by Arunabha Sengupta
Dreaming the Impossible by Mihir Bose
319 pages, Arena Sport
£17.99
Dreaming the Impossible is a near-impossible endeavour in itself.
Compiling a thorough treatise on the inequalities – racial and otherwise – that has dogged British sport through history to the current day is an incredibly difficult task.
The canvas is formed by an extremely complicated society – a legacy of the long history of the Empire, unequal by default because of such origins.
It is also a story across multiple dimensions.
These are the tales of the BAME individuals connected with British sports, each different group and diaspora further splintered into complex roots and lineage. There are Blacks – from the African continent, the entirely distinct world of South Africa and the various islands of the Caribbeans; there are South Asians who hail variously from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; there are others from places as distinct as Greece, China and Ireland. To complicate matters further there are the off-the-boat immigrants and their subsequent generations, with different outlooks of life and definitions of acceptability.
The complex layers of inequality get further enhanced when we bring in gender, religion and sexual orientation. We need to look behind the turbans, hijabs and hoodies.
The tales vary as we shift from north to south, east to west of Britain, across different communities from different strata and classes of society.
And of course, the dynamics are different in each sport … from football to cricket to rugby to tennis to athletics.
Finally, the story is told through the voices of the sportspersons in the arena, the coaches and managers who hover along the sidelines, the men and women who watch and write from the media centres, and the decision makers who sit in the boardrooms.
While Mihir Bose provides the garnishing of commentary, historical inserts and insightful summaries, the meat of the content is gathered from an incredible number of interviews conducted with men and women from all these above-mentioned domains.
It is a long and puzzling journey through time, from the days when monkey chants, spit and bananas were variously voiced, hurled and thrown at the few coloured sportspersons trying to edge into a predominantly white world; to the current day when … well … periodic claims that racism has been eradicated are brought crashing down with similarly periodic Azeem Rafiqesque incidents.
The narrative starts from the days when the Luther Blissetts and the Brian Steins were hounded by the all-white crowds with monkey chants. We are told of the times when the National Front went around with copies of the Bulldog, and Alex Williams was told by his white teammates to ‘get on with the game’ when he faced race-hate.
The book traverses through the times when John Barnes took corner kicks in a hail of spit. We journey through the formation of Kick It Out and right to the day of Raheem Sterling, Marcus Rashford and Lewis Hamilton and their pathbreaking sports activism.
And while the above paragraph reads as if it is a journey in the right direction, the book shows with a startling clarity that it is not always so. The representation of the various communities still hint at exclusiveness – one black coach operates in the Premier League, 15 British Asian players can be seen across four professional divisions, the number of black cricketers in county cricket is diminishing, tennis remains a white man’s game. In some opinions racism has become less blatant and more systemic :‘Now it’s really under the radar, it is covert, it is little comments, little smirks, it’s often the way they look at you’. However, there is plenty of evidence that race plays a part in the referee’s decisions. Frequently enough we get to hear of racial abuse leading to abandoned matches and discontent in the dressing rooms.
‘Paki’, ‘Elephant washer’ , ‘black bugger’ and ‘Where is your Datsun’ remain comments that wriggle out of smug closets and make uncomfortable headlines. And even today, there are many disconcerting attempts to dismiss them as banter.
Yes, there are several important members of the sporting and other communities who will dismiss the whole book as much ado about nothing. After all, for them racism does not exist.
For example Tim Lamb, Chief Executive of TCCB and thereafter ECB, honoured as Life Member of the MCC, Middlesex and Durham. He apparently never found any evidence of racism during his long relationship with cricket.
‘I was saddened to read the comments of Michael Holding… I have found it difficult that they glorify somebody like Mr [George] Floyd. I don’t know whether you heard but there were rumours that he actually died of self-inflicted barbiturate poisoning rather than the result of the actions of the police.’ Granted Lamb’s interview was conducted before the Minneapolis jury found Derek Chauvin guilty, but after this bout of wishful thinking he goes on to say other things that include partially justifying Cecil Rhodes: ‘Judging him by twenty-first century standards he would not be somebody you would necessarily admire, but he was the product of his age and the same goes for many other people. History is history. It happened. Get over it. Move on.’
Lamb’s views on apartheid South Africa are also quite interesting, underlining that he is indeed a product of his age who has not moved on. The trouble is, so are many other people in and around sporting administration and ivory towers.
There is an absorbing chapter describing the 2018 semi-final of the Peter Butcher Memorial Cup which demonstrates that to many racism remains invisible.
Through allegedly biased refereeing, the Bangladeshi team, Sporting Bengal, had three players sent off against the Aveley reserve team at Romford. It led to abandonment of the match and complaints to FA against the assistant referee. The eventual FA decision was against the official. However, the reaction of Michelle Dorling, the secretary of the Essex Senior League, was illuminating. She did not witness any racial bias during the game. After all she knew that the Asian community is completely racist because that was what her best friend, a Pakistani, had told her.
‘FA took the view because in equality and diversity, if you feel it’s racist, then it’s deemed racist even if it’s not.’ She goes on to say non-whites should learn from the British society and their attitude towards Jews. ‘In the twelfth century, England persecuted Jews and threw them off a cathedral. In the twentieth century, they fought a world war because someone else was doing some of the [same] things.’
There are, however, poignant moments that speak of hope. Two interviews in particular stand out. Chief Executive of FA, Mark Bullingham, starts out by saying that he did not believe the FA was institutionally racist. But he adds that not every area of the organisation was fully representative. ‘There is unconscious bias throughout the country ... Every white person has benefitted from white privilege.’
Sue Day, the Chief Financial Officer of RFU, says, ‘Every institution that we are part of in this country has been built on racist structures.’ She agrees there is white privilege ending, ‘Of the 400 people employed by RFU, 95 per cent are white.’
Similarly, while the boardroom continues to be predominantly white male, and we often hear that Black Lives Matter is not really a big deal, we also have AB de Villiers telling Moeen Ali that he and his son together sing the Kolo Touré-Barmy Army song mash-up – the one that goes: ‘Hashim Hashim Hashim Hashim Amla… Moeen Moeen Moeen Moeen Ali’
Moving on to media whiteness we find the story of the Chinese-origin Jonathan Liew and his ‘blasphemous’ act of questioning the privileged commentary box career of Henry Blofeld. Foibles, mispronunciation, misidentification of fielders, things that would have branded an Ebony Rainford-Brent incompetent, were seen as charming in the persona of Henry Blofeld. Separate yardsticks continue.
The most sparkling chapter, at least in my opinion, is the one featuring John Barnes. Branding the curse of racism as a legacy of the Empire, the former England left-winger expounds on his views on colonialism and Black Lives Matter, civil rights movement and the removal of statues. The views are probing and hard to ignore.
His book The Uncomfortable Truth covers a lot of these issues and debunks myths about progress and equality. It is revealed that the book has received 14 lines in the Brief Review section of the Observer, squeezed below My Body by Emily Ratajkowski.
Well, the combination of reviews and separate yardsticks does sound familiar to me. I reflect on my recent book Elephant in the Stadium. It is about the triumphant Indian tour of England in 1971, and while covering the cricket it also deals with the complexities of Indo-British relationship from the colonial days to the post-colonial era.
A traditional ivory tower of English cricket recently reviewed the book. The eighty-something reviewer, while praising the scholarship and the way the cricket is brought to life, wondered whether ‘we needed a lecture on Eden’s shortcomings in the Suez crisis and other domestic issues’.
Now, I do anticipate being asked to accept this and move on. If it had been purely about the merit of the book I could have done so. However, there are problems that make me pause and I understand that they may not be apparent to a monochrome world at first glance.
Firstly, I don’t know how the topic of decolonisation can be covered without discussing Eden and Suez and the following decade of British politics. Also I did not write the book for any specific ‘we’. Finally, if the tables are turned, I wonder if a Peter Oborne or a Scyld Berry or any other writer from the white part of the world will ever face the same reservations while writing about the internal affairs of the Indian subcontinent.
Separate yardsticks are still very much part of the fabric. And the reviewer in question may not even be aware of the discrimination evident in a sentence emerging from the depths of a near-permanent mental make-up. The reason is the same legacy that John Barnes talks about.
So, is the impossible dream achievable?
In the final chapter, Bose speaks of a panel discussion on Sports and Identity held in 2018, during which a couple of white participants angrily insisted that there was no racism in football. ‘Some white people in these islands and I were still living in two different worlds,’ the author reflects. ‘What the people in that meeting were, in effect, saying was, “You non-whites should get over the past, stop moaning and move on.”’ White fatigue.
Yes, a lot of the attitude remains unpromising, in denial. But even as I reflect on my own experiences, I go back to the extremely disturbing introduction of the book where Bose starts by describing some of his experiences as a football reporter in the early 1980s.
While returning from Nottingham on the 19.03, he was accosted twice – once by a solitary football fan, and once by a group of them. Shouts of ‘coon’, ‘wog’, ‘Why are you not Patel? All Pakis are Patels’ were appended by pushes and jostles … a terrifying experience before he was saved by the appearance of the Transport Police.
As I read it again I realise that as a person of similar Indian extraction of the next generation, I have taken the evening train from Nottingham to London often enough, but have never been subjected to what Mihir Bose went through. It is the subliminal racism in the ivory towers that I have to contend with, not physical. At least not yet.
So, times have changed somewhat even if the progress has been far slower than desired.
The book ends with the chapter ‘Inching towards a non-racial sports world’. The conclusion is that the first steps have been laid. I concur.
This is not the first book on the topic Mihir Bose has written. His Sporting Colours about sports and politics in South Africa was written 28 years ago, and thereafter Sporting Alien was published in 1996. All of them are important books on the topic and Dreaming the Impossible is a much recommended addition to the collection.
To use a hashed cliché, it comes through with flying ‘colours’.