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Victims of discrimination? England hopefuls Ravi Bopara, Amjad Khan and Adil Rashid in 2009 (Photo: PA) |
What on earth is Newsnight thinking? I ask because last night, it aired what must be one of the most ludicrous items in recent memory.
On the night that Col Gaddafi’s regime was collapsing, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was about to taste the sweet air of liberty, Andy Coulson was revealed to have remained on the News International payroll and England had completed a historic 4-0 Test series whitewash against India, Newsnight’s editors decided to air a film accusing English cricket of, effectively, institutional racism.
Now, I know it must have been a struggle to come up with a new angle on this England team, and their grimly exhilarating pursuit of excellence. But the Newsnight film betrayed all the worst biases of the liberal intelligentsia. England, it claimed, have neglected the Asian community – despite the contribution to the game of (among others) Nasser Hussein, Ravi Bopara, Monty Panesar, Adil Rashid and Mark Ramprakash (of Indian ancestry by way of Guyana). There is, said the presenter, Sarfraz Manzoor of the Guardian, an entirely untapped talent pool of working-class Asians that is being kept out by the snooty English elite.
It’s a respectable point to make – but a rather strange one on such a day, and at such length. And the rest of the film’s content only made things worse. English cricket has the same attitude towards British Asians as there once was to black footballers, said Amjad Aziz, vice-chair of the (all-Asian) Birmingham Parks League: that they don’t have the aptitude, attitude or ability.
This was, palpably, nonsense – any England fan would kill to have a thousandth of the aptitude, attitude and ability of a Hussein, Panesar or Rashid. But then Aziz revealed that it wasn’t just Asians the team was lacking – it was Muslims. Devout Muslims.
“What we need, he said, “are some pioneers that will break through those barriers for us. The day we have some Hashim Amlas playing within the England team – and Hashim Amla is a devout Muslim, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t wear any sponsorship that reflects alcohol or gambling – the day we have that kind of player playing within the England team, that’s the day that we would have an integrated English cricket team that reflects all the diverse cultures that make up this wonderful land of ours.”
Next, Manzoor interviewed a couple of part-time cricketers who seemed to take it as a personal affront that the only Asian within the current XI, Ravi Bopara, is a fringe player. The suggestion almost seemed to be that some kind of affirmative action was needed to redress the England and Wales Cricket Board’s manifest selectorial failings.
What made me all the more annoyed with the Newsnight film was that I’d just come from a day at the Oval, char-broiling gently in the sunshine. Never has there been a more impeccably multicultural event – English and Indian fans sitting hugger-mugger in the stands, giving the same respect to a four from Mishra as a snorter from Broad.
At one point, two of the people in my row attempted to get competing chants going: “Come on, Sachin!”, “Come on, Swanny!”, only to catch each other’s eye and start cracking up. I even saw the most beautiful confounding of Lord Tebbit’s famous cricket test, when the guy in front of me in the queue tried to buy a replica India shirt, balked at the price, and bought an England strip instead.
To suggest to anyone in that crowd that English cricket doesn’t think Asians can cut it as cricketers – Asians like, oh, Tendulkar, or the impossibly impressive Rahul Dravid – would have been ridiculous. In the Newsnight discussion that followed the film, it was left to Scyld Berry of The Sunday Telegraph to make the obvious point – that yes, working-class Asians might be discriminated against, but so are working-class Anglo-Saxons.
It’s a point Berry made in a great piece for the paper recently: given the far greater facilities and resources available to public schools, it’s no surprise that they – and South Africans/Australians with British ancestry – furnish most of the players on the county circuit. It’s just the easy place to find your players, or at least your batsmen: bowling depends less on coaching and more on natural ability, which is perhaps why the England bowling unit is where the state-educated players are concentrated.
A film along those lines – which also highlighted the strenuous efforts administrators are making to redress the situation – might have been an appropriate counterpoint to the celebrations on the pitch at the Oval. As it was, knee-jerk political correctness appears to have got the better of basic editorial common sense.
By: Robert colvile
On the night that Col Gaddafi’s regime was collapsing, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was about to taste the sweet air of liberty, Andy Coulson was revealed to have remained on the News International payroll and England had completed a historic 4-0 Test series whitewash against India, Newsnight’s editors decided to air a film accusing English cricket of, effectively, institutional racism.
Now, I know it must have been a struggle to come up with a new angle on this England team, and their grimly exhilarating pursuit of excellence. But the Newsnight film betrayed all the worst biases of the liberal intelligentsia. England, it claimed, have neglected the Asian community – despite the contribution to the game of (among others) Nasser Hussein, Ravi Bopara, Monty Panesar, Adil Rashid and Mark Ramprakash (of Indian ancestry by way of Guyana). There is, said the presenter, Sarfraz Manzoor of the Guardian, an entirely untapped talent pool of working-class Asians that is being kept out by the snooty English elite.
It’s a respectable point to make – but a rather strange one on such a day, and at such length. And the rest of the film’s content only made things worse. English cricket has the same attitude towards British Asians as there once was to black footballers, said Amjad Aziz, vice-chair of the (all-Asian) Birmingham Parks League: that they don’t have the aptitude, attitude or ability.
This was, palpably, nonsense – any England fan would kill to have a thousandth of the aptitude, attitude and ability of a Hussein, Panesar or Rashid. But then Aziz revealed that it wasn’t just Asians the team was lacking – it was Muslims. Devout Muslims.
“What we need, he said, “are some pioneers that will break through those barriers for us. The day we have some Hashim Amlas playing within the England team – and Hashim Amla is a devout Muslim, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t wear any sponsorship that reflects alcohol or gambling – the day we have that kind of player playing within the England team, that’s the day that we would have an integrated English cricket team that reflects all the diverse cultures that make up this wonderful land of ours.”
Next, Manzoor interviewed a couple of part-time cricketers who seemed to take it as a personal affront that the only Asian within the current XI, Ravi Bopara, is a fringe player. The suggestion almost seemed to be that some kind of affirmative action was needed to redress the England and Wales Cricket Board’s manifest selectorial failings.
What made me all the more annoyed with the Newsnight film was that I’d just come from a day at the Oval, char-broiling gently in the sunshine. Never has there been a more impeccably multicultural event – English and Indian fans sitting hugger-mugger in the stands, giving the same respect to a four from Mishra as a snorter from Broad.
At one point, two of the people in my row attempted to get competing chants going: “Come on, Sachin!”, “Come on, Swanny!”, only to catch each other’s eye and start cracking up. I even saw the most beautiful confounding of Lord Tebbit’s famous cricket test, when the guy in front of me in the queue tried to buy a replica India shirt, balked at the price, and bought an England strip instead.
To suggest to anyone in that crowd that English cricket doesn’t think Asians can cut it as cricketers – Asians like, oh, Tendulkar, or the impossibly impressive Rahul Dravid – would have been ridiculous. In the Newsnight discussion that followed the film, it was left to Scyld Berry of The Sunday Telegraph to make the obvious point – that yes, working-class Asians might be discriminated against, but so are working-class Anglo-Saxons.
It’s a point Berry made in a great piece for the paper recently: given the far greater facilities and resources available to public schools, it’s no surprise that they – and South Africans/Australians with British ancestry – furnish most of the players on the county circuit. It’s just the easy place to find your players, or at least your batsmen: bowling depends less on coaching and more on natural ability, which is perhaps why the England bowling unit is where the state-educated players are concentrated.
A film along those lines – which also highlighted the strenuous efforts administrators are making to redress the situation – might have been an appropriate counterpoint to the celebrations on the pitch at the Oval. As it was, knee-jerk political correctness appears to have got the better of basic editorial common sense.
By: Robert colvile
Robert Colvile is Comment Editor of The Sunday Telegraph and
an editor and leader writer on The Daily Telegraph. He is @rcolvile on Twitter.
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