Cricket continues to move with times
The 24-year old English wicket-keeper (and Ashes hero) will not be in Bangalore this morning for the ICC World Cup clash with Ireland but this is a game which, despite its diminishing novelty value, still carries with it a triple threat of colonial intrigue.
If we allow it to, that is. Times are changing and cricket has been doing its bit for a while now.
In 1995, London-born film producer and cricket enthusiast, Katy Haber, who worked on Blade Runner and Deer Hunter among other notable movies, joined forces with homeless activist, Ted Hayes, to co-found the LA Krickets, a unique outlet for some of the city’s poorest and most violent individuals.
In June of 1996, the “Compton Homies and the Popz” were born. Their plan: take wickets and provide an alternative path away from the gangs, violence and prisons which were the destinies of every team member, two of whom haven’t made it. (In 2009, Jesse Cazarez — brother of team member Ricardo — was gunned down in a drive-by shooting when he was just 20 years old. It didn’t make a difference that he was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.)
On the bright side, Hayes, whose sons Isaac and Theo are on the team, believes the cricket etiquette of walk-don’t-argue has proved inspirational. “When someone mad-dogs (provokes) them, or has an attitude towards them, instead of mad-dogging back, which ends in violence and death, they have the discipline in their soul to say, ‘Nah, I’m walking’.”
Compton Cricket Club boasts that it is the only truly American-born cricket team in the world. They have won the British Cup twice in the LA Social Cricket League which comprises almost 20 teams composed of British, Pakistani, Australian, Indian and South African expats in the City of Angels.
They have also toured overseas — they’re just back from a tour to Australia — and it was during one of their tours of England that they crossed over to Northern Ireland and played a match against civil servants while also getting a flavour of hurling in 1999.
It was at a specially arranged meeting organised by the then Secretary of State Mo Mowlam that Hayes and his team brought out the ash and the willow and brought together opposing leaders in the throes of thrashing out a power-sharing agreement.
David Trimble was presented with a hurley and Gerry Adams a cricket bat. Two months later, November 29, a Northern Ireland Assembly was elected. Coincidence? Haber likes to think not, laughing as she remembers the image of Adams holding the “symbol of British supremacy in his hands”.
“I’m fully convinced that we accelerated the talks,” she said to me tongue-in-cheek over the phone on Sunday from her home in LA as she prepared to report on the Oscars for BBC radio that evening.
Haber sent me a scanned copy of a handwritten note from Louth’s newest TD dated October 7, 1999. “Ted, a chara,” it diligently opens in the slightly-old fashioned scrawl of the Sinn Féin President. He goes on to express his hopes that Hayes and his team enjoyed their visit to the North. “Martin McGuinness and I were very pleased to meet with you all. Our brief engagement livened up an otherwise dreary series of meetings.”
More evidence of the canny diplomacy of a Londoner who has lived in LA since 1971 was the moment when former England cricketer and Arsenal footballer in the days when that was possible, Denis Compton (1918-1997), thanked her for naming the team after him. “I didn’t have the heart to correct him,” she admits.
Disney bought the film rights to the story of the homeless cricketers who made up the LA Krickets but Haber doesn’t believe it will be made — however, the proceeds were split between the players nonetheless.
After an enjoyable chat with Haber about a story that merits far more than a column, I hung up before realising I’d forgotten one significant issue. I texted her briefly about today’s game in the subcontinent and thought no more.
A few hours later, she rang me as she navigated the Oscar traffic on her way to the BBC studios near the Kodak Theater. She was clearly confused by my text and sought clarification.
“I asked Gerry Adams whether or not Ireland had a cricket team and he told me ‘no’,” recalled the woman who brought the game to the unlikeliest of cities. I reassured her that we had a team and that technically Gerry Adams didn’t actually lie to her.
“Times have changed, haven’t they?”
JohnWRiordan
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