Benjamin Golby
“Why did Pat Cummins return to an empty airport after Australia won the World Cup?”
“Why do Australians boo David Warner?”
“Do Australians not like cricket? How? They’re the best at it.”
These are questions I am constantly asked when I am in India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka.
Southasians struggle to fathom Australian customs of following cricket. For a long time in Australia, Subcontinental cricket was a faraway thing, local views of it marked often by disinterest and sometimes by distaste. That has changed profoundly during this century. Indian cricket now makes the fortunes of cricket players and cricket administrations. And the Indian national men’s team regularly beats its international counterparts. Still, the regard that the Australian cricket establishment feels for Indian cricket has not spread to Australia’s general public.
This disconnect is liable to change this southern summer with the Indian men’s team’s five-Test tour of Australia: a marquee event running from November to January, and the first five-Test series between the two in the modern era. The series promises to be a commercial bonanza – the first of many such, administrators hope – and a potentially meaningful challenge for cricket-watching Australia.
In the opening Test, concluded on 25 November, we saw a different kind of cricket from previous encounters between teams. For one, India decimated Australia in Perth through fast bowling – Australia’s own area of expertise, Jasprit Bumrah proving once again to be among the best and most dangerous bowlers on the planet. Beyond this, we saw a cultural shift take shape around the game. White commentators and pundits were deferential to the Indian team and their Subcontinental media counterparts, sometimes even obsequious. In part, this was a reaction borne out of their frustration at Australia’s failure; but it also evidenced a deeper, insidious flattery of India. Equally noticeable were the Indian supporters in attendance – not only those who were flashed up on television screens, but an entire assembly that made its presence audible, screaming for India when the Australian supporters were stunned silent. Indians are now unafraid to be themselves in Australia, where they would have been restrained before.
India and Australia have drawn close during these past decades geopolitically, economically, and – through migration – culturally. However, for the average Australian, opening up to Southasia has been a slow, incomplete business. An Indian cricket side that can command respect and warrant this full-summer billing will not only give significance to the prize at stake – the Border-Gavaskar Trophy – it will also inform Australian thinking about India and the Subcontinent at large, and direct recognition to Australia’s surging Southasian community.
A cricket reader might wonder what I mean when I say “an Indian cricket side that can command respect.” After all, India has beaten Australia in each of their last four Test series. I mean that the average Australian does not yet esteem India as a sporting rival on par with England, or regard the Border-Gavaskar Trophy as an honour as exceptional as the Ashes.
Australians have a singular adoration for the Ashes, the Test series contested between England and Australia. That fixation is mingled with, and fed by, contempt for the English in cricket. The Ashes has a deep culture that cannot be confected for the Border-Gavaskar Trophy – no matter the collective will or convincing reasons of the cricketing world’s governing powers. For two decades India has been far more competitive than England in Australia, but the contest is only partially what Australia’s cricket fans appreciate; while Australians relish 5-0 whitewashes against England, should India fail to contend this summer, the elongated series will be derided as hollow moneymaking.
Should India continue to meet Australia in cricketing intensity or, better yet, with the domination on display in the first Test, profound things could happen. The Border-Gavaskar Trophy can grow in relevance. The pride, joy and arrogance that we saw in Indians fans the other week in Perth will continue to swell. Australia will have a very different spectator group inhabiting her stadiums in voluble numbers. And, most peculiar among sights, white people being humble to Indians, craven even, acknowledging their power and money at least in this game.
Australians are largely oblivious of their cricket team’s history of touring the Subcontinent. In the Australian mind, Southasia is fabled for heat, discomfort, sickness and unpalatable food. To accept the Border-Gavaskar as a consequential series anywhere near equal to the Ashes, let alone the premier contest in cricket, they need a cricketing circumstance to command their attention.
Dean Jones suggested that such a moment occurred in 1986, when the two sides tied a Test in Madras and the Australian cricketing veteran starred on that occasion. “We had never really had a cricket match that defined the two countries’ relationship,” Jones said to the Cricket Monthly in 2013, ahead of an Australia tour of India. “We were the first Australian team that really enjoyed going to India – so much so that we made special efforts to get involved in their culture … We really enjoyed the people and the food and we started to get on. Every other Australian team had said, ‘You’re going to get sick, there’s millions of people, it’s hard work, the grounds are awful and they’ll turn square.’”
If anything, though, the physical drama of that match – the exhausted, dehydrated Jones hospitalised and on a drip – underlined for Australian spectators the foreignness and sense of fear around India. What can now be recognised as a pivotal moment in the countries’ competitive history came too early in the evolution of Australia’s outlook on the Subcontinent to ignite a sporting grudge. Australians need something more immediate than Madras, something more galling than the Gabba – where an Indian comeback in 2021 handed Australia their first ever Test defeat at the Brisbane ground – to see this contest with India with the same rivalry and delight as the Ashes.
AUSTRALIA’S FIRST TOUR of India took place in the 1930s, before the Subcontinent threw off the British colonial yoke. It was privately organised, financed by a maharaja and was not endorsed by the Australian Cricket Board, which saw zero value in cricket relations with India. Australians themselves did not pay attention.
The first official series between the two countries, staged in Australia in 1947–1948, saw a stunned Indian side, its quality literally halved by Partition, mauled by Don Bradman’s Invincibles. India’s failure to attract Australian crowds and a general disinterest in the match-up meant that 20 years would pass before another disappointing tour. It was another decade after that before the next contest. It was not until this century that India became regularly fixtured in Australia.
Twenty-one years ago, a confident Indian side under an assertive Sourav Ganguly drew the Border-Gavaskar series in Australia. India has played competitively in Australia ever since. There is dawning cognisance among Australians of India as a worthy rival. India today has first-rate fast bowlers, where earlier it had few. It is a team with grit; one that wins even when it is hard; one with not just a few great batters but wondrous depth of them; one that functions as a unit rather than a collection of lone hands.
How could cricket lovers not follow the 2020–2021 Border-Gavaskar series without careering through the drama? India collapsed at Adelaide – all out for 36. It then made a stunning comeback in the next Test, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). In the third match, at Sydney, Ravichandran Ashwin and Hanuma Vihari mounted an improbable batting defence to snatch a draw. And then came India’s iconic victory at the Gabba, where it won the series with just three overs left. I wasn’t the only one making giddy phone calls to friends, elated by the fancy and marvel of Test cricket.
Yet, during that hot summer, I saw Australians tune out. The country was unchanged, unmoved, by one of the defining moments in Indian cricket. No casual cricket conversation was to be had. No one was watching. Rishabh Pant no sooner took the series for India than the Australian broadcaster put on a game show.
In part, this is the culture of Australians: gracious in victory, unused to losing, and never certain how to respond when they do. In part, it is that the consequential Gabba Test took place in mid-January, by which point the Australian Open was underway. At that time every year, Australia stops following cricket to watch tennis. Also, outside the summer months, cricket is a passing trifle in media coverage and the collective consciousness. It’s not that Australians don’t care about cricket, but that the country’s sporting calendar has its set traditions: winter’s long Australian rules football and rugby seasons, horse racing in the spring, summer cricket and tennis, and then football again.
The broader reason is that the majority of Australians have limited interest in watching Australia play cricket against India. Most Australians think Test matches in India do not count because the pitches spin; it’s not just that Australians don’t excel in playing spin bowling, they also think its cultivation on the subcontinent unfair and a deceit not worth playing against. You’ll hear these arguments in any pub in Australia, should a subcontinental game pop up on the television. And two of the serial Indian series victories in Australia in recent times occurred in the forgotten years under the captaincy of Tim Paine, when, rather than countenance that their team had cheated at cricket by sandpapering the ball, Australians preferred to ignore the game.
Interest escalates rapidly when it comes to the cricketers themselves. Australian cricketers express their esteem and awe for Indian and Southasian cricket, and their affection for the Subcontinent’s people. Indian cricket enriches these players, who would otherwise be moderately paid by professional athletes’ standards. Every year, India bestows lavish hospitality and riches on Australians playing in its extravagant – and sumptuously wealthy – Indian Premier League. It gives them frenzied celebrity while pursuing what is otherwise a niche international sport. They are awash in public adulation; their opinions are valued and their social media accounts made to trend wildly. The players express the gratification they naturally feel and India seizes upon the approbation. The appreciation is conspicuously mutual. This is an incredible change, accomplished in just one cricketing generation, made possible by Indian money. Australia’s great cricketers of previous eras have watched on in wonder.
Australian cricket administrators would like to piggyback on Indian cricket’s commercial success, built on the sport’s monumental viewership and revenues in the Subcontinent. They seek to elevate the Border-Gavaskar Trophy to the status of the Ashes, coveting, along with broadcasters, the potential advertising market both at home and abroad. Players themselves speak of the series’ parity. This season’s fixture of five Tests on Australian soil – an honour reserved only for England in recent years – is an attempt to achieve it.
Meanwhile, Indian cricket desires the distinction of being part of a fearsome Test rivalry. Not something ferocious, like India-Pakistan, but something that recognises their pre-eminent place and achievement in the game. If India are the parvenu of international cricket, this investment in Test relations is the equivalent of buying a tailored wardrobe and a country estate to mix with the pre-existing elite.
As a nation, though, Australia is yet to play ball.
ONE MIGHT ASK, “Who cares if Australians follow the series closely? Hundreds of millions will follow it elsewhere. The Border-Gavaskar Trophy is too big to fail.”
If Australians tune out, they lose a chance to collectively rethink their view of Southasia, to develop a regard for the region and a connection with Australia’s new Southasian communities. It will be a squandered chance for the Southasian diaspora as well.
About 6.5 percent of Australia’s population identifies as Southasian – a similar fraction to that of Southasians in the United Kingdom. But, unlike in the UK, which has seen Southasian migration since Partition, in Australia Southasian migration has occurred largely in the last 25 years.
Melbourne is home to Australia’s largest Southasian diaspora. The city’s intergenerational Sri Lankan community has arrived over five decades, and its younger generations have Australian accents. But other arrivals, particularly from India, have come more recently and rapidly. More than half of Melbourne’s Indian residents arrived in the past decade. Suburbs in the city’s far-west, north and south-east are dominated by Southasian communities, the railway carriages filled with brown people at rush hour and Southasian languages now part of local school curricula.
In a country that practiced a White Australia immigration policy until 50 years ago, this is a dramatic shift. For Australia, it is also an economic gift.
Southasians commonly arrive in Australia as students, paying huge sums to study and live in the country. Many then undertake the costly and unpredictable process of obtaining permanent residency. By the time Australia accepts them as residents, these often upper-middle-class migrants are educated to a tertiary level within Australia, are familiar with the country’s functioning and social expectations, have been humbled by the capricious residency system, have invested large amounts of money in the country and are employed tax-payers in industries where there is demand for skilled workers.
The state of Victoria is in colossal debt but is kept solvent through international education and immigration. Sydney’s extravagant housing market continues to grow through the influx of migrants. Even though the fallout is a lack of affordable housing for Australians, there is no reason to expect these migration trends to end given the ready supply of model migrants from Southasia and their profitability for the country.
But few Australians are aware of the economic benefits of this migration. To them, Southasians most visibly fill lower-tier service industries. They are Uber and bus and delivery drivers, attendants at petrol stations and convenience stores, and security guards. They are students working part-time, parents pulling second jobs.
Unlike in Britain, where disenfranchised people blame migrants for their woes, in Australia people are largely amicable – at least so far. Casual racism abounds, but – again, unlike in Britain – it is rarely organised.
It’s not so much that Australians dislike brown people as it is that they don’t see them. These people who make Australians’ lives easier and more affordable are barely recognised for their work or their existence. An earlier Australia viewed Southasia as a nuisance of telemarketers or worse. Now the country sees Southasians as odd-jobbers who drive drunk Australians home. They are treated with civility, if not positively matey feeling.
What is less noticed is how Southasians augment Australia’s white-collar professional industries. This contribution will continue to increase with the arrival of more skilled migrants from Southasia, and also as Southasian migrant children excel in education and enter not only these professions but also into business, politics and positions of power – much like Australian Chinese and East Asians have done since the end of the 20th century. As we saw the other week in Perth and as will continue this Border-Gavaskar series, cricket in particular has a role to play in Australia’s inevitable reassessment of Southasians and their place in its society.
CERTAIN PARTS OF their shared colonial histories make Southasians and Australians natural friends – a shared command of English, for instance, and of course a love of cricket, the heritage sport of the British Empire. Melbourne’s Indian population can fill the MCG four times over. Southasian cricket teams enjoy significant support in the country. That thrilling Pakistan vs India game during the 2022 T20 World Cup in Australia was packed, but fixtures with Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Nepal all drew attendance.
Test cricket, embedded in the Australian consciousness, remains the preserve of men. The iconic Boxing Day Test match at the MCG is dominated by groups of men drinking off their Christmas hangovers, passing wind, belching, making a mess of the stadium lavatories. In talking about sport, men’s voices become imbued with the mannerisms, drawl and vulgarities of a coarse, macho Australia. We feel an impetus to become blokes. This crowd would show more interest in the Border-Gavaskar series were it seasoned with animosity, as the Ashes is.
Australia’s great public sporting romance of recent years – driven particularly by young women – has been with its women’s soccer team. The Australian Football League draws huge female support, a feat that has eluded cricket.
As Cricket Australia, the sport’s governing authority in the country, attempts to extend the game’s reach, Southasians are its captive audience. The Big Bash League, Australia’s colour and gimmick filled Twenty20 men’s cricket competition, attracts families to games, but Cricket Australia also aspires to diverse attendance for international fixtures. In cricket’s embrace of Australian Southasian spectators, the stadiums look different now from when they hosted traditional white male crowds. This southern summer, a wealthy Indian touring contingent has contributed to sellout crowds for the first three days of the Adelaide Test and broken sales records for the MCG Test due to start the day after Christmas. The only other foreign nationality that follows cricket tours in Australia in large numbers are the English, but the England team’s travelling support – largely retirees with drinking habits to rival Australians’ – are not so different from their Australian hosts.
Among Southasian crowds there is little consumption of alcohol, and they include women, infants, dancing uncles, musical instruments and unbridled expression of emotion. Indian supporters, who are a combination of tourists and local residents, are in Australian stadiums in their tens of thousands, brash, vocal and empowered in a way we have never seen before. For Australia, it is a strange awakening with previously invisible people rattling the cages of their national sport.
Australia’s insularity as an island nation in the Southern Hemisphere has given rise to a cricket culture that is very different from its equivalents in the rest of the world. Life for the majority of the world’s populace takes place during Australia’s night. And even as, like in many countries of Southasia, cricket is Australia’s national sport, it is a summer pursuit, followed intensely only during the “home season” in December and January. Test cricket is paramount. Australians may pay vague attention at best to the limited-overs fixtures that surround Test series, and even the local cricket establishment treats these as a sideshow. Australia’s loss in November’s three-ODI series against Pakistan was hardly noticed by Australians, and consequently barely regretted by the establishment.
Australia’s home cricket season is broadcast on free-to-air television. Otherwise, cricket is restricted to prohibitively expensive paid channels and inconsistent streaming services. This means that the vast majority of Australians do not follow the national team when they play abroad. They end up missing even those series and global tournaments in which the country has been so fantastically successful in recent decades.
The difference is stark in Southasia. I am amazed at the encyclopaedic knowledge of World Cups even among passing cricket observers. An incredible number of people on the Subcontinent have spoken to me of the Australian all-rounder Glenn Maxwell and his superlative performance against Afghanistan in the last men’s World Cup. Few Australians are aware of it – most were asleep while Maxwell batted his way through cramps on a blistering Mumbai day to make a miraculous unbeaten 201.
Similarly, when Australia beat India in the World Test Championship and again in the World Cup last year, to a general crushing of Indian cricketing hearts, Australians were largely unaware of the feats. The hero-captain, Pat Cummins, returned to an empty airport, because why on earth would you camp out at an airport to harass a cricketer? Besides, who knows or cares what flight he is on? It’s not in Australian culture. But it inspires the shocked question I get from cricket fans in Southasia who were shocked to see him push his own airport trolley: “Why did Pat Cummins return to an empty airport?”
As for David Warner being booed, only part of that was because he was involved in the sandpaper incident with Paine. The cricketer fell on the foul side of a line so fine that it is hard to explain. Warner’s ego, for which Australians had earlier lionised him, is the same thing that made him much reviled. Australians simply decided they did not like him anymore – it was really that arbitrary.
WHILE AUSTRALIA navigates its relationship with Indian cricket, it would be sensible to consider the sport’s politicisation in the Southasian giant. Australia and India celebrated “75 Years of Friendship through Cricket” at an event in Ahmedabad during the 2022–23 Border-Gasvaskar series on Indian soil. It remains the strangest, most unpleasant experience I have had in cricket.
On the opening morning of the final Test, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, hosted a public reception for Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, out on the field in the stadium in Ahmedabad – an Ozymandian proceeding, at an arena renamed after Modi himself.
Adding to the triteness of the ceremony was the fact that tickets had not been sold for the day’s cricket. The stadium’s 132,000 seats were reportedly allocated to local families. I did not see women or children in attendance, only groups of mostly young men chanting “Modi!” as the prime ministers were chauffeured around the ground in a buggy. Australian tour groups were placed in a secure gallery, above and sheltered from the throng. I was alone in the long-off bay, trapped in public proceedings.
This bussed-in crowd of Modi supporters lost interest once the game was a few overs old. These ring-in boys somehow found me, the next best entertainment. They were rough chaps. I was screamed at, touched and slapped. Many ordered me, as has become inevitable, to join a selfie and ceaselessly demanded this gora’s attention for no clear reason.
It got worse when the free lunch arrived. Uncontrolled, hungry men, anxious not to miss out, jostled each other in confined spaces. Wild boys seized seven or eight lunch boxes and legged it. Clambering away with the boxes piled above their eyeline, they crashed into the swarms, tripped onto the concrete floor and sent the food flying.
I sought refuge near police stationed at the sightscreen. I watched play from that vantage point until a chap in uniform started screaming at me. I retreated as far from the disorder as I could, climbing high into the eyries of the overlarge arena, from where the play was undiscernible. Even in that relative quiet, some unknown threw a bottle of water at my head. I wasn’t sure what triggered the violence.
The next morning, I returned with trepidation to the long-off bay and found, to my relief, the pleasing hum of a Test cricket crowd: children, sweet uncles, knowledgeable spectators and polite conversation. A gentle voice asked me, “You came yesterday? Oh, but why did you come yesterday? We all knew it would be a disaster.”
During that Test and for many weeks after I felt a shock. As I walked round the Ahmedabad coliseum under five-storey posters of Albanese – his eyes bigger than cars – I considered his role in the ugly demonstration. I felt abandoned because, while I got scuffed up, I watched the prime minister of my country engage in a trumped-up proceeding he would never dare to take part in if it happened at home.
The formal ceremonies were grandiose, the prime ministers’ bodyguard-escorted lap of honour grotesque. Australian media took umbrage at Albanese taking a position at the head of his country’s team during the national anthem, placing himself before its captain, Steve Smith, and linking arms with the players during its performance. Should Albanese have behaved this way in Australia, it would have caused outrage and been called out as shameful grandstanding.
Various Australian prime ministers have enjoyed cordial relations with the national cricket team. Still, their role in the game is clearly defined: host the team every year and make a public visit to the Sydney Test match to shake many hands, call a ball on the radio and appear on a brief spot for television commentary. It is a friendly political gracing of the sporting stage, and limited to that.
Albanese’s centre-stage parade, set against Big Brother-sized banners of himself and a skirmish in the background, happened in India, so no one in Australia noticed or cared. But the circus at Ahmedabad demonstrated what has become permissible within cricket in India and Australia’s willingness to tacitly, if not heartily, go along. The politicisation of the sport will have further consequences as the countries’ cricket relations develop deeper.
WHEN I WAS growing up in Australia, in the 1980s, the country held a great celebration to mark 200 years of colonisation – the bicentenary of the arrival in Australia of the first fleet of British ships carrying convicts transported here as punishment. We felt ourselves to be the most noble and important of colonies. We were ignorant of the fact that India was the jewel in the crown of the Empire, whose excise and plunder financed Britain more than Australia ever could. We were oblivious to our comparative insignificance as a former penal colony at the edge of the world.
Australia remains confused about its place in colonial history and its relationship with other colonised peoples. Sport is as good a medium as any to remind Australians of their place in an increasingly connected world with an increasingly ascendant Southasia.
Australia has sporting prestige, something that India respects and has designs to emulate. Indians are the nouveau riche of the cricketing world, ascendent as a “winning side” and harnessing a spectacular wealth in money and talent. In the 21st century, the Border-Gavaskar Trophy has demonstrated India’s transformation as a touring side: from 2003–04, when Ganguly and India’s batting titans first stood up to Australia on the field, to India’s defiant yet problematic stance during the 2007–08 tour, when the spinner Harbhajan Singh was accused of using a racial slur against the Australian batsman Andrew Symonds in a scandal that came to be called “monkeygate”. The team’s unity in subsequent years, fostered by Mahendra Singh Dhoni, and its more recent combativeness, honed by Virat Kohli, have resulted in emphatic, glorious Indian victories in the last two tours of Australia.
Australia has its own rewards from these regular, extended bilateral sporting relations. There are monetary dividends, which underwrite Cricket Australia’s operations, and a partnership with Indian administrators on cricket’s global stage that gives the country a share of power in the sport’s ruling structure. These are things cricket’s poorer participant nations long for.
The Border-Gavaskar series that has begun so strikingly at Perth has many strands that go beyond the game alone. It is too early yet in the summer for Australians to tune out as they did four years ago. If India continues to strong-arm Australia, how will Australian fans make sense of losing – again – to a country they have not learnt to respect? As Australia’s grounds fill with Indians – both residents and tourists – how will these two cricket cultures make sense of each other, particularly with an India team that is no longer deferential but loud, assertive, and at times obnoxious?
The Border-Gavaskar Trophy is working out where it stands. It is a new time in the game – and Australia, like the rest of the cricket-playing world – must get used to it.
source : himalmag