Deafening advert for support Asian style (9 June 1999)

9 June 1999

Deafening advert for support Asian style

Mihir Bose

Halfway through the Pakistan innings Sachin Tendulkar caught Moin Khan on the boundary. An Indian who had driven up from London turned to me and said: "It's all you media guys who hyped up this match as a Third World War." Then he paused, dropped his voice and said: "But I don't know what will happen if Pakistan lose. They can be fanatical, you know."

The Indian runs an electronics firm in Tottenham Court Road and employs more than a dozen who support Pakistan. They are, he says, as good as gold. And if the crowd at Old Trafford yesterday were not quite as good as gold - at the end, there were a few minor scuffles, some bottle throwing and police had to prevent an Indian flag being burned - the pre-match concerns about violence proved largely unfounded. What is more, the spectators demonstrated how British Asians can produce the tumultuous noise, colour and glamour involved in a cricket match in the sub-continent.

The immense culture shock that this represented for the many English in the crowd can best be illustrated by the reaction of the man sat in the top tier of Old Trafford's pavilion. He could have been the archetypal English cricket watcher: panama on his head and a novel by Joanna Trollope in his bag. Just before the match began, he brought the book out, no doubt hoping to read it while Shoaib Akhtar walked back to his mark. But the moment Shoaib began his run-up, the decibel count rose to such a crescendo that the Englishman quietly closed the book and never brought it out again.

This was not a day to peruse novels by authors beloved of middle England, but for the whistles, flags and chants of the sub-continent mixed with some English football culture. So when Tendulkar got out, the Pakistanis taunted the Indians with: "You're not singing anymore." When I asked a Pakistani supporter why he combined his Pakistani hat with a Celtic shirt he said: "Man, they're both green", which is probably the first time that a Muslim-Catholic alliance has been argued on the basis of a colour code.

Source :: The Electronic Telegraph