Cricket has a rich cultural history in Toronto. The sport is closely tied to Black history, following the Black Diaspora throughout the colonized world – and especially in Toronto, a British colonial outpost. In “Rebound: Sports, Community and the Inclusive City” (Coach House Books, fall, 2021), Perry King discusses cricket as a vehicle to talk about how people can organize, animate and bring forth ideas to build a better city.
King is a communications officer at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and an author. In this excerpt, first published in Spacing Magazine on February 18, 2021, he quotes Peter Donnelly, a professor at the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, about the history of cricket in the GTA. Donnelly launched the GTActivity project in 2016, to track and celebrate the diversity of physical culture in the GTA.
Cricket has been part of the colonial Canadian imagination longer than the Canadian project itself. According to Peter Donnelly, a University of Toronto professor of sports policy and politics, cricket has been here since the 18th century at least, and lived in the imaginations of former colonies for centuries. “It now gets very connected with two big communities – South Asian and Caribbean – plus all of those South Africans and Brits and Australians and New Zealanders that are in town are also playing,” he says.
Donnelly’s GTActivity project revealed that the game is being played more broadly than he expected. “I live in Burlington and the park has just been mowed and pegged out a cricket field in the last three or four years,” he recounts. “I was watching a game on Sunday afternoon around two years ago. It was clearly a mixed-race team, but looked like a lot of South Asians and I was talking to one of the folks on the batting side. I asked, ‘Which league is that?’ And he told me it was a hybrid district and that there were probably 10 to 12 teams.
Peter spoke to a batter who was a librarian from St. Catharine’s, Ontario. “I said, ‘Well, what kind of people are playing?’ This guy is a brown guy with a Canadian accent. So he says to me, ‘We have people from everywhere – you know, South Asian, West Indian, Australian, New Zealand and Britain you know – and he said, ‘Pretty much everybody except Canadians.” Peter and the batter shared a good laugh over that one.
“So, this identification – as cricket as being ‘not Canadian’ – and you know, all these guys were Canadian!”
Read more in Spacing Magazine online.