‘A carnival of cricket?’: The cricket world cup, ‘race’ and the politics of carnival

The 1999 Cricket World Cup will be 'A Carnival of Cricket' -with this application form you too can join the Carnival. The adoption of carnival imagery by the English Cricket Board to market the World Cup of 1999 was savagely ironic. International cricket had grown out of the British Empire where it had been, among other things, a site of struggle, on which colonial peoples, especially in India and the Caribbean, sought to beat the British at 'their own' game. After the Second World War, various Test-playing colonies successively accomplished this aim and did so with their own styles of cricket. None was more spectacular in this regard than the West Indies, where cricket culture was most obviously touched by elements of carnival. Little was made by the British press of England's first defeat by the West Indies (at Lords in 1950), but since the 1960s English cricket has been widely perceived to be in crisis and increasingly characterized by malign and gloomy introspection. English cricket officials and commentators were wont by the 1980s to view the ex-colonial teams with suspicion and hostility: the 'real quick' fast bowlers of the West Indies were seen as 'intimidators', their Pakistani counterparts as ball tampering 'cheats' and so on. Most importantly, in this context, an inward looking nationalism entered English cricket discourse, bringing with it a preoccupation with 'the enemy within'. Within cricket there were mutterings about 'too many overseas players' in the county championship, whilst in 1995 the prestigious Wisden Cricket Monthly gave an obscure malcontent called Robert Henderson a platform from which to argue that the England team was failing because too many of its members were born abroad. Beyond the game itself, in 1990, the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit invoked an image of black cricketlovers from all over South London flocking to the Kennington Oval to see the West Indies play England. 'Which side', he had asked in sinister fashion, 'Do they cheer for?'. Furthermore, throughout this period the banners,