The un-bylined author of this Essential Reading item wasn’t the only one to draw a very large breath upon the news that the US national cricket team (above) recently beat Pakistan in the T20 World Cup.  Such a result by a cricketing minnow (the US made the tournament only because it was a co-host of the event) against a powerful, although notoriously fickle, cricketing nation (Pakistan finished second in the previous cup), was unthinkable, even in the ersatz, lottery-level, shortened form of the game, and must as ER concluded, be evidence that the End Times are nigh. 

Actually, it signifies nothing quite so momentous, just more of the End of Western Civilisation Days as the West goes to hell in a woke handbasket courtesy of self-inflicted mass immigration.

Quintessentially English, and bequeathed to and embraced by its colonial prodigies (Anglo and non-Anglo alike), cricket has thrived throughout most of the Anglosphere with the notable exception of the US, where gridiron, baseball, basketball and ice hockey thumb an American Revolutionary nose at the old empire it fought an actual war to be rid of.

It took until the 1930s and 1940s for the first inroads to be made into the US by cricket  with the founding of the Hollywood Cricket Club (below) by expatriate English actors when the likes of Boris Karloff (highly prone to the LBW dismissal), David Niven and (the Tasmanian-cum-honorary Brit) Errol Flynn (usually drunk or late to a game) donned the whites, joined by such American stars as British-born Cary Grant and a young Elizabeth Taylor served tea and Olivia de Havilland lunched on cucumber sandwiches.

That’s all changed now and cricket in the US is more like Bollywood than the Golden Age of Hollywood thanks to the massive inflow of Indian immigrants.  As a result of these foreigners simply being on American soil, what is called the ‘American’ cricket team is largely the American franchise of Indian cricket – at least six players on the US team are of Indian descent, including several who are in the U.S. on temporary work (H1-B) visas that allow companies to hire (cheap) overseas labour.

These six ringers (out of eleven in a cricket team) include such apple-pie-Americans as  bowler Saurabh Netravalkar (who, like many foreign students, came to find work and stayed on), batsman Monank Patel and bowler Nosthush Kenjige, who all played crucial roles in getting ‘America’ over the line against Pakistan. 

Note, also, that the Indian, and other sub-continental Asian, diaspora is propping up some of the other cricketing minnows in the World Cup – “the majority of cricket players in Oman”, for example, are “expatriates from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka whilst … fewer than 100 of the 780 players in the senior national league are Omani nationals”, whilst the Ugandan team includes three Indian-origin players.

‘Progressive’ immigrant enthusiasts are cock-a-hoop over the Indian-supplemented US victory over Pakistan, declaring it a victory for immigration, “America’s most potent superpower”.  Our no-borders ideologues really can’t help themselves, turning a sporting entertainment and national cultural signifier into a vehicle for delivering a simplistic, globalist, ‘One-World’ anti-nationalist message at all opportunities: immigration good, borders bad. So cop that you ethnocentrists, racists and bigots who query the national credentials of the ‘US’ cricket team.

But this jibe is gratuitous. Cricket is firmly part of the national identity, culture and history of the old British Empire bastions of the game but can a synthetic USA team, half of which consists of immigrants, ever achieve the same status?  Cricket has a certain level of popularity Stateside, but take away the demographic cohort of South Asian immigrants and it has not sunk any organic roots in US sporting culture.

Partly that is due to the nature of the game which doesn’t gel with Americans’ taste for shorter, more action-packed sports. With its five-day Test matches that can peter out to tedious draws, and with more time being spent with nothing happening than any actual sporting drama, cricket is not to the liking of American sports nuts. Having watched an English county cricket match for several hours with his hosts whilst visiting that country, Groucho Marx, when asked “are you enjoying it?”, replied, “It’s great. When does it start?”  The pace of the long-form game would have prejudiced many Americans against it, even in the bastardised, twenty-over slogfest format.

The forced celebration of the surprise win by ‘America’ over Pakistan by all the correct-thinking Good People is about proving their ‘anti-racist’ credentials whilst bagging political conservatives as despicable racists. Meanwhile, those folks who want to keep politics out of sport are criticised by implication for having insufficient woke ardour.

This is wide of the stumps, however, since, if those who quibble with the multi-culti, pro-immigration message are crude racists who don’t like black or brown people, how does that explain the popularity and admiration in Australia, England and New Zealand of, say, the powerhouse West Indies team of the 1970s (Richards, Lloyd, Marshall, Roberts, Holding, Garner, etc.) which laid waste to all other cricketing nations?  Of course, the charge of ‘racism’ is never levelled against the non-white cricketing nations of the Commonwealth which are about as non-Diverse as you can get and still pass woke muster. Only Anglo Westerners can be ‘racist’, personally or ‘structurally’, don’t you know.

So, if the West Indies cricket team is allowed to be identifiably West Indian, and the Indians Indian, and the Pakistanis Pakistani, why should not the US, Australia, etc. also be allowed to be identifiably American or Australian in demographic makeup, as Australia (but not the US), miraculously, still is, despite the passing infatuation of Australian cricketing officials with ‘taking the knee’ to honour a black career criminal and drug addict, and despite a certain Australian opening batsman who shills for some of his more disreputable co-religionists in Gaza.  Or is ‘diversity’ a one-way street with demographic dilution only meant to be aimed at oppressive, non-coloured countries like Australia and the USA?

That’s just not cricket.