The magnificent Ashes series against Australia will merely slow the fall of English cricket, according to Geoffrey Wheatcroft's counterintuitively gloomy piece on what is still, just about, our summer game. Let us hope Wheatcroft is wrong. He complains that some of the passages of play in the first three tests betrayed a spillover into the five-day game of the vulgarity of limited-overs cricket. But is that so terrible? If cricket's dilemma has been how to adapt to a less patient world without departing too far from the game's true spirit, then English cricket—especially in the shape of exciting young players like Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen—seems to be making a good fist of things.
Far from being a harmless distraction from all the momentous issues thrown up by 7/7, sport is, of course, one of the main arenas for the expression of group identity and collective emotions. This is why the "Tebbit test"—Norman Tebbit's suggestion that second-generation immigrants should identify with the English cricket team rather than that of their ancestral lands—became one of the biggest controversies in British politics during the 1980s. But it is a measure of how far we have travelled since those confused times that one of Britain's leading multicultural thinkers, Bhikhu Parekh, can calmly spell out inside why immigrants should make a moral and emotional commitment to their new British home. Parekh is no Tebbit; he believes it is possible for immigrants to make that commitment while still holding on to a large part of their original culture. He might, on the other hand, be rather dismayed at the continued separateness of much ethnic minority cricket in England. (This does seem, at least sometimes, to be a matter of choice—in my son's under-11 cricket league, one of the teams calls itself the North London Muslims.)
By contrast, imagine what a positive difference a couple of Flintoff-like young British-Pakistani Muslims in the national cricket team could make the next time Australia visits. This is surely a colonial legacy that we can turn to Britain's advantage.
