Sociology of Sport Unit VI Compare & Contrast Assignment

Third World Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 7, pp. 1263–1276, 2004

Major sports events, image projection and the problems of ‘semi-periphery’: a case study of the 1996 South Asia Cricket World Cup

PAUL DIMEO & JOYCE KAY

ABSTRACT This paper explores the response of the international press to the co-hosting of the 1996 Cricket World Cup by India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The event had a troubled background: the shift of power within cricket towards the subcontinent and the consequential commercialisation of the sport were causing some dissension among traditionalists. At the same time there was some instability in South Asian politics, especially between India and Pakistan and because of the civil war in Sri Lanka. While these issues overshadowed the event, some aspects of its organisation were unsuccessful, leading to some negative press coverage. It is argued here, however, that the problems faced by South Asian countries in trying to use this sports event to promote a positive image were further exacerbated by underlying stereotypes and criticisms of South Asian cultures. As such, the paper addresses several important themes relating to major sports events and ‘semi-peripheral’ countries.

The 1996 Cricket World Cup (CWC) was hosted jointly by India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, three countries that enjoy international success in cricket, and where the sport has a massive and emotional following among large sections of the population. Social elites want to be associated with it, ordinary fans feel passionately about it, players of all backgrounds can become national heroes, and there is strong financial support through the media and commercial sponsor- ship. A joint venture in hosting can help ‘semi-peripheral’ countries overcome some of the organisational and economic disadvantages they may face when competing with ‘developed’ countries for events. However, as with examples in other contexts,1 the partnership approach may introduce another set of tensions and challenges as the organising committee try to manage expectations, facili- ties, security, transport and supporters across national borders. In the case of the 1996 CWC this already burdensome aspect of event management was further compounded by the ongoing political tensions between Pakistan and India, communal tensions in India and the civil war within Sri Lanka. If this was not enough for the international media to mercilessly pick apart, the traditionalists

Paul Dimeo and Joyce Kay are both in the Department of Sports Studies, University of Stirling, Room 3A45, Cottrell Building, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK. Email: [email protected].

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/04/071263-14 © 2004 Third World Quarterly DOI: 10.1080/014365904200281267 1263

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within cricket circles were critical of South Asian commercialism and anxious that the old values of sportsmanship were being corroded by corruption, ball-tampering, verbal abuse, spectator misbehaviour, political intervention, and other such evils that could be neatly blamed on South Asians.2

This paper will focus on the issue of image projection, and ask if the event was a success in terms of projecting a positive image to an international audience. After all, one of the principle reasons for hosting any event is to attract praise for organisational skills and structural resources, thus leading to the more material rewards of increased tourism and external commercial investment. It will be argued that the South Asian countries faced a number of problems, not least the prejudicial attitudes inherent in much of the media coverage, which severely dented any hope of projecting a positive image to a wider audience and thus gaining international ‘marketing power’ (see Black and Van der West- huizen, in this issue).

There are, however, at least three methodological concerns here that should be addressed. First, the press coverage was largely to be found in those countries that participated in the CWC, so the event may not have made much impression on a wider global audience. Second, the availability of source material limits discussion to English-language newspapers, omitting television coverage and newspaper coverage in other languages. Third, it is never easy to determine how audiences respond to media coverage and their reactions should not be assumed. And finally, most of the media discourses are constructed by sports journalists who bring to the event a specific set of pre-established ideas, and have their own aims, styles and ideological perspectives. Broadly, it could be said that sports writers will focus on the events on the field, will discuss politics and culture when they affect the sport itself, but may not necessarily have too much expertise in these areas. Like the players themselves, sports journalists come to see other countries in terms of their functional ability relative to the organisa- tional and structural aspects of an event. In doing so, they may become unsympathetic to the broader difficulties central to life in ‘developing’ societies.

Notwithstanding these caveats, however, focusing on media discourses in the ‘developed’ world, albeit limited to a handful of nations, provides an opportunity to assess how South Asia is made ‘knowable’ to wider audiences. The recent literature on sport and postcolonialism suggests that Western cultures continue to construct ‘others’ in oppositional, dichotomous terms, often as inferior, but at times with a certain ambivalence in which envy and desire can mix with assumptions of intellectual weaknesses, ie in the image of the ‘noble savage’ or the ‘exotic East’.3 In this way, power is inextricably connected to knowledge, and the ‘West’ retains the power of constructing the ‘East’ through discourse.

Nevertheless there is a danger of over-simplification when drawing upon postcolonial theory. In the world of international sport, rivalries draw on historical national stereotypes that are not necessarily postcolonial: the samba- dancing, playful Brazilian, the temperamental Latin, the efficient German, and so on. At the same time, cricket in particular is complex in postcolonial terms. England may be the historical ‘metropole’ but it is gradually losing its grip on how the game is being commercialised and ‘globalised’. Meanwhile, rivalries between the West Indies, Pakistan, Australia and the South Asian countries undermine any sense of unity or resistance among the formerly colonised.

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Finally, the idea of resistance is difficult to apply in this context. If the ‘West’ is imposing some form of hegemonic model of representation or cultural homogeneity through sports, then why are ‘postcolonial’ countries so keen to be involved and take advantage of the commercial and status opportunities? Or, as Jack Williams argues, is the so-called ‘globalisation’ of cricket along commer- cial lines by the South Asian nations actually a veiled form of ‘Westernisation’?4

Bearing in mind these underlying concerns and conceptual dilemmas, this paper seeks to analyse how the 1996 CWC exposes the problems facing ‘semi-peripheral’ countries as they attempt to use events to gain prestige and status (and the hoped-for developmental benefits flowing therefrom). The joint nature of the event did become a critical issue, but so did two other factors: the changing nature of cricket, and the internal organisational problems during the event. In effect, these proved the catalysts for some sections of the international press to revive historical stereotypes of the chaotic and corrupt ‘East’ and to recycle prejudicial stereotypes in a late 20th century context.

Analysing major events in the ‘semi-periphery’: themes and directions

Black and Van der Westhuizen have drawn together several insightful and significant themes in an introductory paper to this issue that serves as a very useful platform for the subsequent case studies. In doing so they offer the possibility that this project of exploring major events through the criteria of identity, inequality and power can illuminate some generalised outcomes that reach beyond case study-specific narratives. As identified by the various contrib- utors to this collection, there have been several recent research publications looking at individual events or at specific nations, but grander projects like that of Maurice Roche are rare exceptions that aim to develop theories on major sporting events as integral to such larger themes as processes of modernity.5 It is important that the theme of ‘semi-peripheral’ polities is addressed as a broad theme that shows the place of major sports events in the global political economy.

It is therefore unfortunate that academic research has, in a sense, come to reflect the very power relations that Black and Van der Westhuizen aim to critique. Some events in the Western, English-speaking world—such as the Sydney Olympics—have been dissected in close detail from a range of method- ological perspectives, while events firmly located in the ‘semi-periphery’ like the African Nations’ Cup and the Afro-Asian Games have been entirely ignored. Of course, there is a mid-level between these extremes whereby events that are non-Western but still comprehensible to Western researchers, and large enough to attract attention—such as the Commonwealth Games in Malaysia, the soccer World Cup in Japan and South Korea, or the 1999 Cricket World Cup in England—have received some, if still limited, attention. Therefore, if we are to focus on the discrepancies in bidding decisions and hosting processes that favour the ‘developed’ nations, we also have to pay attention to how and why some events are considered safer, easier, more appropriate and more comfortable by academic researchers.

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This is not simply a question of subjective preference on the part of individual scholars, however; there is a question of epistemology at stake here. We would speculate that mainstream, Western, English-language events are seen as more ‘knowable’. The contested interpretation of the Sydney Games is quite instruc- tive in this respect. Radical, left-wing critics such as Helen Lenskyj differ in their interpretation from more conservative and Olympic-friendly analysts like Richard Cashman and his cohort of postgraduate researchers.6 Yet in this instance both sides make strong claims for their authority to interpret. Largely these are Australian researchers with access to localised information and who were ‘on-site’ when the event took place and in the country during the pre- and post- event periods. As such, their writings reflect something of a modernist approach to knowledge, meaning and interpretation—they assume that there is a truth that can be accessed through the classic methods of empirical data collection and objective analysis. What leads to variation in their analysis is the selection of issues to focus on, the selection of evidence to prove ideological points, and the background assumptions about the value or otherwise of hosting a major sports event.

In the sports events literature generally there is a lack of critical reflection on how knowledge is to be obtained, collated, applied and analysed. Nonetheless, it seems that even fundamental types of knowledge are produced in ways that reflect power relations at local, regional and national level. Whether it be financial data, surveys of volunteers, details of tourism expenditure, records of police attitudes to homeless people, management of facilities, and so on, information gets produced by a particular organisation with a vested interest in promoting a particular argument. Indeed, almost all parties within the major event’s ‘policy community’ are inclined to show the event as a success, and so will highlight the positive and play down the negative.7

Following on from this, it could be argued that knowledge about an event is up for negotiation, and becomes a focus for competing ideological interests. This issue is implied in the question posed by Black and Van der Westhuizen: ‘How frequently, and under what circumstances, are host governments likely to lose control of the images they seek to project—and with what costs?’. So we can revise what is meant by ‘success’ and ‘failure’ to position these as elements in the interpretation process, as opposed to objective facts based on a straightfor- ward materialist reading of the outcome. A successful host is one that can manage the production of knowledge to suit its ends, while a failed host is one who allows negative publicity to overshadow the event. Given that the media are relatively autonomous, there is pressure for strong PR ‘spin’.

Yet it is here that the difference between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries can become extremely important. The media are more likely to be generous or at least sympathetic to hosts whose national stereotype fits with the perceived demands of organising a major sports event. For instance, Australia is largely viewed as a well managed, ‘sporty’ country, where people enjoy physical recreation and healthy lifestyles. Issues of racism, sexism, harassment of home- less people, and so on, are assumed to be a marginal part of national culture. Such positive imagery is not usually applied to countries of the developing South—they are less likely to be able to control knowledge and image projection

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because they face media who persist in portraying their country in negative prejudicial stereotypes. In essence we are arguing that there is no single ‘truth’ but that the management of ‘truthful’ discourses must contend with the specific pre-existing, powerful stereotypes that relate to a particular culture.

In terms of our analysis of the South Asia Cricket World Cup, there are several useful points in Black and Van der Westhuizen’s paper. These authors make the point that ‘ethnically diverse’ semi-peripheral societies often lack a cohesive national identity required for the ‘successful deployment of marketing power’ through hosting a major sports event. As such, the potential for an event to promote a positive image of this society can be undermined by internal conflict, with the media quick to expose inefficiencies and embarrassing episodes of mismanagement. This opens up the state to the risk that negative imagery will be associated with the event. Drawing on the theories of Bourdieu, Black and Van der Westhuizen argue that: ‘the risk of loss is determined not only by the inability to convert social capital to material capital, but by the fact that political embarrassments may actually diminish rather than boost a state’s cultural and social capital’.

Arguably, this risk is even greater for societies that are consistently repre- sented in negative ways by the media. India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are rarely given much encouraging coverage, except perhaps within the pages of exotic travel magazines. Even then, however, only small scale, specific regions are presented as attractive and many travel articles also carry the obligatory Foreign Office warnings and descriptions of the health risks associated with tropical places. In the mid-1990s most of the news coverage of South Asia focused on the Indo-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir, the testing of nuclear weapons by these countries, and the ongoing tragedy of the Sri Lankan civil war. The underlying, but not exactly covert, assumption on the nuclear weapons question was that, while rational Western governments could legitimately stockpile such weapons, they would more likely be used by over-excitable and unpredictable South Asians. Moreover, conflicts within each of the countries and between them were a consistent feature of reportage surrounding South Asian politics.

Therefore, when South Asia won the right to host the CWC these countries not only faced the problems of internal conflict, but also a latent prejudice within the media. Perhaps it is not so much the reality of internal conflict that is important—after all, this is a region of a billion people, wherein we can hardly expect ethnic homogeneity and constant political stability—but the media’s use of this conflict alongside other negative stereotypes to present a particular type of image to the rest of the world. As Black and Van der Westhuizen note in a later passage:

while hosts may wish to project images of modernity and unity, what the northern (North American and European) sporting media may in fact project to their audiences are tales of instability, poverty and ‘backwardness’, effectively re-inscrib- ing post-colonial images of difference.

This is an important theme for analysing how the CWC was presented to international audiences through the media. It suggests that the risks inherent in using major events to project images of positive identity, community and efficiency can be enhanced by pre-existing prejudices and media practices that

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aim simply to confirm popular stereotypes. The language used in media dis- courses is therefore not a straightforward ‘window’ on to reality; instead we must confront the fact that our knowledge of an event is essentially the product of mediated representations. By analysing these representations we can further understand the reasons why hosting major events in ‘semi-peripheral polities’ does not always prove a successful exercise in projecting a positive image of the host country and why the consequent economic or image benefits do not always accrue to these countries.

Background to the 1996 World Cup

The interrelationship of event organisation and media interpretation is very demanding and not especially sympathetic to ‘developing’ societies. Instead it is expected that the host country can align itself with a particular model of unified national identity based on ethnic homogeneity, state control over violence and political dissension, management and provision of infrastructure. When hosts do not live up to these expectations they face what Black and Van der Westhuizen refer to as a perceived ‘competence deficit’.

However, because the world of global cricket is a small one, largely inhabited by postcolonial nations, it is more likely that host nations will not fit the expectations outlined above. What makes the situation more complex and somewhat ironic is that the former imperial power and home of cricket, England, is no longer in a position to make the sport a viable commercial entity. Cricket has neither the popularity, marketing power or commercial base to make much impression on the British public and certainly will not in the foreseeable future be able to compete against soccer and rugby. Beyond these materialist aspects of the sport’s position, the cultural baggage of English cricket is extremely traditionalist and a hindrance to its commercialisation and globalisation. When the 1996 CWC was awarded to South Asia, many traditionalists decried the fact that money seemed so prominent a factor in the bidding process. The South Asian organising committee, known as PILCOM, had essentially stolen a march on England, who were favourites to host the 1996 event, by offering larger financial deals to other cricketing countries and making promises about merchan- dising and marketing.8

Despite the criticisms, there was no denying the fact that South Asian supporters deserved the World Cup and held the future of the game, as the massive popularity of cricket and its heroes facilitated much improved media deals, sponsorship packages and branding. Paradoxically, the globalisation of cricket was seen in many quarters as simultaneously the survival of cricket but also its death. In Bourdieu’s terms it could be said that the enhanced economic capital bled the cultural capital from the game. Of course, this is a traditionalist, ethnocentric view not shared by South Asians but it nonetheless gave rise to many patronising comments within the media that served to problematise the cultural influence of South Asian countries. This is reflected in Robert Winder’s comment: ‘To restrained English eyes, perhaps the most telling aspect of the sub-continent’s enthusiasm for cricket is that it is fuelled partly by a love of fame and glamour.’9

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However, to focus only on the tension within cricket between long-gone but deeply felt traditional values and the modern, global game, is somewhat to miss the point. Much of the media coverage around the world revealed that stereo- types and patronising attitudes towards South Asia are the postcolonial hangover of old colonial days. The terminology used to describe South Asian people provides sufficient evidence of this. Alan Lee, writing in the Times, described Pakistani fans as ‘hysterics’ and Indian fans as ‘impressionable’ people who are happy to see players as ‘demi-gods’;10 elsewhere he wrote of the ‘fevered, irrational atmospheres of Bangalore and Calcutta’.11 Robert Winder in the Independent referred to India’s ‘hysterical home support’.12 Ron Reed, writing for the Adelaide Advertiser, described South Asia as ‘one of the world’s danger zones’.13 In general therefore it was widely accepted that South Asian culture could be represented in fairly classic colonial terms as insane, uncontrollable, superstitious, uncivilised and threatening.

Interpretations of key events were made on the assumption that South Asia was beset with ‘developmental’ problems. After problems with the opening ceremony, Ken Rutherford offered this account in the New Zealand newspaper Truth:

Who can possibly expect the cricket World Cup to progress without any further glitches? Only the most hopeless of optimists. Already the tournament has been plagued by strife and the organisation appears disjointed as internal factions collide. Small wonder. The political situation in the sub-continent hardly portrays peace and stability. Trying to get India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka working together on a common project is like getting the All Black, Springbok and Wallaby front rows to share a picnic.14

After crowd trouble in Calcutta, Lance Campbell wrote in the Adelaide Adver- tiser that, ‘To the West, it would have appeared that the East had gone mad.’15

And on the same incident, Peter Roebuck in the Sunday Times echoed colonial discourses: ‘Civilisation had not entered the soul of the cricketing crowd in Calcutta, tempering its anger, reminding it that life has its ups and downs.’16 And R Craddock in the Courier Mail (Queensland) took the opportunity to twice remind readers of the ‘volatile nature of the sub-continent crowds’ that ‘creates a threatening air of tension the game can do without’.17 Finally, Tony Lawrence wrote for the Agence France Presse that the event had whipped up ‘feverish passions’, and that ‘Sport is often described as the civilised world’s alternative to war. This tournament has seemed a mere extension of it.’18

Of course, against the ‘postcolonial representations’ thesis it could be argued that these comments emerge from and reflect ‘real’ issues, and that in the course of analysis we should not allow a social constructionist perspective to dominate. In the next section of this paper, we will address the key events that prompted criticism and ask if the media’s response was either an understandable reaction to these or was prompted by an underlying prejudice that sought confirmation of negative stereotypes.

Mistakes, embarrassments, and media discourses

The tournament began with the opening ceremony on 11 February 1996 in

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Calcutta. Before then, however, safety fears had been raised after two incidents: a fire in northern India killed 400 people in December; and nine fans died and 50 were injured at a cricket match in November after a newly built wall collapsed.19 Security was worrying the Australian team even before it left for South Asia. In a report for the Observer, Vic Marks sympathised with its reservations regarding playing in Sri Lanka by citing a whole range of other violent episodes in the recent history of the region.20 Two days later a leader article in the Sydney Morning Herald widened the scope of anxieties to include the ‘possibility of terrorist activities in Pakistan’.21

The discussion of boycotting Sri Lanka led Simon Wilde to outline the recent political context as one in which ‘the sub-continent has descended into deeper and more intractable difficulties’, especially the long-running problems in Sri Lanka and the Indo-Pak tensions’.22 The South Asian organisers responded by saying that the bomb in Sri Lanka was the first in 18 months, that the Tamil Tigers had promised not to target cricket players or matches, that the IRA bombs in England did not stop countries going there on tour, and that concerns over local security did not prevent the British from colonising South Asia for 200 years. However, these responses were ignored and the spotlight continued to shine on further problems after a crane collapsed at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai as the new floodlights were being installed.

The situation did not get better for the South Asian organisers as the opening ceremony in Calcutta ran into some technical difficulties. The much-vaunted laser show was hard to watch as the wind buffeted the giant screens on which it was projected. After rumours had spread through the city that the former Miss Universe would strip naked, the crowd kept a disappointed, muted silence during her appearance—she meanwhile was blissfully unaware of her role in the matter and continued to plead with the onlookers to ‘make some noise’. The national costumes of each competing country were to be worn by models but failed to arrive so the young women were presented in simple T-shirts and jeans. The compère, actor Saeed Jaffrey, could not properly identify the teams and managed to announce South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and Zimbabwe wrongly as they entered the stadium. The television coverage did not work as predicted because the organisers failed to secure air traffic clearance for the blimp. Predictably, this was described as ‘an embarrassing flop’.23 And even though the responsibility lay with an Italian promotions company, it was grist to the mill of South Asia’s critics. The following day, Alan Lee dealt harshly with the event’s organisers and indeed national psychology when he wrote the following in the Times:

The sixth cricket World Cup has attracted ridicule and condemnation in its run-up but it is on the delivery that it must be judged. Out of a jungle of political tension, logistical chaos and administrative brinkmanship, there just might emerge a memo- rable sporting competition…Given what has already occurred, a complete shambles seems the likelier outcome…the nations staging the tournament live, by nature, on the edge.24

The next major story was that Australia had finally decided to boycott Sri Lanka and accept the loss of two points, a move that won the support of most

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international newspapers. Back home, Ron Reed in the Adelaide Advertiser reported on a bomb several days beforehand in Colombo that killed 87 people and the defusing of a truck bomb around the same area, and concluded that everyday life was conducted in a state of ‘constant peril’.25 Criticism of the organisers mounted after the West Indies also chose to boycott Sri Lanka. In the Manchester Guardian Weekly, Mike Selvey claimed that the competition was already ‘devalued’, that there was a ‘question mark’ over its ‘authenticity’ and that damage had been done ‘to the image of international cricket’.26

However, in South Asia the response was somewhat different: Australia was cast into the role of arrogant imperialists acting out of snobbery and the players were described by a leading politician as ‘sissies’. In their refusal to bow to Australian fears and shift the venue, the organisers were congratulated by New Zealand journalist Ken Rutherford who saw some edifying elements of self-be- lief: ‘The sub-continent now says candidly that it is a grown-up member of cricket’s community not makeweights, not apologetic post-colonialists, but proper International Cricket Council members who can say “no”…the sub- continent now has an assertiveness that is backed by a staggering volume of money…Their refusal to budge is a sign of their political self-confidence’.27 If South Asia had won the right to host through economic capital, then, in this case at least, some political capital might have followed. However, such insight as Rutherford showed here was rare among journalists outside South Asia; instead the usual disparagement of South Asian independence was remi- niscent of patronising colonial attitudes towards ‘native’ attempts at self- governance.

A number of articles around this time focused entirely on violence and security fears. It was reported that the England player Darren Gough had almost been struck by what was described as a ‘spear’ but was more likely to have been a wooden stick. This prompted the Evening Standard (London) to list a range of other small incidents of a similar nature that had occurred in South Asia over the previous 10 years.28 In the Daily Mirror, Mike Walters painted a dark picture of the ‘sad face’ of the World Cup:

With machine guns shadowing them all the way, England head back to their Karachi hotel yesterday after net practice. An armoured vehicle tails the team minibus and police cover every corner along the short drive of Pakistan’s most dangerous street…it’s safety first in the city where Foreign Office diplomats advise tourists to travel ‘only if it’s necessary’.29

The first round of games had actually passed off without much incident. The excitement was to come in the play-off phase, beginning with the highly anticipated meeting of India and Pakistan in Bangalore. A features article in the Times forecast a match that would be ‘part cricket and part war’, and made a quite astounding suggestion of historical continuity in South Asia’s preference for violence as compared to England’s civility: ‘Old WG Grace, were he somehow to return, would not recognise the atmosphere; Prince Ranjitsinhji might, perhaps, but only with some local prompting’.30 It is fascinating how easily some sections of the media were willing to imply an ahistorical, almost natural, inclination among South Asian people for violence and hysterical forms

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of behaviour. A close cousin of this idea is that South Asia is full of religious fundamentalist ‘hotheads’ who would disrupt the cricket for their own ends. There were numerous stories of such potential actions, as well as stories that Islamic mullahs were unhappy with the secular cultural activities that were related to the CWC. Another accusation made was that corruption had led to the redistribution of tickets to the ‘influential…undeserving…and unscrupulous’, the latter creating a black market with inflated prices. Meanwhile, other writers worried about blood being spilled in the ‘frantic streets’ of Bangalore in the context of a nuclear stand-off and communal tension.31 In the end the violence predicted did not materialise, but that did not stop the media using the match to air the prejudiced stereotypes that would lead readers to fear South Asian culture.

The worst case of violence came in the semi-final match in Calcutta between India and Sri Lanka, which had to be abandoned because the fans—among other things—invaded the field of play. The negative publicity was inevitable, as was the invocation of standard stereotypes of South Asian fanaticism. For instance, the Washington Post’s correspondent reflected on events thus:

Cricket is thought of as a sport for gentlemen. However, disappointed fans threw rocks and bottles, set fires and stormed the field in Calcutta…Police were needed to clear the field as fires burned in the stands and outside the stadium. The players returned after 20 minutes, but objects continued to rain down, causing Lloyd to award the victory to Sri Lanka by default.32

The article went on to detail the problems police faced trying to disperse the crowd waiting for the players, while angry fans ‘burnt an effigy’ of the Indian captain Muhammad Azharuddin. This image of fans burning effigies was repeated in The Australian, and is reminiscent of television reporting of funda- mentalist protests in the Middle East. There were also reports of over-emotional and incomprehensible responses in the cases of two fans who mourned their team’s defeat by killing themselves.

However, in contrast to the hype around security and violence, and suggesting that the coverage itself was hysterical (rather than the fans), Peter Roebuck in the Times did make the point that the events should not be exaggerated: ‘No one was hurt, there was no riot. Worse things happen on English football grounds. But it was a disgrace.’33 Meanwhile, sincere apologies were offered by several key figures such as the President of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, Inderjit Singh Bindra, and the boss of the organising committee, Jagmohan Dalmiya. And the local press was quick to condemn the riotous crowd: the Calcutta-based Telegraph reported that ‘India has succeeded in establishing that it deserves to be excommunicated from the world of cricket’.34

Nonetheless, South Asia was seen to have failed the test of modernity and organisation that is hosting major events. A number of newspapers claimed that no major sports event would be staged in the sub-continent again.

The Guardian roundly criticised the event and its organisers after ‘India had crossed the threshold from partisan support to mob rule…this is supposed to be the celebration of world cricket, not the third world war’.35 Reflections on the

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event as a whole focused on the problematic incidents: the opening ceremony, the boycott of Sri Lanka, the violence in Calcutta; but also the underlying air of tension as players received death threats, fundamentalists tried to use the cricket for their own ends, and security was tight. And there was of course the background of ongoing in-fighting between cricketing countries, based on allegation of ball-tampering, bribery, match-fixing and corruption. Despite these concerns, it could be argued that the criticisms were over-hyped, that some aggressive behaviour by fans does not constitute a third world war, and that, as Peter Roebuck noted, such behaviour can be found in other cultural contexts. But the discourses are different: sports-related violence in the West is constructed as the behaviour only of a small minority of mindless idiots who ruin it for everyone else; in South Asia—by contrast—violence was the endemic confirmation of everyone’s worst fears of extremists, fanatics and fundamental- ists, and was somehow taken to symbolise a national malaise.

In the final, Sri Lanka beat Australia in Lahore and received much applause for their attacking style of play. The trophy was presented by the Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and in the crush of celebrating fans the Trophy was knocked over, the captain Arjuna Ranatunga was pushed through an advertising boarding, and the winners’ cheque was stolen from his pocket. All of which offered a chance for The Australian to reflect that ‘Cricket’s World Cup concluded here much in the manner it had begun—amid chaos and contro- versy’.36 The following day, Alan Lee returned to the theme that South Asian culture had corrupted cricket. He wrote for both the Times in England and for The Australian that the tournament had been a disaster, mostly because of the ‘moneymaking obsession’ that had turned cricket into ‘just one more ride in the commercial fairground’ such that ‘within this financial fever, the mechanics of orchestrating a successful tournament—logistics, practice facilities and the logic of the playing format were shamefully neglected’. As a consequence, Lee concluded that the South Asian countries should never have been allowed to host the event: ‘Perhaps the administrators who voted for this World Cup to be staged by the subcontinental tripartite are satisfied. The inducement to them all was money and that they will receive; yet, if this continues to be the sole justification for such decisions, then the game of cricket has a precarious and unattractive future.’37

The accusation of greed alongside incompetence is a reflection of anxieties over cricket’s globalisation. It infers that a virtuous game that was the repository of cherished values, and was once a means of civilising the colonial native, has been appropriated by the native and become something contemptible in the process. There was more at stake here than simply the running of an event: the shift from colonial to postcolonial/Commonwealth dependency had been dra- matic enough; but this new shift to a direction in which former colonies had the power to take over cricket for grubby reasons like profit was not seen as acceptable. Indeed, the whole process of bidding for the event was disparaged as merely a financial transaction rather than the correct sporting decision. And the process of organising and hosting the event was disparaged as a fiasco of poor management both in terms of the format of the matches and the handling of critical issues like security.

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Conclusion

The questions remains as to whether a realist or constructionist interpretation is more viable. From the realist perspective, it could be argued that the events themselves undermined the possibility of using the CWC for positive image projection. It was not so much that the government and PILCOM lost control of the images, but that they lost control of the event. It was poorly structured in terms of playing format, important moments like the opening ceremony were badly managed, the fans could not be trusted to act in a decent, civilised manner, the police did not prevent pitch invasions and riots, there were constant security worries that were not dealt with, including the impact of a civil war, and the whole thing was a corrupt enterprise in profiteering. Such a view suits pre-exist- ing stereotypes and the interests of traditionalists who want cricket to remain bound up with notions of gentlemanly England.

Nevertheless, we should explore the question of whether the media over- inflated the problems and presented a set of images that were selected to reconfirm existing prejudiced stereotypes of South Asia. In his book recounting the event, Hell for Leather: A Modern Cricket Journey, Robert Winder suggests that the British media, at least, had built up a negative image of a crisis-ridden event long before it even began:

During the preliminaries to the World Cup the English newspapers had been full of remarks, by players, administrators and commentators, about the trials and tribula- tions of spending any time at all in the subcontinent. India, in these accounts, boiled down to a fearful pageant of poisonous food, violent illness, chronic delays and distressing squalor.38

And yet Winder was himself inclined to indulge in such descriptions, even if he did criticise others for doing so. In the same book, and only two pages previously, he had offered the following account of Mumbai:

If you took Southall High Street [west London], bombed it a bit, took out the plumbing and the drains, dropped in thousands of people to camp along the road, starved them for a year or so, spread rubbish around, emptied a few lorry loads of cows and goats on to the streets, and turned the heat up to furnace-level, that would give you the drive into the city centre.39

In other words, regardless of the violent events in Calcutta or the civil war in Sri Lanka, there was a pre-existing image of South Asia that focused on the violence, the strangeness, the underdevelopment, the fanaticism, corruption and fundamentalism. These images, we would argue, lay the foundation for criti- cisms about South Asian culture and facilitated the exaggeration of small problems into grand theories of cultural backwardness. Even the more sympath- etic commentators like Robert Winder allowed their writing to slip all too easily into simplistic and prejudicial stereotypes. Few journalists paid much attention to how South Asians viewed events—their defence of Sri Lanka as a location, their embarrassment at crowd violence, and their arguments that perhaps the Western countries are not perfect either.

Finally, what conclusions can be drawn from this case study that might benefit the wider analysis of events and semi-peripheral settings? Our central point

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concerns knowledge and representation: that ‘developing’ countries are less able to control the images that are projected within the media. This is not because they lack PR skills, but because the Western media and their audiences have a narrow and largely negative set of images in mind. It is easier to play up to these images than to confront and challenge them. If governments and sports author- ities want to use major events as a means of integrating themselves into the global economy, and in the hope of improving infrastructural development and attracting higher numbers of tourists, then the example of the 1996 Cricket World Cup should serve as a sober warning. Analyses of events that concentrate on textual readings can highlight the struggles for ideological interpretation and show that global inequalities are to be found in discourse as much as in the more materialist areas of economy and development.

Notes 1 We are thinking here of such cases as the Scotland–Ireland joint bid for the 2008 football European

Championships which ran into difficulties because of a lack of internal cohesion within the Irish sports policy community.

2 For a critical and insightful account that sets this in historical context, see S Sen, ‘Enduring colonialism in cricket: from Ranjitsinhji to the Cronje affair’, Contemporary South Asia, 10 (2), 2001, pp 237–250.

3 J Bale & M Cronin, Sport and Postcolonialism, Oxford: Berg, 2002. 4 Williams tackles the complexities of cricket’s ‘globalisation’: ‘In the 1980s and 1990s cricket had been

a cultural space where the Pakistani desire for decolonisation had clashed with the residual white English assumptions of moral superiority which had validated imperial power, but paradoxically Asian leadership in international cricket has resulted in cricket becoming a force for Western cultural imperialism, even though this was a form of cultural imperialism with which English cricket felt uneasy. The tensions of England/Pakistani cricket in the late twentieth century do much to highlight the complexities and contradictions of the postcolonial condition.’ J Williams, ‘Paki cheats! Postcolonial tensions in England– Pakistani cricket’, in Bale & Cronin, Sport and Postcolonialism.

5 M Roche, Mega-events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture, London: Routledge, 2000.

6 For more on this debate see H Lenskyj, The Best Olympics Ever? Social Impacts of Sydney 2000, New York: SUNY Press, 2002.

7 Another example of contested knowledge is that of economic impact analysis. See J L Crompton, ‘Economic impact analysis of sports facilities and events: eleven sources of misapplication’, Journal of Sports Management, 9 (1), 1995, pp 14–35.

8 R Winder, Hell for Leather: A Modern Cricket Journey, London: Orion, 1999. 9 R Winder, ‘Sticks and stones and mobile phones’, Independent, 24 February 1996. Winder wrote several

lengthy and reflective pieces for the Independent and later published a monograph on the 1996 CWC. Winder, Hell for Leather.

10 A Lee, ‘India weighs up price of fame’, The Times, 15 March 1996. 11 A Lee, ‘World celebration sinks in a quagmire of greed’, The Australian, 20 March 1996. Lee was one

of the most important contributors to the international press coverage, having several articles in the London Times and in The Australian.

12 R Winder, ‘Cricket’s new order is happy to embrace the commercial age’, Independent, 13 February 1996. 13 R Reed, ‘Cup jinx hits as Aussies fly out’, Adelaide Advertiser, 10 February 1996. 14 K Rutherford, ‘Cup cricket strife? It’s hardly surprising’, Truth (Auckland), 16 February 1996. 15 L Campbell, ‘Oh! Calcutta!’, Adelaide Advertiser, 15 March 1996. 16 P Roebuck, ‘Mob not to blame for India’s shame’, The Sunday Times, 17 March 1996. 17 R Craddock, ‘Riots end Indian hopes of second cup tournament’, Courier Mail (Queensland), 15 March

1996. 18 T Lawrence, ‘Controversial World Cup goes down in history’, Agence France Presse, 14 March 1996. 19 ‘Safety concern for World Cup’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 10 January 1996. 20 V Marks, ‘Mind games tilting balance of terror’, Observer, 4 February 1996. 21 ‘No-go cricket’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 February 1996. 22 S Wilde, ‘Why trouble has dogged World Cup from start’, The Times, 7 February 1996.

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23 R Reed, ‘Foul-ups make World Cup audience squirm’, Courier Mail, 13 February 1996. 24 A Lee, ‘Riches in store after the ridicule’, The Times, 12 February 1996. 25 R Reed, ‘Solidarity in shadow of truck bomb find’, Adelaide Advertiser, 14 February 1996. 26 M Selvey, ‘Laser dazzle fails to lift Cup gloom’, Manchester Guardian Weekly, 18 February 1996. 27 Rutherford, ‘Cup cricket strife?’. 28 J Thicknesse, ‘Threat to Gough’, Evening Standard (London), 23 February 1996. 29 M Walters, ‘And they call it cricket’, Daily Mirror, 29 February 1996. 30 ‘Beyond a boundary’, The Times, 9 March 1996. 31 A Lee, ‘World Cup in the line of fire’, The Times, 9 March 1996. 32 ‘Violence ends cricket’s World Cup semi-final’, Washington Post, 14 March 1996. 33 P Roebuck, ‘Mob not to blame for India’s shame’, The Sunday Times, 17 March 1996. 34 Telegraph (Calcutta),14 March 1996. 35 ‘Cricket: World Cup riot was waiting to happen’, Guardian, 14 March 1996. 36 ‘Chaos shadows Sri Lanka’s hour of triumph’, The Australian, 19 March 1996. 37 Lee, ‘World celebration sinks in quagmire of greed’. 38 Winder, Hell for Leather, p 23. 39 Ibid, pp 20–21.

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