Having read your posts, you seem to be the only one who understand what informs some of th3 selection decisions. When i got home from.work and seeing Bavuma get his ton brought emotions because I sort of had an idea of the racial obstacles he had to endure to get there. With due respect a oerson in Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, India and England can never ever understand the legacy of living under apartheid. We as Blacks understand it because it's our reality. It's this reality that informs certain decisions.
Hi DarkMagician and thank you. I was moved to read your long post. It's sad that it should be so difficult for others to understand. You know much better than me that it is also sadly predictable but also I would add, ironic.
This forum never ceases to preoccupy itself with the myriad ways in which the story of Pakistani cricket is
not a story of meritocracy, fairness and justice. The most common complaint if one can paraphrase is that cricket is not only about cricket, that politics interfere. But as the forum own lively debates attest, where would be the interest without the politics?
Historically cricket has been fascinated many including stadium audiences precisely because it about something more than itself. It has been about colonialism and decolonization for instance. I encourage anyone who cannot read Bavuma feat into the story not only of South Africa
but also cricket itself, to look up CLR James' classic 'Beyond a Boundary.'
More than other sports, of which the same if often said, I do think that cricket also stages the drama of life. Because not as the eternal happy-ending of a Hollywood romance. Everyone knows umpires get their calls wrong, that rain and weather and poorly prepared pitches skew results one way or another. Its hard to think of another sport in which there is so much room for the brute violence of the arbitrary.
Like man sports, it also has less space for moralizing than is commonly imagined. People may agree Asad Shafiq has turned out to be a good Test player, but no one can say with certainty that he
deserves his place in the team; that it is 'just' or fair. Others, say a Fawad Alam, could have been even better had they been given as many chances. Even hindsight isn't as useful as we think.
Similarly, no adult should be able to believe that everyone gets an equal chance, that life is fundamentally fair. Yet regardless of what they know, most people today can only live their lives, ie act,
as if this fantasy was reality. This double consciousness is ideology in a nutshell. In a world ruled by this ideology is clearly impossible to be in favor of quotas, as this thread
has shown.
Contrariwise, there is nothing more necessary than saying that quotas should not be used and that the best should be selected etc. It sounds principled and it is. From this position one can look down with paternal concern ('quotas are not really good for you either') And ask other to have another history. To act as if the past is not also a part of our present, in so far as it
is anything at all.
Perhaps most tellingly, the person of principle can ask those who have suffered violence to have different feelings, ('don't you also feel like i do about Dale Steyn?') As if they were living in the wrong body. And of course theirs
are wrong bodies, yet again but now in a new way. But in the end, goes the irony, it is they who are accused of perpetuating the violence of history,
out of step with things, rattling about like a loose cog in an otherwise well oiled fantasy.
And whereas others can talk of principle, of the importance to doing things as if there is no racism, even though they know there is racism, the rattling cog has to talk about 'reality,' the brute arbitrariness of life and the impossibility of a game without politics.
