Bangladesh via Scarborough

Dear Cricket Monthly,

As if we don't have enough on our plate. Bangladeshi cricket fans were never going to trip the light fantastic, but still, recent goings-on have called for the kind of insomniac resignation normally reserved for Ian Botham's friends. There was the pure Carry On farce of losing to Hong Kong in the World T20. Before that, we were bounced out of the Asia Cup by Afghanistan, a team of limber Pathans born mainly in the 1980s and so perhaps a tad more familiar with Stingers than stumps. Our foreign coaches have tripped each other up on the way out - Stuart Law, Richard Pybus, Shane Jurgensen. Not to mention the corruption and match-fixing charges, the ban on Mohammad Ashraful, the suspension of Shakib Al Hasan.

And then I read the book. Duncan Hamilton's A Last English Summer. It is an account of his year-long journey across England's cricket fields in 2009. It is ferociously nostalgic, irremediably English, suffused with the splendid late twilight of Edwardian summers over village cricket grounds, written in a prose drawn from deep within limestone quarries, imbued with sea spray. The book is in memory of his grandfather, a miner "gutted" by the trenches of the First World War, who would set off to Scarborough "in dawn's pale shadow and returning to the soft blackness of early autumn" to partake of "the beauty about cricket".

Fittingly perhaps, years after his grandfather's journeys, Hamilton was at Scarborough to witness a Youth Test between England and Bangladesh Under-19s. Bangladesh lost by ten wickets. But that is not the point. What lingers is the description of the Bangladeshi players - who have a "waifs-and-strays look" about them - during the lunch break. One player goes over to look at the photographs on the wall, without a clue as to who is in them.

A signed portrait of Lord Hawke instantly grips him, as surely as if the Yorkshire patriarch had ordered him to heel… The photograph of Len Hutton, hung on the balcony, is more revealing still. At first he glances at Hutton… and then lets his eyes wander across the dusty glass. With animated wafts, he begins pointing at the date beneath the photograph: 1948. It immediately registers with him that the backdrop against which he has been fielding all morning has barely changed in more than 60 years. He calls over a team-mate, who studies the picture too, almost pressing his nose against the frame.

Hamilton acknowledges that a team granted Test status only in 2000 means that its cricketing history "scarcely represents the blink of an eye"; yet, without meaning to, the overwhelming impression he gives is that of an Englishman somewhat appalled at the scene before him, of uncomprehending, stumbling aliens landing on his shores - in Scarborough! Where seaside cricket is played beneath the "mauled outline of the Norman castle" and its "squawking gulls, scavenging and silver-shone", with the distant "pencil smudge" of a freighter, and the tea rooms and the second-hand bookshops still in business, where "everything is in its place and just as it ought to be".

In the new narratives it doesn't matter who knows who Lord Hawke is. What matters is the Chandigarh traffic jam on the morning of the India-Pakistan semi-final

Till the end of the book - as it spun and dipped through baggy greens, Neville Cardus, gasworks, and the best newspaper line on Wes Hall ("He bowls in Lancashire but begins his run in Yorkshire.") - the author's incredulity stayed with me. It is not about Bangladesh's obvious disabilities on the field. It is that in the broad narrative of cricket, in its mytho-poetics, Bangladesh is stranded even farther out. In this storyline we are bumbling rustics beyond even the luxury of scorn!

But perhaps help is on the way. Cricket has changed. Into the old model has entered the maidan, the galli and the tamasha. Cricket now is a thing of the bazaar, of samosas, chutneys and dosa houses, of masala-grinding! The old narrative has fractured, and Hamilton's book is actually a salute to that fact.

The last summer is the last because the old cricket, England's cricket, is gone. In the newer narratives are heaving hordes of humanity, traffic jams, board politics, firebombings, sweat and dal-puri, which over time will redefine what cricket books are about and how their new frameworks come into being. In them Bangladeshi cricket has the chance of being seen as a whole, not in scattered patchworks of dim lighting and bad audio.

Glimmerings of it can be found in books such as Vaibhav Vats' Triumph in Bombay, about the 2011 World Cup, and where Dhaka ("I was in the midst of a human gale") is articulated along with Colombo, Chennai, Nagpur, Delhi, Mumbai, in even tenor, without strain. Here it doesn't matter who knows who Lord Hawke is; what seems to matter is that for the first time, two Asian teams meet in the final. And where the Chandigarh traffic jam on the morning of the India-Pakistan semi-final has to be seen to be believed.

In the Bangladesh U-19 team at Scarborough was a Mominul Haque, who hit 90 runs in the first innings and a further 80 in the second. He is a Cox's Bazar lad, who grew up with the longest natural beach in the world at his doorstep, amid the coconut trees and briny air of the Bay of Bengal, where the gulls glint in the sun as much as they do elsewhere.

Cox's Bazar, where I used to go during school vacations as a child, is the last place I thought would produce a cricketer. It used to be a tiny hamlet populated by innocent locals who cooked superb fish curry for blushing, panting honeymooners, and where a government motel with tidal warnings in the lobby stood in lonely splendour amid the red crabs and moonlight.

Today it is a frenzied, tacky tourist town, with illegal constructions, kitschy touts in lungis, and screaming middle-class Bangladeshis on the sands. It is our Scarborough. A huge new cricket stadium is being built there. Once it is finished, with the breeze blowing in past the fishing boats parked on the beach, no doubt peanut-chomping locals will roar when Mominul, now in the national team, walks to the pitch to face West Indies, or the Black Caps, or whoever… The waifs and strays need to write back.

Till the next time,
Khadem

Khademul Islam is a Bangladeshi writer, editor and translator. He is working on a book about escaping from Pakistan in 1972, out in 2015

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