Imposing their will* By Fazeer Mohammed

Imposing their will*
Published on Feb 7, 2016, 7:58 pm AST
By Fazeer Mohammed


ECSTATIC: West Indies Under-19s celebrate their two-run victory over Zimbabwe in Chittagong, Bangladesh, last Tuesday.


“They devised a game by which they could always rule, they could always rule.”
This second part of the opening line of David Rudder’s 1994 tribute “Here come the West Indies” helps us to understand why so much of our understanding and appreciation of cricket, sport in general, and indeed our overall value systems in relation to almost every aspect of our post-colonial lives, is determined by our former political masters.
Love it or loathe it, English is our language. Nuanced by dialect and embellished (or abbreviated) by modern influences, it remains our primary form of communication. So it’s inevitable that cricket, born and nurtured in England before it was planted, took root and flourished in what was then the Empire over which the sun never set, would be broadly defined by values and conventions that are quintessentially English.