Mar 1, 2011
The Mercury, Durban, South Africa Monday February 28 2011 With the 10th World Cup now under way, 50-over cricket and the event itself are on trial, says one of the game’s most provocative, passionate and analytical followers, Mike Marqusee. Patrick Compton spoke to him. THE famous dictum of historian CLR James: “What do they know… Read more
Feb 21, 2011
Outlook (India), 21 February The 10th cricket World Cup opens with the format, and the event itself, on trial. That’s curious, for through most of its history, the World Cup has been an extraordinary success story. It came about more by accident than design (to plug a gap left in the English season by the… Read more
Dec 1, 2010
Red Pepper, December-January, 2010-2011 Politicians of all stripes feel obliged to genuflect before the altar of cancer, so it’s not surprising that the government has made strenuous efforts to cast itself as a defender of cancer patients. Some of its measures are genuinely beneficial. Innovative bowel screening procedures will save thousands of lives and extra… Read more
Sep 6, 2010
Outlook (India), 6 September On top of floods, war, bombs, a corrupt and incompetent government with a much feared military in the wings, the long-suffering people of Pakistan have now been betrayed, once again, by their cricketers. Most will not be shocked or will profess not to be shocked: over the last 15 years there… Read more
Aug 1, 2010
History Today, August 2010 As the England cricket team take on Pakistan in this summer’s Test Match series, Mike Marqusee revisits S.M.Toyne’s article on the origins and growth of the game, first published in History Today in June 1955. The full text of the original article (”The Early History of Cricket”) is available at History… Read more
May 8, 2010
Frontline (India) 8 May 2010 An abbreviated version of this article has been published on the Guardian’s Comment is free website. In the flush of its success, the IPL was held up as the face of the new, thrusting, ambitious India and its swelling status. “It is a global representation of India,” Lalit Modi argued,… Read more
Jan 12, 2010
The Guardian, Comment is free 12 January 2010 Visiting friends in Delhi, I found the local media celebrating India’s performance at Copenhagen, from which it had emerged unburdened by the slightest commitment to reducing carbon emissions. This “climate nationalism” seemed particularly grotesque given that north India’s river systems are threatened by receding Himalayan glaciers and… Read more
Aug 1, 2009
CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING Red Pepper, August-September 2009 Cricket emerges as the world’s first, modern organised team sport in the late 18th century, and is indelibly marked by that early origin. Its fate was intertwined with the political and economic revolutions of the era, and was shaped from the outset by a paradoxical mixture of… Read more
