Race against the times

Last week, Indian fast bowlers Mohammed Siraj and Jasprit Bumrah were at the receiving end of racist abuse by Australian fans, who were ejected from the Sydney Cricket Ground. This incident, which marred an enthralling draw in the third Test, a torrent of indignation from the Indian team and profuse apologies from Cricket Australia. The International Cricket Council is reportedly investigating the incident. Later, Gautam Gambhir complained that players were regularly subjected to racial abuse in Australia and South Africa. This may well be true, but anyone who has attended an international cricket match in any ground in India will know that Indian cricketers are not the only victims.

Visiting West Indian teams are regularly subjected to crude taunts about the colour of skin. Windies outfielders do not complain because they do not understand the local language. Some of them even believe the crowd is being friendly (as did Darren Sammy, who thought his Sunriser Hyderabad colleagues were being affectionate in nicknaming him kalu). Black cricketers from South Africa, England and the dark-skinned Sri Lankans received similar treatment (Hyderabad Sunrisers gave Sri Lanka’s Thisara Perera the same nickname as Sammy). Countering racism doesn’t figure high on Indian sports’ administration’s agenda. Thirteen years ago, it was Harbhajan Singh who found himself facing a three-match ban in Australia for racially abusing the mercurial all-rounder Andrew Symonds, the only non-white cricketer in the Australian team at the time. Sachin Tendulkar sought to bail out his colleague by suggesting that the word “monkey” that Symonds heard was actually a similar-sounding, crude Hindi invective that has nothing to do with race.

But it is interesting that all of a sudden, the issue of race has forced its way to the forefront of the sports business worldwide. Less than a month before that Sydney incident, almost 17,000 km away in Paris, two leading football teams, PSG from France and Basaksehir from Turkey, trooped off the pitch halfway through a UEFA Champions’ League match. They were protesting against a fourth official who racially abused the Turkish side’s Cameroonian assistant coach. The referee sent the fourth official off and the match was replayed the next day. It was preceded by both teams taking the knee ahead of kick-off, though it is worth wondering if the players would have been quite so sensitive had there been goals in the first match.

That spontaneous gesture of racial solidarity is of recent provenance in European football and, in an oblique way, the hundreds of African and Asian footballers there have US President Donald Trump to thank. As US-wide protests over the police murder of an African-American man, George Floyd were met with vicious crackdowns authorised by the president against Black Lives Matter supporters, the English Professional Footballers’ Association across the pond took note. They voted to take the knee for a few seconds before kick-off in each match starting with the 2020-21 season in solidarity and to send a “powerful message” that there is “No Room for Racism”. A poll in December suggested that footballers were happy to continue with the practice (it is nice to see coaching staff participating in this pre-match ritual).

In doing so English football is imitating a potent gesture by National Football League star Colin Kaepernick who took a knee during the national anthem ahead of a match to protest against police brutality and racial inequality in 2016. That hit a raw nerve all over the US with the president issuing dire threats even as footballers and basketballers defiantly imitated Kaepernick. Initially, some team owners and coaches, mostly white, threatened action, accusing their players of disrespect towards the American flag. But African-Americans form the bulk of the players on their teams, so they eventually bowed — or rather kneeled — to the inevitable and permitted the practice.

Fifa, the body governing world football, has been reasonably proactive this past decade in urging its European affiliates to get fans and teams to respect the growing presence of African and ethnic minorities on their football pitches, though with variable results. Among the major European footballing nations, Italy and Spain remain problematic as far as football fans are concerned but England, France and Germany make a manful effort to tamp down on racism. They deploy the help of TV cameras and microphones around the ground to identify offending fans and occasionally punish clubs by banning guilty players or supporters from the ground (the fan-less stadiums in these Covid-19 times makes that threat temporarily inapplicable).

Though it’s still a work-in-progress, European football’s effort to counter racism offers a good example for other sports. The widely-watched Indian Premier League, for instance, would do well to set an example by mandating racial counselling for their multinational teams and use its vaunted technology to police fans better. Cricket has had a proud history against racism, with the 1977 Gleneagles agreement outlawing sporting contact between Apartheid South Africa and Commonwealth nations (then the major cricketing nations). In the chase for big money, such values tend to be ignored. But as this sporting season has shown, the times they are “changing” and sports administrations should respond to them.