The incident may have passed without injury to anyone; it would, however, be foolhardy to make light of the stoning of the West Indies team bus by irate Bangladeshi fans after their team had been humiliatingly beaten by the Caribbean side in last Friday’s Cricket World Cup 2011 encounter.
And if the occurrence itself is acutely disturbing, the comment made by the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) Chief Executive Officer Haroon Largat that it was “a minor incident” is bizarre; arguably, even downright irresponsible. While WI team coach Otis Gibson has correctly dismissed Mr Largat’s comment as “ridiculous,” it is the WICB, not Mr Gibson, that should be having a few choice words in the ICC’s ear about exactly how the Caribbean feels about the incident and, more particularly, about Mr Largat’s response. Indeed, it is more than a trifle irritating that up to yesterday the Board had still not done so.
We must be clear about two things. First, the stoning of the West Indies team bus – the size of the objects thrown notwithstanding – was a very serious incident. Secondly, the organizers of the event and more specifically those assigned to protect the players must take full responsibility for what could easily have been a major tragedy. If Mr Largat does not understand this then he must surely be visiting earth from another planet, specifically for Cricket World Cup 2011.
Security, above all else, has been a major concern for the tournament’s organizers. Pakistan, one of the sub-continent’s cricketing powerhouses, had already been removed as one of the venues for the tournament following the terrorist attack of two years ago on a bus carrying a Sri Lankan touring team. With fourteen teams travelling to and fro among the co-hosts – Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India – countries that all have a history of militant violence, security was bound to be a challenge anyway. Nor would the teams have necessarily been overly comforted by Mr Largat’s assurance that security for the tournament was “a non issue”; not least the Sri Lanka and New Zealand teams which, in recent years have witnessed and felt first-hand the sudden and terrifying violence that is sometimes visited upon the countries currently hosting CWC 2011.
Mr Largat – if in fact he did make the “non issue” comment attributed to him – must now surely be acutely embarrassed by the turn of events and it is by no means far-fetched to suggest that it is that embarrassment that has compelled him to trivialize the bus-stoning incident.
Even if what happened on Friday in Bangladesh does not compare in the seriousness of its outcome to the May 2002 suicide bomber outside the hotel in Pakistan accommodating the New Zealanders, or the 2009 terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan team bus, the outcome of Friday’s incident in Bangladesh could very easily have been equally serious. When account is taken of the fact that the assailants got close enough to the West Indies team bus to throw stones that broke the vehicle’s windows, the mind boggles as to what might have happened if they had been armed with guns.
What we have heard from the WICB so far is that it is satisfied with the extant security arrangements for the team. How much assurance such a statement provides, however, given the sub-continent’s particular vulnerability to sudden and spectacular acts of violence, is open to question. It would have been far more appropriate, particularly given Mr Larget’s comment, for the Board to express its profound concern over the incident and demand that security be ‘beefed up.’ A circumstance of this nature provides no time for diplomacy.
We have seen more than enough of the volatility of the sub-continent to understand that the security of visiting cricketers cannot be taken for granted. It is a circumstance that we in the Caribbean might not fully appreciate. Our cricketing culture embraces among other things the extension of warmth and welcome to visiting players, and if our passion for the game is no less intense than that of cricket fans anywhere else in the world, we are, for the most part, gracious in defeat, venting our verbal rage mostly on our own players and leaving it there.
But the Caribbean is not the Indian sub-continent. Security concerns there stem from a complex mix of internal strife, social, cultural and religious differences and, in the case of India and Pakistan, a protracted and often bloody bilateral conflict. For players from other parts of the world touring either country gives rise to security considerations that are as substantive as the cricket itself. There have been cases too in which individual players have bluntly excused themselves from tour parties to those countries.
In the wake of the disturbances in India that followed their early exit from the 2007 World Cup, the Indian cricket writer and author of the book Men in White, Mukul Kesavan described the cricketing rivalry between India and Pakistan thus: “The compulsive need to confront the old enemy led to the creation of a cricket circus in the Gulf Sheikhdom, Sharjah, where, on neutral ground, the sub-continent’s blood feuds were re-played as one-day tournaments for the benefit of increasingly feverish and volatile audiences. The fusion of chauvinism and television had two bad consequences: an obsessive fan base that tended to become deranged by defeat and the rise of contemporary cricket’s stock villain, the corrupting bookie. Defeat, especially at the hands of the old enemy, led to a) a suspension of cricketing relations (India stopped playing Pakistan in Sharjah after a sequence of defeats led to allegations of foul play); and b) to attacks on players or their property (Mohammad Kaif’s home was attacked in 2003, and Mahendra Dhoni’s house was damaged after India was defeated by Bangladesh in their opening match in the tournament).” If Kesavan is right and cricketing contests between these two countries are no more than proxies for “blood feuds” then that alone brings the game into disrepute.
Cricket World Cup 2011 is not out of the woods yet. The intensity of Indian cricket fans has already manifested itself in their clashes with the police over ticket availability. More than that, with the balance of cricketing power having shifted to the sub-continent on account of India’s huge audience and its ascendancy on the field of play, and with the Indian Players League (IPL) having emerged as a monument to India’s global ascendancy, much is expected of Mahendra Singh Dhoni and company in the current World Cup. India’s temperamental and frequently unforgiving fans appear to have placed on the shoulders of their team the burden of prematurely anointing them 2011 World Cup champions, and the Indian team, as Dhoni is personally aware, will not be unmindful of the price that they sometimes have to pay for not living up to fans’ expectations. Security still remains the most important key to the success of what is left of the 2011 Cricket World Cup and we must hope that Mr Largat’s precipitate pronouncement does not come back to haunt all of us.
