Thankfully those days are gone, but to be replaced by what? I make no apologies for discussing South African affairs since, for a decade, I was denied access to its shores for what I had written in these pages about its apartheid policies and was then arrested at Johannesburg airport on my first visit back. 'Fancy being bowled out by a Chinaman.' The story may well be apocryphal.Įven if it isn't I can assure you that Walter Robins, whom I knew well, didn't have a racist corpuscle in his veins. ![]() 'Good heavens,' Robins is supposed to have said. ![]() He wasn't all that good but he did manage to dismiss R.W.V. With much help from Mr Stephen Green, the librarian at Lord's Cricket Ground, we almost certainly determined that the word was first coined during a visit to this country in the 1930s by Mr Ernie Achong, a Trinidad left-arm wrist-spinner of mixed West Indian and Chinese parentage. There are racial undertones under many stones if you are sufficiently foolish to turn them over and, curiously enough, the derivation of our own cricketing term of 'chinaman' - the left-arm spinner's googly - is not without ammunition for those determined to make us grovel for forgiveness about our Colonial past. There may have been some racial undertone to that as well, but so what? I have sat in cricket grounds all round the Caribbean with delighted West Indians yelling 'black-wash' as their great teams of the recent past put England to the sword. However, I wonder why such acute navel-gazing political correctness should unnecessarily attract worldwide attention.Īs for 'whitewash', dismiss it from your minds. It is an extremely unsport-ing, though technically admissible, manoeuvre and, obviously, I recognise that the South African description of it is not entirely tactful. I confess this is a definition outside my experience but, apparently, it has been in common usage in South African cricket for many years to describe a delivery bowled underarm along the ground to make it virtually impossible for a batsman to score. The reason that McMillan is the focus of attention in South Africa is that he has been asked to apologise by tomorrow for publicly expressing the term 'coolie creeper'. Given three hours and half this page I couldn't improve on that. These are 'chinese cut' (a streaky shot that flies through your legs instead of in the direction intended) and 'whitewash' (the sad state of affairs when you fail to win a single match in a series).Īfter philosophising on these suggestions for all of two seconds, Mr Brian McMil-lan, the South Africa Test all-rounder, described them as 'a load of crap'. ![]() In addition and in all seriousness, Mr Brian Basson, director of umpiring and playing affairs with the United Cricket Board of South Africa, has said that two other familiar cricketing terms should also be proscribed. THESE are delicate times to discuss racial issues but I do believe the world has edged a little closer to terminal madness with the proposal to eliminate the word 'chinaman' from the glossary of cricket-ing definitions.Ī chinaman - invariably written without a capital 'c' to avoid provoking anyone who's ever heard of cricket in China - describes a left-arm wrist spinner's googly.
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