American Author Joseph O’Neill

As a teenager, O’Neill played cricket for the Netherlands’ under-19 side. He kept up the sport in England and, when he came to New York, he set about looking for a game. Eventually he called up the Staten Island cricket club. ‘Joe,’ asked the club official, ‘are you a white man?’ ‘Yes,’ O’Neill replied. ‘Well,’ said the official, ‘you better pack a helmet.’

As with Hans, O’Neill’s teammates were largely Asian and West Indian. Though it was a ‘recreational decision’ to take up cricket, he soon realised that he’d stumbled across a promising milieu for a novel. ‘But I knew that I would have to spend another year or two penetrating the closed world of New York cricket.’

Did he think he’d also located a suitable fictional arena in which to investigate the ‘post-colonial’ tensions to which Wood had referred?

‘I think you sense the metaphorical resonance of what you’re writing without analysing it too carefully,’ says O’Neill. ‘That leads you down dead ends. You stop imagining things and start writing towards these themes. I think if you’re writing about cricket you’re obviously writing about power, because cricket is such a loaded sport, much more so than soccer. And in this country it’s a sport of powerlessness.’

One of O’Neill’s fellow cricketers at the Staten Island cricket club is Habib Rehman, a 43-year-old taxi driver originally from Pakistan. ‘He’s my brother,’ Habib told me outside the Chelsea Hotel. ‘I call myself half-Irish and he calls himself half-Pakistani.’ Habib hadn’t read Netherland. He said he was waiting for an Urdu translation.

Habib took us out to Brooklyn in his cab to see some of the places O’Neill describes in his book. It was a Friday and he had come straight from the mosque. ‘I love Brooklyn,’ he told me. He reeled off the street names and districts as if they were magical legends – Flatbush, Prospect Park, Brooklyn Heights – and sung the praises of the rich mix of people on the streets. ‘Here,’ he said, pointing out one parade of shops, ‘they’re West Indian. Those women,’ he said of an approaching group of hijabis, ‘they’re Punjabi, like me. And those there,’ gesturing towards some women in brightly coloured saris, ‘they’re from Bangladesh.’

He took obvious pride in the multicultural make-up of his adopted home in a way, it struck me, that is unusual in Britain. In one sense, he occupied the margins of American life, working the nightshift in a taxi, playing cricket beyond the boundaries of fashionable Manhattan, and yet he seemed enthusiastic about his life prospects. Chuck Ramkissoon, too, is a man who knows that he is estranged from conventional American success and yet he retains an engaging, if perhaps misplaced, optimism about the way forward.

O’Neill showed me a large wooden house in the classic American suburban mould in one of the more leafy districts of Brooklyn. It was an attractive home, full of space and light and horse chestnut trees. O’Neill and his family had lived here for a while during a hiatus away from the Chelsea Hotel. But they sold up and moved back to the hotel because Singer felt cut off from the action of Manhattan.

Perhaps it’s too melodramatic to call a change of neighbourhood a crisis of identity, but if Netherland has a point it’s that our surroundings shape who we are and how we feel. And the more detached we are from our environment, the more disengaged we become from ourselves. For Hans, this realisation hits home during a bizarre date with a bewitching young woman who wants to be thrashed. He glimpses a reflection of himself wielding his belt and suddenly he feels a sadness ‘produced when the mirroring world no longer offers a surface in which one may recognise one’s true likeness’.

Later, he’s taken to the graveyard of the 18th-century Dutch reform church in Brooklyn. Chuck expects Hans to experience some kind of tribal connection among his dead countrymen. But he feels nothing. Looking at the headstones, with names like Jansen, van Dam and de Jong, Hans asks: ‘What was one supposed to do with this information?’

It’s an interesting question because O’Neill knows how ghosts from the past can weigh on the living. In Blood-Dark Track, the memoir he published shortly before 9/11, he tells the story of his Turkish grandfather who was imprisoned by the British during the Second World War, and that of his Irish grandfather who was jailed at the same time for being a member of the IRA. Among other things, it’s a fascinating exploration of familial and national identity. Towards the end of the book, during an argument with his Republican uncle, O’Neill becomes ‘furious’ that his patriotism and Irish nationality is brought into question.

Nowadays, he seems to have come to terms with his rootless status. Indeed, he recognises its advantages. ‘You don’t have a functioning substantial identity as a writer,’ he says, as we follow in Hans’s footsteps in the graveyard of the Dutch church. ‘You have a notional identity… I used to be quite exercised by nationality, but really I was an early member of the global flotsam. And if you stop thinking in terms of countries, you’re left with cities.’

If he thinks of another city, it is London, which he describes as a ‘fantastic place’. But he also harbours reservations about the narrowness of vision it can impose. Netherland makes a number of references to the temporal currents that Fitzgerald writes of in Gatsby, so it is surely worth noting when Hans observes: ‘Londoners remain in the business of rowing their boats gently down the stream.’

‘It’s a nihilistic thing,’ says O’Neill, when I ask about this sentence. ‘It’s about shrinking the significance of their achievements. People find satisfaction in shrinking their lives. It’s an English recipe for living. Whereas here [in New York] there is in the air an almost inexhaustible sense of possibility.’

Perhaps it says something about the endlessly expanding nature of American horizons that just recently O’Neill has begun to think Chuck’s doomed scheme to popularise cricket in the States, which represents futility in the novel, may yet come to fruition in the real world. ‘I mean,’ says O’Neill, ‘it would surprise me still, but it’s now within the bounds of imagination.’

Americans falling for cricket? That sounds a little far-fetched to my ears. Almost as incredible, in fact, as a novel about cricket becoming an American bestseller.

Florida unlikely to host Windies domestic ODIs

West Indies’ domestic one-day tournament is unlikely to take place in Florida as originally planned. The effects of hurricane-related weather have severely hampered preparations at the purpose-built stadium in Broward County, where the matches were planned.

“The backup was to have it in the Caribbean and I’ve asked my staff to do just that in case it falls through,” said Donald Peters, the West Indies board chief executive.

Peters said the board and the sponsors were “having problems” with the proposed dates in November that were undermined following heavy rains in the area associated with hurricanes Gustav and Hannah.

“They still want to do it and have given us alternative dates for next year but this is a problem,” Peters said. “This is the hurricane season and perhaps people weren’t thinking when they selected the dates initially.”

It is the first time any WICB-sanctioned event would have been staged outside the Caribbean. The cricket culture is strong among the sizeable Caribbean expatriate communities in Florida. Broward County put forward an unsuccessful bid to host a group stage of last year’s World Cup and were awarded the 2008 one-day tournament by the WICB after an American company came forward to replace KFC, which did not renew its three-year sponsorship agreement.

Since the American sponsor is interested in backing the tournament only if held in Florida, Peters said the WICB was now trying to source an alternative. Plans to include an official United States Cricket Association (USCA) team will also fall through should Broward County be eliminated.

How premier inter-leagues took over USA

Official matches between the 23 cricket leagues in the USA, called “inter-league matches” by cricketers in the country, have increased from 11 to more than 40 in just three years – from 2005 when the term first began to be noticed, to today when almost every US cricketer knows what it is supposed to mean.

Until recently, an “inter-league” event in US cricket was simply a fixture that was off the regular-season league schedules of competitive matches, but described some non-cricket tradition of a local kind. A country fair in Idaho with hayrides and cowbells, where local South Asians are regularly invited to showcase their “exotic” curries, saris and cricket skills. An Indo-Pakistani Independence Day where South Asians from neighbouring cricket leagues meet in conviviality to celebrate what they have in common.

Or “international” matches with neighbouring cross-border leagues, which always means Canada; Mexico does not count because Mexicans have not learnt to play cricket. Showcase events to honour (some would say “placate”) a sponsor with deep pockets, so as to keep his subsidies flowing. The “inter-league” aspect of these events was an indirect way to emphasize that cricket was not just a matter of hard fighting, head-to-head confrontation and win-or-lose attitudes – there was room for people to reach across league boundaries in fellowship and fun-and-games that was just–well, cricket.

Adding “premier” to “inter-league” adds a peculiarly American meaning to the word. The two terms used together make special sense in this country, because of the way cricket has developed in the United States.

It all goes back to the USA Cricket Association, or USACA, which wrote itself a constitution and got it approved by the International Cricket Council (ICC). For the first time, definitions were applied and standards were set, and enforced; A cricket league had to have at least eight teams to call itself a “recognized US league”. The number of cricket associations in the USA went from a “probable” 600 to a “recognized” 200 as the constitution took hold – the “unrecognized” leagues did not disappear, of course, they merely refused to file the papers required by the USACA to “prove” their bona fides, and went on playing cricket on their own terms.

The “recognizability” issue was to have an unfortunate consequence in US cricket. It marked the beginnings of a caste system, with an elite group of cricketers occupying the upper tier, and a much larger number who lived in the same neighborhoods in isolated clusters which were subdivided along linguistic or familial lines. For example, I came across a cricket team where all the players were named “Mathur”, and lived next to a team of “Patels”; the Mathurs were Hindi-speaking, the Patels spoke Gujarati, and they played each other with a gusto that must have rivalled the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys in the Kentucky Highlands of the USA – though, fortunately, with a lot less bloodshed.

The elite cricketers wasted no time in getting things under control. Carrying the banner of the USACA (“we represent an All-American organization, you know”), they talked to local and city officials, found grounds large enough to meet the needs of competitive cricket, helped out with laying pitches and setting up tents for makeshift pavilions, and even brought lawnmowers and rollers from their gardens to supplement the resources of the Park maintenance crews. This was not always as easy as it sounds; there was opposition from Little League, co-ed and recreational softball, and soccer folks who felt their spaces were being encroached upon, and were very vocal in their opposition at City Council meetings. In the end, though, most of the elite cricketers were able to reach a modus vivendi with their new neighbours, who accepted them as fellow-citizens of an exotic variety.

Here is when, and where, the term “premier” came into common use, and began to produce dividends for US Cricket.

As explained earlier, the 1991 USACA Constitution had made it possible, for the first time, to compare cricket leagues across the USA by standards of performance. The word “premier” was the key to the process.

How it works is best illustrated by the following example.

Suppose you are looking at two cricket leagues, one a 15-team league in Wyoming and the other a 50-team one in Connecticut.

The Wyoming league, with 15 teams, could call a team officially drawn from its 15-member clubs its “premier” team.

Let us say that the Connecticut league has four divisions, each with 12 teams. A team drawn mostly from its top division but containing the best players from the lower divisions would be called Connecticut’s “premier” team.

The theory is that the best “premier” players from Wyoming could be as good as the best from Connecticut. This has been found to be true to a surprising degree in US cricket – some of the best players in Team USA hail from the unlikeliest small leagues in the country.

But why are “premier inter-league” players becoming so important now, in 2008? What makes them so important today?

The simple answer is that, in 2008, “premier inter-league cricket” is the only game in town. The official USA team, having been unceremoniously shoved out of international cricket in Jersey, can do little except cool its heels in the Associate Member basement for now. The top Team USA players, like Steve Massiah of New York and Niraj Shah or Sushil Nadkarni of Texas, could give up on the USACA altogether, and switch to alternatives like CricketAmerica, knowing that they would be called back when, and where, a national USA team can take to the field again.

But most of the lesser members of the erstwhile USA team, being less sure of their places, want to hang around the ICC arenas of international cricket, hoping for a renewed use of their talents. Meanwhile, if they are to stay within the USACA-defined zone of ICC-sanctioned cricket, “Premier inter-league cricket” provides the best, in fact the only, current opportunity.

But, once fully established, could “premier inter-league cricket” end up excluding itself, or being excluded from, playing against countries without recognized “premier leagues”? Cayman Islands, for example, or St Kitts and Nevis, do not yet have premier leagues as USACA and ICC have defined them. Many Affiliate members in the Caribbean have simply not established premier leagues of their own. Shouldn’t the USA be playing such teams anyway, with the hope of encouraging them?

There is another danger lurking in the wings of US cricket. It too involves the use of the “premier inter-league cricket” concept, but in a negative and sinister way.

As Martin Williamson, Executive Editor of Cricinfo, has been pointing out for some time, a lot of money will be coming into the USA to promote domestic cricket. Opportunists (called “carpetbaggers” in an earlier era) are already hovering around to take advantage of this bonanza. “Premier inter-league cricket” could become the talking point around which the deals and the trade-offs will be argued. Fortunes could be won or lost on which interpretation will be promoted by adept lawyers, and “premier inter-league cricket”; could become an official orthodoxy, setting the tone for US Cricket for the next decade.

Not bad, one might say, for a term which had been first used to describe US Cricket’s search of extended meanings. It successfully brought together what had been a haphazard assortment of cricket – playing clusters, and gave them a uniquely American shape and identity.

One day, it may even be said that a truly American cricket had been born out of the transplanted seeds brought in by expatriates, and the next generation of US cricketers is already looking at world cricket with homegrown eyes. If this is indeed the case. “Premier inter-league cricket” could well be the unifying theme for today’s US cricket, and it is likely to become more so in the years ahead.

Unbeaten Canada romp to Under-15 title

Canada were crowned Under-15 Americas Champions in Bermuda after predictably taking care of a final-day victory against the Cayman Islands at the Police Field. By crushing the luckless Cayman Islands in ruthless fashion, Canada ended the week unbeaten and deserved winners of the tournament.

The Cayman Islands decision to bat first did not work out as planned as they were bundled out for a paltry 33 in just 15.3 overs, then Canada only needed 2.3 overs to knock off the runs and celebrate their championship.

Canada’s Axay Patel returned extraordinary figures of 6-4-4-6, and his six-wicket haul deservedly earned him the Player-of-the-Match award. Not far behind was skipper Nitish Kumar, who continued his fine bowling form and took his total wicket haul to 16 by taking 4 for 8 in 4.3 overs. In what thus became a straight shoot-out for second place at the National Sports Centre, USA comfortably beat a disappointing Bermuda to relegate the hosts to third place. After being out in to bat, USA captain Abhijit Joshi once again showed his class with his third half-century of the event, making 68 off 104 balls.

In fact his involvement with two big partnerships virtually took the game away from Bermuda at the outset. Fellow opener Vikram Valluri made a brilliant 51 off 57 balls, with six fours and a six, as together Joshi and Valluri got the innings to the ideal start with a 97-run partnership. More was to come in the shape of Player of the Match Steven Taylor, who made a sparkling 65 off only 61 balls, with 9 fours and a six, and contributed to an entertaining second-wicket partnership of 113. USA eventually finished on a daunting 236 for 7 in their 40 overs, while for Bermuda only Tre Govia had relative success with the ball in taking 3 for 39 in 7 overs. Edward DeSilva weighed in with 2 for 28 in 5 overs.

In reply, Bermuda never gained any momentum, and apart from a stylish 39 from Greg Maybury, an innings compiled off 53 balls with five fours, no other Bermuda batsman could gain any real advantage over the USA bowling attack, with the spinners once again to the fore. Andrew Ajodhi took 3 for 34 in 8 overs, while Krishneal Goel took 2 for 8 in 4 overs, and Waqas Shah 2 for 25 in 5 overs, as Bermuda succumbed for 126 all out in 33.1 overs and defeat by 110 runs.

The Bermuda Development XI clinched a credible fourth place with a resounding win over the Bahamas at Bailey’s Bay. Choosing to bowl first, the Development XI routed the Bahamas for 66 in 27.5 overs, and were it not for a resolute 20 not out (45 balls, 2 fours) from No. 3 Turan Brown, as well as 26 wides, it could have been much worse.

Best of the Bermuda bowlers was Tre Manders, with 3 for 16 in 7 overs, with all other six bowlers used taking a wicket apiece. The Development XI needed only 7.4 overs to reach their target, with Player of the Match Lateef Trott making an explosive undefeated 41 off only 29 balls.

1. Canada
2. United States
3. Bermuda
4. Bermuda Development XI
5. Cayman Islands
6. Bahamas

Can Americans learn to love cricket?

An article from the English Times newspaper:

“The New York Cricket Club was a splendid idea,” one of the peripheral characters says in Joseph O’Neill’s engaging, poignant, subtle novel Netherland, recently nominated for this year’s Man Booker prize. “But would the project have worked? No. There’s a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket.”

Of the central figure in the book whose “splendid idea” it was he adds: “He wanted to take the game to the Americans. He wanted to expand the operation, get them watching it, playing it. Start a whole cricketing revolution. My idea was different. My idea was, you don’t need America. Why would you? You have the TV, internet markets in India, in England. These days that’s plenty. America? Not relevant. You put the stadium there and you’re done. Finito la musica.”

Well, there is a cricket stadium in Florida now, purpose built, too. New interest in the game sparked by the rapid sales of Netherland and the recent reinstatement of the United States as an ICC member after a period of suspension mean that, not for the first time, there is an opportunity for cricket in the United States. The dream for some, in fact as well as in fiction, is that it could expand in a dramatic way. Americans, after all, have been toying with the game since the days of W.G. Grace when Philadelphia was a centre of the game and J.Barton King one of the world’s great fast bowlers.

Had America remained a British colony for as long as India, they would be playing Test cricket these days. After all, the fixture between the US and Canada predates those between England and Australia. The emergence into public consciousness of Allen Stanford, the Texan, is one indication that a fair wind may again be blowing for cricket in the US, even if his theatre is Antigua. But O’Neill knows much better than Stanford the real nature of cricket on the other side of the Atlantic and particularly in New York, where he lives, a barrister turned full-time author, married to the fashion editor for Vogue magazine.

Son of an Irish building constructor and English mother, he was brought up in the Netherlands, where he learnt cricket at The Hague (the narrator of his novel is Dutch). He was educated in England and sounds English, although he can switch to Irish in a twinkling if you mention it. He is so besotted by cricket that he plays it with a passion in conditions far removed from the pristine tidiness of the Cambridge college grounds on which he represented the Crusaders, the University second team, in the early 1980s.

Yet there is a link between cricket in Cambridge and New York, to judge from his description of seven or eight games being played on the same afternoon in the same park, much as used to be the case at Parker’s Piece when Jack Hobbs was a boy growing up near Fenner’s. In O’Neill’s New York, matches have to wait for softball games to finish and someone has painted a “rivalrous” baseball diamond in a corner of Walker Park.

But the joyous family participation of the opposing team from St Kitts in a match against his Dutch narrator’s team composed otherwise of men from Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka has the resounding sound of authenticity.

The Dutchman, schooled on a left-elbow technique, eventually learns that batting in New York requires courage, a good eye and the muscle power to lift the ball over a thickly grassed outfield. The Twenty20 approach, in fact, which is not inappropriate. “There are some Antiguans who have played Twenty20 in the Stanford tournament in our league and we’ve got lots of ex or semi-pro players,” O’Neill told me. “We are desperate for some of the Stanford action here. There’s definitely scope for a small cricket stadium in New York. Mind you, I’m a bit sceptical about the way that the ECB have got into bed with Stanford and his money with such desperate eagerness.”

O’Neill arrived in New York in 1998. “The first thing I did was to find somewhere to play,” he said. “I was put in touch with a Pakistani who was trying to build a cricket stadium. I ended up at Staten Island CC, which, of course, is a historic club. We won our first league match last week, which was a relief.” His enthusiasm brings to mind the lines of Jeff Cloves, the poet, on park cricketers everywhere: “We are cricketers here, and we care, we care.”

The United States of America Cricket Association (USACA) was reinstated by the ICC in April under the presidency of the evocatively named Gladstone Dainty, having been suspended in 2007 because grants from the world’s governing body kept disappearing without trace and no unified American body could survive internal rivalries in so vast a country.

Matthew Kennedy, the ICC’s development manager, who has seen the number of cricketers in the non-Test countries more than double in the past five years, is guardedly optimistic. “We are looking at this as a fresh start and I’m hoping that all those administrators concerned can and will successfully unite and lead US cricket development into a period of positive progression,” he said. “The ICC sees the appointment of a chief executive of the USACA as a vital priority. The development programme will work hard to encourage proper budgeting and planning. With nearly three times more senior cricket teams than all other non-Test nations, there is real potential for success. On the field the ICC World Cricket League gives the opportunity for the US team to move out of division five and break into the top ten associate members within the next two years or so. If they can do this, it will bring even greater ICC attention and funding.”

But O’Neill does not underestimate the difficulties. “There are sufficient young players and although it will never overtake baseball, there is sufficient of a cricket culture for the US to become at least the equivalent of, say, Kenya,” he said. “But the game is divided regionally. We need some disinterested administrators who are not in it for themselves.”

Above: The members of the St. George Cricket Club pose for a photo in 1861 in New York City

Cricket Cracks New York Public Schools

For those of us who grew up with the American pastime of baseball, cricket can be a confusing game. For immigrants from places like Guyana, the Caribbean islands, India and Pakistan, cricket is a way of life. “I was born in India, I’ve been playing for a long time,” says Sohom Datta, a senior at Stuyvesant High School who helped start his school’s cricket team.

But when families move to the United States, kids end up playing American sports like basketball and football in school.

“My favorite quote about that is that when Indian kids come to Britain, they’re still cricket crazy. When they go to America, they forget about cricket,” says Datta. “That stuck with me.”

That is quickly changing. The New York Department of Education introduced cricket into the public school system and the response was tremendous. It’s only the first season, but the varsity league is already in full swing. Teams signed up from Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens.

As in baseball, there are bats and balls, but no bases to be found. Instead, the batters run back and forth between “stumps.” The pitchers are called “bowlers.” They try to knock little wooden “bails” off the “wickets” — three wooden sticks stuck in the ground.

Several kids in the league have never played before, but they say they’re having blast learning an unconventional sport.

New cricket ground in Central Texas

Saturday June 21^st, 2008 – Grand opening of a new cricket ground in Central Texas.

Shortly before bowling the first ball on the Pflugerville ground, Travis County Commissioner Sarah Eckhardt cuts the ribbon, assisted by her family and several of the Travis County staff who built the ground.

Thanking her and the county team are USACA Treasurer, John Thickett (left) and the Central Texas Cricket League President Ram Narayan (right).

The Pflugerville ground is one of two new Central Texas grounds scheduled to open in 2008. Sincere thanks go to the many folks who contributed to the outstanding new ground.

Florida invests in new ground

Florida is to embark on an ambitious plan to build a state of the art ground in the Boca Raton and Delray Beach area by November.

 

The plans are bankrolled by Cricket Council USA (CCUSA) – a management organisation in charge of cricket in Florida – and come on the back of a successful Twenty20 tournament held on July 4.

“Given the success of the historic MAQ T20 International Cricket Tournament…we believe that South Florida possesses the amenities, good year-round weather and a diverse population that will enable the area to become the hub of cricket in the United States,” said Mahammad “MAQ” Qureshi, CCUSA chairman.

The ground will reportedly meet international standards so that local, national and international tournament could be staged there, and it will eventually become the home of the USA cricket academy.

“With proper coaching, conditioning and nutrition along with the outstanding training facility, we believe that the aspiring US Cricket Players will be able to compete on the international stage against the best cricketers in the world,” Qureshi said. “That’s CCUSA’s goal. We have the passion, resources and the will to make it happen.”