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It's just not cricket

By Stephen Hagan - posted Thursday, 27 December 2007


My most enduring memory of my cricket crazed days was when I worked as a diplomat in Colombo in the early 1980s and looked after the visiting Australian cricket team who played their inaugural test in historic Kandi.

The formal reception for both teams at the High Commissioner’s residence allowed for a great photo opportunity with the great Australian fast bowler Dennis Lillee and the best cricketer of all times West Indian all-rounder Sir Garfield Sobers, who at the time was the coach of the Sri Lankan team.

Disappointingly today I don’t have the same interest in cricket or compulsion to take my son Stephen to the cricket like my father did because of the unsavoury behaviour of certain elements of the Australian cricketing public who persist in racially abusing international cricketers.

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Although I suspect there was name calling back in those days when the famous all conquering West Indies team dominated international cricket I don’t recall hearing such rubbish at the ground or being made aware of it through the media.

Perhaps redneck elements in the crowd were mindful of the presence of an assembly of us burly Indigenous spectators within their vicinity and erred on the side of caution.

It’s rather ironic that the recent saturation media coverage of the Australian cricket tour of India has been focused entirely around racial vilification of Australia’s only black cricketer, Andrew Symonds (of British and West Indian origin) by other non-white spectators - the Indians.

Symonds was persistently racially vilified with chants of “monkey” by sections of the Indian crowd whenever he fielded near the boundary. I was most disturbed to see images beamed back to Australia on national television of what appeared to be monkey gesturing by the Indian crowd.

I turned 21 in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) in the summer of 1980 and know first hand how fanatical the Indian population is when a test series is on. Back in those days the open batsman for India was Sunil Gavaskar, nicknamed Sunny, who was widely regarded as one of the greatest opening batsmen in the Indian Test history. Gavaskar held the record of 34 Test centuries for almost two decades before it was broken by Sachin Tendulkar in December 2005.

Whenever Sunny went in to bat literally every Indian male had his ear glued to a small radio to listen to a ball by ball description of his performance by excitable commentators.

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So yes, it disturbed me to think that another dark skin person would stoop so low as to engage in racial vilification of a visiting black cricketer. But then again if one looks at the history of the caste system in India it may not be so surprising considering the influential richer and fairer skin Indian high caste were known to turn their noses up at the blacker lower caste adivasi (Indigenous) Indians.

But Australian cricketers and public are not entirely guilt free when it comes to bringing the game into disrepute from their conduct on and off the cricket field.

Let’s take a short journey back in time by visiting my 2006 publication: Australia’s Blackest Sporting Moments - The top 100, and appraise some of the prominent public sledging that our profiled cricketers and not so famous spectators have engaged in.

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About the Author

Stephen Hagan is Editor of the National Indigenous Times, award winning author, film maker and 2006 NAIDOC Person of the Year.

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