Britainology 28: Cricket feat Alan White
This might be one of the most inscrutably British things we've ever covered, and the fact is: Milo doesn't even know that much about it. So, to aid with understanding, we got Politics Home editor and cricket enthusiast Alan White (@aljwhite) to explain it to us. That doesn't necessarily mean Nate came away understanding it any more than before, but it was a fun discussion.
Comments (45)
One aspect that I think wasn’t touched on radio cricket commentary? Or cricket commentary in general. It’s quite fascinating and often highly entertaining bcos they have to be able to fill long gaps but then also keep up when the action heats up. Probably the only sport I’ve enjoyed listening to radio commentary of. Cricket is also a major source of entertainment for my half Aussie half English household. I usually support England bcos it’s fun to wind up my Aussie dad.
I wonder if Nate would have been interested to know that the first international cricket match was between USA & Canada.
The most leftwing major US sports team is probably the publicly owned Green Bay Packers. Not going to claim they are particularly lefty, but they are at least not billionaire owned and in a place with a strong labor culture.
with the noted exception of their current quarterback, but then again Rogers isn't long for this world
Wasn't there also a story about Shane Warne just casually chatting about seeing a movie (can't remember which one) in the middle of a match because there wqs just simply nothing else going on?
Dealing with the wild unpredictably of a ball (and the endless lore of complicated rules that go along with it) is what has led me to ditch all ball sports in favour of combat sports. At least when you watch Sumo or boxing, you know who's won, but one big guy has managed to knock out the other big guy. Ball sports feel like a giant Rube Goldberg machine by comparison
Nate talking about how there isn’t much overt politics in American sports is forgetting one major example; Texas Rangers owner George W. Bush in the early 90s, right before he ran for and was elected Governor.
It's surprising to me that, of all things, anyone would find the scoring in cricket difficult. One run per run, six for clearing the boundary on the full, four if it hits the ground first. And extras, I guess, but they're not a big part of the game and also not terrifically complex. There's plenty that really is confusing but the scoring itself is pretty basic and obvious.
I would love to hear Milo learn about the Houston Astro's sign-stealing scandal.
My one and only experience of live test match cricket was the 2017 boxing day ashes test, where I got heatstroke on an overcast day, and saw an incredible amount of drunk people ejected from my section - including the guy sitting next to me who then proceeded to call his mates from over in the members stand.
perfect cricket
basketball was invented in canada, nate. and as you can imagine, cricket is one of the least posh things ever in australia lol
the most right wing american sport would have to be MMA wouldnt it?
the most conspiratorially unhinged, almost certainly - but one of the biggest fan issues in MMA right now is supporting a fighters' union to pay non-star fighters properly, and rein in the cartoonishly hyper-capitalist boss (Dana White)...honestly I think the politics of MMA fans would be incredibly hard to summarise especially compared to the small upper-class in-group feel of something like Lacrosse
Not quite the same as throwing batteries, but the English rugby team refuse to play at the Millennium Stadium (home of the Welsh rugby team) with the roof closed, because the singing from the Welsh fans is so loud and psyches them out so much.
Milo's Scandinavian accent was hilarious
I'm Norwegian and I find it hilarious because it's either spot on and therefore funny or fake as hell but also very funny.
My very small college did an exhibition cricket match on parents’ weekend. They had to publish pamphlets to attempt to explain the sport to the various white Ohioans
Ackshually liking American Football is very cool and sexy Milo smdh
The first time I taught a seminar on Empire to mostly American students I made them read Beyond a Boundary. It completely baffled them, alas. But I agree with Alan that it is a marvelous book, and I'm not even much of a cricket fan.
Some years I had the students hate-read Niall Ferguson. The things I found made most sense of the British Empire that were accessible to US students were those where commodities were central: Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power; Sarah Rose's For All the Tea in China.
Loved this, and you barely touched on the politics and economics of the sport. Nate and Milo are getting their interview patter down to a tee. Regarding the drunkeness of cricket in the UK, this is something which has been industrialised over the last 30 years. You used to be able to bring your own and now you have to buy from inside the grounds as it has become a major source of revenue for the venues. So getting shit faced is frowned on but encouraged in a stupid piece of Briitsh duality. The irony is that the price of tickets has gone up about 5 times since I first started going, except for the county game. The County game you should have talked about, where most matches have the same viewership as ITV4 +1 @ 4am in the morning.
Some other sports which are often populated with the most insanely right wing ghouls which you guys didn't touch on: Tennis, sailing, skiing, golf, Formula 1 (shout out to the Well There's Your Problem ep on that), and certain shooting disciplines (especially benchrest shooting ooh boi).
Also fencing
There is cricket in America. About 11 or twelve years back I was attending the university of Oregon in Eugene. I was walking across campus, hungover, when I saw a flyer for a club cricket team. I was bored enough that I showed up that afternoon just to have a laugh. Somehow I ended up playing wicket keeper for three years and being the team manager. I was the only American born player. The rest of the team was mostly Pakistani and Indian grad students, a British professor, and a random Jamaican who was the head custodian of the local high school and was in no way affiliated with the university. We played against other teams, mostly from the greater Portland area. Most of those teams were made up of tech employees who had ended up working for HP, which has offices in Portland. It was a blast. I appreciated this episode, brought back fond memories of getting drilled in the ribs by a speed bowler.
l was once in a bar in France where a cricket game was thrown on. l turn and see the Australian l'd come in with staring at the tv, transfixed. Directly behind him was the other Australian l knew in town, staring at the tv, transfixed. Neither had noticed the other. (They didn't know each other, but the lack of situational awareness was hilarious).
Oregon actually has a 13 team league. I’m pretty close to about 3 pitches.
I think Lacrosse is the American posh sport or water polo. “I played water polo in college” is one of those sentences that instantly makes me suspect you’ve gotten away with at least one murder. That’s my barometer for poshness. Jai-alai seems pretty posh, but outside of Florida I don’t think anyone is really aware of it.
nah, Jai-Alai is niche in the sense that very few people follow it due to the fact the ability to gamble on other sports legally had become easier to do in the US over the past few decades. And there's a history of labor organizing amongst players - thanks in part to the largely Basque players importing a more... Basque sensibility to the frontons of Southern Florida to say the least.
Cricket from a South African point of view is what got me to like the game and watch more of it and more of the versions of it (test, odi, and so on). Guys sitting on a grassy knoll, shirtless, with half a watermelon worn as a hat and drinking copious amounts of beer and barbecued meats. It’s a nice weekend but then there is the dark fucked up stuff that is on the other side of that nice weekend.
I want to yell shit at every mention of baseball. Ball tampering is a thing in baseball. Notoriously. Spidertack, Vaseline, pine tar. Fuck
As an American fan of cricket (got sucked in by a video game) I’ve been anticipating this one. It’s always fun to watch England struggle against a former colony
Don Bradman?
I was hoping they would do this episode with Andy Zaltzman
I sympathize with the boys because I had cricket explained to me by drunk Welshmen in a bar in Poland. I still don't understand but it was fun.
There’s a pretty sizable South Asian diaspora in the US, and not surprisingly they love cricket. You can often see pickup games of cricket happening if you’re ever in areas with a South Asian population like in Queens or Edison, NJ. Apparently, they’re attempting to launch a T20 league in the US sometime soon.
Grew up in Edison and can confirm cricket in larger parks was very much a thing.
Shane Warne looks quite damn svelte compared to the likes of CC Sabathia, David Ortiz, or Prince Fielder. Hell, baseball’s most mythic figure once ate 20 hot dogs in one go.
I know you've already done poshness but you've got to do one on cursed posh brits absolute love of skiing
My only understanding of cricket comes from the third of whichever hitchhikers guide book so this is very illuminating
It is actually kind of funny to hear a Brit say that American sports aren't trying to export themselves in the same ways, given that NFL is trying incredibly hard to increase its British viewership. That's what the whole American football games at Wembley thing is about.
> MLB finals literally called World Series > claiming american sports aren't trying to export
Interesting stuff. Also, kudos on getting the most British-sounding mf to talk about the most British thing possible
Cricket really isn't that British. I guess it used to be very English (not British), but the modern game and the culture surrounding it owes more to Australia and India than it does to the country it was invented in. English cricket is a good lens to look at English society for a number of reasons and therefore it's a good topic for a Britainology episode... but yeah there's really nothing uniquely British about the modern sport.
I knew a guy who briefly joined a cricket club at Wright State University in Ohio. He expected to meet other nerdy anglophile types who wanted to learn the game, like him. It turned out the club was mostly Indian engineering students who were already very serious about cricket and he didn't quite fit in.