you are seeing the ball well and timing your fours off the sweet spot of the bat that the un-playable shooter can come along and bowl you. A country where a majority of the population still consults astrologers and believes in the capricious influence of the planets can well appreciate a sport in which an ill-timed cloudburst, a badly prepared pitch, a lost toss, or the sun in the eyes of a fielder can transform the outcome of a game. Even the possibility that five tense, exciting, hotly contested and occasionally meandering days of cricketing contest could still end in a draw seems derived from ancient Indian philosophy, which accepts profoundly that in life the journey is as important as the destination.
Interestingly enough, Indian expatriation is now becoming the principal driver for the globalization of what used to be thought of as a quintessentially English sport. A recent Indian visitor to New York asked about cricket matches in the city and waxed eloquent about the growth of the game in, of all places, Dubai. When I first heard of the phenomenon, I had visions of Bedouins on camelback trying to turn Chinamen upon the desert sands, and scorecards bearing the regular notation “dust storm stopped play.” Enlightenment soon followed, however: I duly learned about the lead taken in promoting the game by the Air-India Sports Club, the success of the Dubai cricket development program, and that many matches are played on subkha grounds with sand outfields. And why not, indeed? After all, there is a famous stadium in next-door Sharjah, and the United Arab Emirates team would be a force to reckon with for the International Cricket Council (ICC) trophy if it were allowed to field some of the subcontinental stalwarts who play the game around the Gulf.
The globalization of cricket is a phenomenon with which even this chronically sedentary writer has some personal experience. In the course of a peripatetic life I learned not only that Italians and Israelis played cricket, but I ended up playing the game myself in two less likely countries, Singapore and Switzerland.
If ever Singapore gets around to nominating a national sport, you can be pretty sure it won't be cricket. Most Singaporeans appear to believe that the term applies either to a noisy insect or a trademark cigarette lighter. So the fact that every Sunday I would dress up like a poor relation of the Great Gatsby and venture hopefully into the drizzle clutching my bat invariably mystified my Singaporean friends. Bats, of course, they associated more with vampires than umpires. And the notion that anyone would spend the best part of his Sunday on an uneven field in undignified pursuit of five-and-a-half ounces of cork provoked widespread disbelief. “You mean they still play cricket here?” exclaimed one Singaporean. “I thought that ended with the Japanese occupation in 1941!”
In fact, there were twenty teams in the two Sunday Leagues run by the Singapore Cricket Association when I was there in the early 1980s, and innumerable others playing “friendly” matches on Saturdays. They ranged from the sometimes plebeian Patricians to the tavernless Tanglin Taverners, from NonBenders who chased every ball to Schoolboys who didn't, and from the two teams of the elite Singapore Cricket Club to the more esoteric acronyms of SAFSA and SPASA (known to the initiated as the Armed Forces and the Polytechnic respectively).
“I do not play cricket,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, “because it requires me to assume such indecent postures.” Most Singaporeans, a notoriously serious and straitlaced breed whose recreations are golf and economic growth, appeared to share his disdain. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who described cricket as “organized loafing,” and the Nobel Prize — winning author (Kipling), who termed cricketers “flanneled fools,” would have felt right at home in Singapore. Many a local utilitarian with the national devotion to statistics pointed out to me that cricket simply wasn't cost-efficient enough. The amount of space and time it took to give twenty-two players a game could, I was reliably informed, be more productively allocated to one hundred squash players, two hundred swimmers, or three hundred joggers. When I responded that eighty-eight cricketers could have more fun and exercise in the space taken up by the prime minister's daily game of golf, the silence that greeted me could have made central air conditioning obsolete.
Of course, neither Singaporeans nor Swiss, law-abiding citizens to a fault, can be expected to approve of any sport that is based on the principle of hit-and-run. So expatriates, especially Indians, tend to dominate the game in both countries.
But cricket has a surprisingly long pedigree in Switzerland. The Geneva Cricket Club's wine label (yes, they are a rather refined lot, these Swiss cricketers) bears an illustration of a cricket match being played on the city's Plainpalais field in 1817. Nearly two centuries later, the game continues to flourish in Geneva, having survived interruptions during the two world wars. The present Geneva Cricket Club (GCC), revived in 1955, plays in a well-equipped stadium that offers underground parking to sportsmen and the luxury of bowling (and fielding) on Astroturf.
The environs of this international city also house the cricketers of the Center Européen de la Récherche Nucléaire (CERN), where a hefty six might dent the casing of the world's biggest proton synchrotron accelerator. An amiable lot, the CERN cricketers tend to be at their best during the expansive tea breaks for which they (and their gifted if long-suffering spouses) are deservingly famous. (I played for them for four years, and apart from consuming more calories than I expended, I am pleased to report that I still feature in three places in the club records, which they have helpfully posted on the Internet.)
There is also an assortment of teams from the other major cities — Basel, Bern, Winterthur, Zug, and of course Zurich, which supports not one but two Sri Lankan elevens, neither of which is on speaking terms with the other. The Swiss teams are organized in an annual competition for the 40-over Brennan Cup, named for the former Australian ambassador who donated it, and they even boast an annual journal, named — what else? — Swissden.
Though neither the climate nor the quality of the cricket comes close to the ideal that every good Swiss would wish to aspire to, cricket in Switzerland — a country of diplomatic conferences — has found its own place in the scheme of international exchange. Here, British-educated Swiss returning from South Africa (and a few South African émigrés) field alongside Indians both east and west; Pakistani and Sri Lankan refugees shatter the stumps of Indian diplomats and United Nations officials; irrelevant Pommies hit sixes off irreverent Antipodeans. And they all retire to their convivial beers at the end of the game. Even if, in most cases, they don't have a pavilion to drink them in.
Cricket probably remains, along with the English language, one of the few colonial legacies in which imperialism gave more than it took. And in our postcolonial times, especially given the boost provided by the Indian Jagmohan Dalmiya's empire-strikes-back leadership of the International Cricket Conference, it is doing so far more successfully than during the days of the empire that invented the game.