Some corner of a foreign field
Given the Asian passion for cricket, it should be a unifying force in Britain today. But is it? Jonathan Rendall travelled to the sport's heartland and discovered that although cultural divides still exist, there are positive signs for the future
Sunday 9 June 2002
Observer Sport Monthly
Hanif Mayet, the 47-year-old founder of Mount Cricket Club, stands happily watching the match being played on Hyrstland Park, an extraordinary plateau of flat parkland somehow carved from the steep hill of Mount Pleasant, Batley, Yorkshire. The game is between Mount 3rd XI, a team comprised entirely of local Asians, and Garforth, a neighbouring team who are all youngish white men.It is, to the newcomer, at first a strange, not to say disorientating scene. Beyond the boundary lies a classic sweep of northern industrial landscape, of brutal rock and blackened brick amid the dipping fields of long-disused Victorian aqueducts and mills. Stepping back to our immediate environs on Mount Pleasant presents a different vista. Among the rows and rows of terraced houses (now 'at least 95 percent' Asian-owned, according to Hanif) poke the vivid green domes of mosques. Driving and walking around the area before meeting Hanif I went past several madrassas - Islamic schools - and, emerging from them, students in their starched white prayer caps and robes. All the shops and businesses - with the exception of Fox's Biscuits, still the largest employer locally - had Asian names.
I began to become aware that seeing white faces here was uncommon, and that my appearance was attracting constant, though generally courteous attention. I had had this sense, more hostilely in America, in the black ghettoes, but never before in Britain. It was different walking around, say, in Brixton, where you are aware of more black faces - so what? - but do not feel displaced from the general run of your country. You are still very much in it. The colour of one's skin is, to me anyway, except for the luxury of individual aesthetic observation, utterly irrelevant to the central business.
Here, it felt different. This area seemed designed to be sealed off from whites except as - honoured - invited guests. It was not poor like black American ghettoes used to be. Nor was it wealthy. The general atmosphere was one of businesslike order and purpose. Passing another madrassa and mosque, and hearing the curious pause in foreign tongues in the moment that I passed by - it was, frankly, like being parachuted into a foreign, if hospitable, country, The only other white faces I saw, apart from the Garforth team - and there were four or five at most -were either very old or very derelict.
It was not always hospitable, however. While walking in another square of parkland, to get a better view of a particularly impressive mosque, a turbo-charged sports car appeared and circled the square twice, its young inhabitants fixing me with stares of intended menace beneath their baseball caps. And when I paused in the car by a laundry, intending to ask directions to Hanif's house, a gang of Asian youths swaggered over threateningly before I quickly drove off - I presumed it was just because I was white. I began to feel rather threatened and isolated, my skin marking me out. I imagined it to be a very minor version of what people like Hanif must have felt in the Seventies in that very square, when no more than 10 per cent of Mount Pleasant was Asian, 'Paki-bashing' was at its height, and skinheads gathered each afternoon outside Batley High School for Boys, waiting for victims.
With Hanif by my side, everything is fine again. I am quite clearly an invited guest. Watching the cricket, I appraise him of a column in that morning's local newspaper, the Press, by Solly Adam, the area's 'Mr. Cricket' and himself - like almost all Asians in Batley - a Muslim Indian from the troubled region of Gujarat near Bombay. In it, Adam had written: 'I saw the Batley versus Ossett game and...the lasting impression I came away with was the fact that Batley has an all-Asian team. It must only be three or four years since there were only one or two Asians playing there. I am disappointed it has become an All-Asian team. What we need is a better mix...We don't want all-Asian or all-white teams. We want people of all backgrounds to mix together.'
What would happen, I ask Hanif, if I moved to the area and tried to join Mount CC? 'Unfortunately mixed teams are not possible here, although a lot of Asians are breaking into other leagues,' he says, 'If you came to play for Mount, you'd be very isolated. It's very difficult to break in and be part of the club. It's different ways and a different culture. It's the same if I went to play for a white team. (This is not true. Especially in Batley. At both Batley and Crossbank we had multi-racial teams, and they were integrated. This is a very one sided arguement, maybe to cover Asians teams not accepting white players) But we've never said we're an all-Asian club. In the past we've had English players playing for us, and players from the Afro-Caribbean community, but they don't last long because it is very difficult.' There is also evidently a political dimension, though Hanif expresses it cautiously. His priority must remain in 'establishing the community's interests', he adds, as long as 'the league is basically run by white middle-class people'.
Here, then, is the honest but depressing linguistic landscape of a Yorkshire town in 2002: 'Asians', 'whites', 'English'. It is, one suspects, a far cry from that envisaged a decade ago by urbane London commentators. Undoubtedly, Hanif's views are informed by his own experiences. A keen all-rounder, he arrived in Batley in 1966 aged 10. He was captain both of the High School and, late, of Dewsbury College (he is now a social worker). But when he tried to join a league club, it was a different story.
'There were no (An exaggeration, few, yes, no is incorrect) Asian cricketers. I'd go to practise and turn up to the match and I'd always be the twelfth man. If they were a man short I'd be slotted in, but even though they knew I could bat, I'd go in at number 10 or 11. (See my comments on the Crossbank page, it's not because Hanif was Asian) It was a waste of time, basically, so we used to play in the street with a tennis ball but one day I thought, "This can't go on, we've got to do something about it." We went round the neighbour hood with a begging bowl - and our fathers weren't well off. They came over from India with three quid in their pockets to work in the textiles.'
In their first season, 1977, having rented Hyrstland Park from the council, Mount won their division of the Dewsbury and District cricket league (now renamed the Asian League). Hanif thinks the 1981 Mount team, which carried all before it in both league and cup, the most formidable, with a pace attack led by Bhanji, a warehouseman and Mount legend. The 1981 exploits were also pulled off at a time when the skinheads were at their worst in Mount Pleasant and mosques were regularly being vandalised. Hanif points out an old man sitting by the natural amphitheatre of the ground. His name is Mousa Mamamait, Hanif says, and he had not missed one of Bhanji's matches, so devoted and vocal a fan was he. 'Yes, if anyone should have made it into first class cricket, it was Bhanji,' concludes Hanif.
Ah yes, the thorny question of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. While Sachin Tendulkar, the world's current best batsmen, was famously Yorkshire's overseas player in the early Nineties, only one home-bred Asian player, the wicketkeeper batsman Ismail Dawood (formatively of Mount CC) has made it through the gates of Headingley as a first-class county player. 'What Brian Close said about the merits of Asian players [a not uncritical view] I think the Yorkshire committee still feels,' Hanif says. 'They have the academy and they've got two or three people from Asian backgrounds, but why aren't they moving up to the first team? You can't tell me the talent isn't there. Even Dawood never got an opportunity and had to change counties. Lots have been invited in but none have been given a contract. When they invite people in I think there is something tokenistic about it.'
Mount now runs five teams, and has 87 players on its books, but still no ground of its own, Though Hanif is clearly fond of Hyrstland Park, he is no admirer of the pitch. 'There've been a few injuries,' he laughs. 'Two players have lost eyes, In fact one of them is still playing with one eye.' Mount's attempts to progress to better leagues, he believes, have intermittently been hampered by what he suspects is prejudice. Latterly, Mount has 'borrowed' the names of other clubs to get in. For several years in the Nineties they played in the West Riding League under the name of Chickenley - one of the oldest names in Yorkshire club cricket. They were only able to do so, he says, because far fewer 'white youngsters' are playing cricket and the clubs are otherwise in danger of going under.
'Then Chickenley chucked us out because the bar takings weren't that brilliant - for obvious reasons - so we had to go back to being Mount. A white team took it over but they couldn't maintain it. Now it's folded
'Chickenley had been in existence for 100-odd years but now there's houses being built on the ground.'
Today, Mount's first team goes under the name of Howden Clough, formerly another ailing club.
It is a confusing and depressing scenario but, objectively, what does it say?
Solly Adam's business premises lie in the shadow of the new, giant Asda in Dewsbury. From afar they look like any other Shell garage but contain thriving sub-divisions: a cricket shop, for example, selling myriad bats and balls made by Solly Adam's Sports, and to the side, a restaurant and takeaway. It was Adam who acted as agent in the deal that took Tendulkar to Yorkshire. Before that, he took Imran Khan to Wakefield.
Indeed, dozens of players from India and Pakistan, many of them future Test players, have been guided by Adam into the Yorkshire leagues as overseas professionals. Tendulkar stayed at his house for three months in 1990.
'A very nice boy,' Adam recalls. 'Very humble and down to earth. In my view he's the best ever but then, I didn't see Bradman.'
Adam is a spry man of care-worn charm and an admirer of what Hanif Mayet has achieved with Mount. 'A very nice fellow,' he pronounces in an upstairs office strewn with Solly Adam Sports samples and a CCTV feed. 'I always support him. He has such a talented team but they haven't got any facilities.'
He is not, however, in agreement with Hanif about the present Yorkshire Cricket Side. 'People always say Yorkshire are prejudiced, but there has been a change of policy for some time. Now Yorkshire are helping. They're organising coaching for Asians, all paid for.'
Indeed, Hanif had told me that 13 Mount players now had their coaching badges, courtesy of Yorkshire's scheme, and that at the previous year's Mount presentation evening, the entire Yorkshire team and committee had turned up, bringing the County Championship trophy with them.
'Yorkshire has gone out of its way to show it's not prejudiced,' Adam continues. 'You will find more English players who can't get in the Yorkshire team. Like Mallender, Illingworth, John Wood. Many, many more who couldn't get in and went and played for other counties. But you won't find many Asians who couldn't get in and went to play for other counties. So if this is Yorkshire's prejudice, what about other counties?
'Personally, I think Yorkshire has gone out of its way to give players a chance who I didn't think were good enough for Yorkshire. They gave the players one or two matches for the second team and they didn't perform and went back to the leagues in despair.'
Were the council pitches that Asian clubs play on a factor?
'It's true that all the Asian clubs, they've got council grounds, and the grounds have deteriorated. People who own their own grounds look after them better. That's why Mount are trying their level best to have their own ground. But, if we're honest, we're not very good on looking after the grounds. We're not very good on cutting the grass or rolling the wicket. 'That's one thing we lack a bit. That's one thing we have to change.'
However, Adam is optimistic about the future. 'To see an Asian playing for Yorkshire would give me pleasure, and I think the time is coming when it will be normal for them to play for Yorkshire, and then normal to play for England. There's no way they can stop that now.'
While dismissing the tone of the infamous Eighties 'Tebbit' test as 'stupid', Adam says such questions might be more relevant now.
'At the end of the day, your heart and soul must be in the country where you're born and bred, and where you're going to live all your life. I love to see Asians born and bred here support England.'
Back at Hyrstland Park, Hanif gives a similar answer, but in his case, perhaps wrongly, I suspect he is being cagey and telling me what he thinks I want to hear.
If so he needn't have worried. The issue does not bother me - though I know it bothers other Britons - as long as such sports contra-nationalism does not get provocatively out of control. It is sport, not war.
Despite appearing the better side on paper, the Mount's 3rd XI and their batting are collapsing. Mousa Mamamiat, the ancient supporter of the great Bhanji, shouts urgent instructions from the boundary to a new batsman. His dialect escapes me, but Hanif translates it as: 'Be careful! Stay there and the bad balls will come! We want about 120 on the board!'
They are all out for 47 - low but not as bad as the total of 21 that Hanif presided over on this same ground in 1976. With defeat inevitable, Hanif offers to take me on a tour of the local area. We go first to Batley Cricket Club, where another match is in progress: one all-Asian team - Batley - against a team of 10 whites and an Asian.
The Batley players I talk to are lacerating about Yorkshire. 'Yorkshire is a closed shop for Asians,' one says. 'Yorkshire is a very, very racist club.'
He is identified by Hanif as Tanveer Afzal, a dashing 34-year-old batsman who, in Hanif's opinion, had he not been Asian, 'would have made it any day.'
Afzal, like Hanif, is scoffing of any thought that Asian cricketers are being treated better. 'It's only getting better because young whites are no longer interested,' he says.
Hanif agrees. Indeed, surveying the Batley ground that had once rejected him, it is not surprising that, for Hanif, a frisson of revenge seems to be in the air, not just for cricket, but beyond.
'All the white kids have gone,' he says. 'And you see over there, that's the junior school. That's 99.9 per cent Asian now.'
Around the Batley ground is terraced housing that looks poorer than other areas of Mount Pleasant. The photographer, after taking pictures of children playing cricket in the street, reports that he has been somewhat menaced by Asian youths in 'gangsta-rapper' garb, similar to those we had seen earlier by the laundry. I ask Hanif about it and he says: 'Sad to say there's loads of drugs. It's on my road especially, around where the laundry is. It's worse at night. It's after they opened a snooker hall there.' Hanif insists that, while they're Asian, the drug dealers are not local, but interlopers. Two weeks previously the grocery on Mount Pleasant had been robbed by two gunmen. Earlier, Solly Adam had said that last year's Bradford riots were 'a nonsense, an excuse. It was people from the drug scene.'
Next we go to see the mosques. There are six in a two-mile radius. Hanif is assistant treasurer of the largest one, a spanking new and remarkable monolith that, though Hanif will not thank me for saying it, somewhat resembles a medium-sized Las Vegas casino. It contains 46 classrooms for the Islamic instruction of children after normal school. There are about 600 children locally and, Hanif avers, 'every child goes.' It cost £2.7 million to build he says. Where did you get the money from? I ask. From the 'community', Hanif says, from 'here and abroad', in particular from Saudi Arabia via 'an interest-free loan'.
Back at the cricket, tea is being taken. Mount and Garforth take it separately, the Garforth players removing sandwiches from plastic bags outside the pavilion while the Mount players are inside. There is an attempt by some Mount players to fraternise - one of them, unbidden offering to replace the rubber coating of a Garforth bat-handle, but all it leads to is a new bat-handle. Play resumes.
Earlier, Hanif had used the word 'ghettoisation' for Batley, and I had assumed he meant it pejoratively. Now, when he uses the word again, I suddenly realise he might mean it approvingly, and ask him if this is so. 'Yes' he says. 'I think it is the way.'
A phrase of Solly Adam had struck me at the Shell garage, but now his optimism seemed misplaced. 'Like my wife always says,' Adam had said, 'A garden always looks nicer if there are different coloured roses.'
I began to become aware that seeing white faces here was uncommon, and that my appearance was attracting constant, though generally courteous attention. I had had this sense, more hostilely in America, in the black ghettoes, but never before in Britain. It was different walking around, say, in Brixton, where you are aware of more black faces - so what? - but do not feel displaced from the general run of your country. You are still very much in it. The colour of one's skin is, to me anyway, except for the luxury of individual aesthetic observation, utterly irrelevant to the central business.
Here, it felt different. This area seemed designed to be sealed off from whites except as - honoured - invited guests. It was not poor like black American ghettoes used to be. Nor was it wealthy. The general atmosphere was one of businesslike order and purpose. Passing another madrassa and mosque, and hearing the curious pause in foreign tongues in the moment that I passed by - it was, frankly, like being parachuted into a foreign, if hospitable, country, The only other white faces I saw, apart from the Garforth team - and there were four or five at most -were either very old or very derelict.
It was not always hospitable, however. While walking in another square of parkland, to get a better view of a particularly impressive mosque, a turbo-charged sports car appeared and circled the square twice, its young inhabitants fixing me with stares of intended menace beneath their baseball caps. And when I paused in the car by a laundry, intending to ask directions to Hanif's house, a gang of Asian youths swaggered over threateningly before I quickly drove off - I presumed it was just because I was white. I began to feel rather threatened and isolated, my skin marking me out. I imagined it to be a very minor version of what people like Hanif must have felt in the Seventies in that very square, when no more than 10 per cent of Mount Pleasant was Asian, 'Paki-bashing' was at its height, and skinheads gathered each afternoon outside Batley High School for Boys, waiting for victims.
With Hanif by my side, everything is fine again. I am quite clearly an invited guest. Watching the cricket, I appraise him of a column in that morning's local newspaper, the Press, by Solly Adam, the area's 'Mr. Cricket' and himself - like almost all Asians in Batley - a Muslim Indian from the troubled region of Gujarat near Bombay. In it, Adam had written: 'I saw the Batley versus Ossett game and...the lasting impression I came away with was the fact that Batley has an all-Asian team. It must only be three or four years since there were only one or two Asians playing there. I am disappointed it has become an All-Asian team. What we need is a better mix...We don't want all-Asian or all-white teams. We want people of all backgrounds to mix together.'
What would happen, I ask Hanif, if I moved to the area and tried to join Mount CC? 'Unfortunately mixed teams are not possible here, although a lot of Asians are breaking into other leagues,' he says, 'If you came to play for Mount, you'd be very isolated. It's very difficult to break in and be part of the club. It's different ways and a different culture. It's the same if I went to play for a white team. (This is not true. Especially in Batley. At both Batley and Crossbank we had multi-racial teams, and they were integrated. This is a very one sided arguement, maybe to cover Asians teams not accepting white players) But we've never said we're an all-Asian club. In the past we've had English players playing for us, and players from the Afro-Caribbean community, but they don't last long because it is very difficult.' There is also evidently a political dimension, though Hanif expresses it cautiously. His priority must remain in 'establishing the community's interests', he adds, as long as 'the league is basically run by white middle-class people'.
Here, then, is the honest but depressing linguistic landscape of a Yorkshire town in 2002: 'Asians', 'whites', 'English'. It is, one suspects, a far cry from that envisaged a decade ago by urbane London commentators. Undoubtedly, Hanif's views are informed by his own experiences. A keen all-rounder, he arrived in Batley in 1966 aged 10. He was captain both of the High School and, late, of Dewsbury College (he is now a social worker). But when he tried to join a league club, it was a different story.
'There were no (An exaggeration, few, yes, no is incorrect) Asian cricketers. I'd go to practise and turn up to the match and I'd always be the twelfth man. If they were a man short I'd be slotted in, but even though they knew I could bat, I'd go in at number 10 or 11. (See my comments on the Crossbank page, it's not because Hanif was Asian) It was a waste of time, basically, so we used to play in the street with a tennis ball but one day I thought, "This can't go on, we've got to do something about it." We went round the neighbour hood with a begging bowl - and our fathers weren't well off. They came over from India with three quid in their pockets to work in the textiles.'
In their first season, 1977, having rented Hyrstland Park from the council, Mount won their division of the Dewsbury and District cricket league (now renamed the Asian League). Hanif thinks the 1981 Mount team, which carried all before it in both league and cup, the most formidable, with a pace attack led by Bhanji, a warehouseman and Mount legend. The 1981 exploits were also pulled off at a time when the skinheads were at their worst in Mount Pleasant and mosques were regularly being vandalised. Hanif points out an old man sitting by the natural amphitheatre of the ground. His name is Mousa Mamamait, Hanif says, and he had not missed one of Bhanji's matches, so devoted and vocal a fan was he. 'Yes, if anyone should have made it into first class cricket, it was Bhanji,' concludes Hanif.
Ah yes, the thorny question of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. While Sachin Tendulkar, the world's current best batsmen, was famously Yorkshire's overseas player in the early Nineties, only one home-bred Asian player, the wicketkeeper batsman Ismail Dawood (formatively of Mount CC) has made it through the gates of Headingley as a first-class county player. 'What Brian Close said about the merits of Asian players [a not uncritical view] I think the Yorkshire committee still feels,' Hanif says. 'They have the academy and they've got two or three people from Asian backgrounds, but why aren't they moving up to the first team? You can't tell me the talent isn't there. Even Dawood never got an opportunity and had to change counties. Lots have been invited in but none have been given a contract. When they invite people in I think there is something tokenistic about it.'
Mount now runs five teams, and has 87 players on its books, but still no ground of its own, Though Hanif is clearly fond of Hyrstland Park, he is no admirer of the pitch. 'There've been a few injuries,' he laughs. 'Two players have lost eyes, In fact one of them is still playing with one eye.' Mount's attempts to progress to better leagues, he believes, have intermittently been hampered by what he suspects is prejudice. Latterly, Mount has 'borrowed' the names of other clubs to get in. For several years in the Nineties they played in the West Riding League under the name of Chickenley - one of the oldest names in Yorkshire club cricket. They were only able to do so, he says, because far fewer 'white youngsters' are playing cricket and the clubs are otherwise in danger of going under.
'Then Chickenley chucked us out because the bar takings weren't that brilliant - for obvious reasons - so we had to go back to being Mount. A white team took it over but they couldn't maintain it. Now it's folded
'Chickenley had been in existence for 100-odd years but now there's houses being built on the ground.'
Today, Mount's first team goes under the name of Howden Clough, formerly another ailing club.
It is a confusing and depressing scenario but, objectively, what does it say?
Solly Adam's business premises lie in the shadow of the new, giant Asda in Dewsbury. From afar they look like any other Shell garage but contain thriving sub-divisions: a cricket shop, for example, selling myriad bats and balls made by Solly Adam's Sports, and to the side, a restaurant and takeaway. It was Adam who acted as agent in the deal that took Tendulkar to Yorkshire. Before that, he took Imran Khan to Wakefield.
Indeed, dozens of players from India and Pakistan, many of them future Test players, have been guided by Adam into the Yorkshire leagues as overseas professionals. Tendulkar stayed at his house for three months in 1990.
'A very nice boy,' Adam recalls. 'Very humble and down to earth. In my view he's the best ever but then, I didn't see Bradman.'
Adam is a spry man of care-worn charm and an admirer of what Hanif Mayet has achieved with Mount. 'A very nice fellow,' he pronounces in an upstairs office strewn with Solly Adam Sports samples and a CCTV feed. 'I always support him. He has such a talented team but they haven't got any facilities.'
He is not, however, in agreement with Hanif about the present Yorkshire Cricket Side. 'People always say Yorkshire are prejudiced, but there has been a change of policy for some time. Now Yorkshire are helping. They're organising coaching for Asians, all paid for.'
Indeed, Hanif had told me that 13 Mount players now had their coaching badges, courtesy of Yorkshire's scheme, and that at the previous year's Mount presentation evening, the entire Yorkshire team and committee had turned up, bringing the County Championship trophy with them.
'Yorkshire has gone out of its way to show it's not prejudiced,' Adam continues. 'You will find more English players who can't get in the Yorkshire team. Like Mallender, Illingworth, John Wood. Many, many more who couldn't get in and went and played for other counties. But you won't find many Asians who couldn't get in and went to play for other counties. So if this is Yorkshire's prejudice, what about other counties?
'Personally, I think Yorkshire has gone out of its way to give players a chance who I didn't think were good enough for Yorkshire. They gave the players one or two matches for the second team and they didn't perform and went back to the leagues in despair.'
Were the council pitches that Asian clubs play on a factor?
'It's true that all the Asian clubs, they've got council grounds, and the grounds have deteriorated. People who own their own grounds look after them better. That's why Mount are trying their level best to have their own ground. But, if we're honest, we're not very good on looking after the grounds. We're not very good on cutting the grass or rolling the wicket. 'That's one thing we lack a bit. That's one thing we have to change.'
However, Adam is optimistic about the future. 'To see an Asian playing for Yorkshire would give me pleasure, and I think the time is coming when it will be normal for them to play for Yorkshire, and then normal to play for England. There's no way they can stop that now.'
While dismissing the tone of the infamous Eighties 'Tebbit' test as 'stupid', Adam says such questions might be more relevant now.
'At the end of the day, your heart and soul must be in the country where you're born and bred, and where you're going to live all your life. I love to see Asians born and bred here support England.'
Back at Hyrstland Park, Hanif gives a similar answer, but in his case, perhaps wrongly, I suspect he is being cagey and telling me what he thinks I want to hear.
If so he needn't have worried. The issue does not bother me - though I know it bothers other Britons - as long as such sports contra-nationalism does not get provocatively out of control. It is sport, not war.
Despite appearing the better side on paper, the Mount's 3rd XI and their batting are collapsing. Mousa Mamamiat, the ancient supporter of the great Bhanji, shouts urgent instructions from the boundary to a new batsman. His dialect escapes me, but Hanif translates it as: 'Be careful! Stay there and the bad balls will come! We want about 120 on the board!'
They are all out for 47 - low but not as bad as the total of 21 that Hanif presided over on this same ground in 1976. With defeat inevitable, Hanif offers to take me on a tour of the local area. We go first to Batley Cricket Club, where another match is in progress: one all-Asian team - Batley - against a team of 10 whites and an Asian.
The Batley players I talk to are lacerating about Yorkshire. 'Yorkshire is a closed shop for Asians,' one says. 'Yorkshire is a very, very racist club.'
He is identified by Hanif as Tanveer Afzal, a dashing 34-year-old batsman who, in Hanif's opinion, had he not been Asian, 'would have made it any day.'
Afzal, like Hanif, is scoffing of any thought that Asian cricketers are being treated better. 'It's only getting better because young whites are no longer interested,' he says.
Hanif agrees. Indeed, surveying the Batley ground that had once rejected him, it is not surprising that, for Hanif, a frisson of revenge seems to be in the air, not just for cricket, but beyond.
'All the white kids have gone,' he says. 'And you see over there, that's the junior school. That's 99.9 per cent Asian now.'
Around the Batley ground is terraced housing that looks poorer than other areas of Mount Pleasant. The photographer, after taking pictures of children playing cricket in the street, reports that he has been somewhat menaced by Asian youths in 'gangsta-rapper' garb, similar to those we had seen earlier by the laundry. I ask Hanif about it and he says: 'Sad to say there's loads of drugs. It's on my road especially, around where the laundry is. It's worse at night. It's after they opened a snooker hall there.' Hanif insists that, while they're Asian, the drug dealers are not local, but interlopers. Two weeks previously the grocery on Mount Pleasant had been robbed by two gunmen. Earlier, Solly Adam had said that last year's Bradford riots were 'a nonsense, an excuse. It was people from the drug scene.'
Next we go to see the mosques. There are six in a two-mile radius. Hanif is assistant treasurer of the largest one, a spanking new and remarkable monolith that, though Hanif will not thank me for saying it, somewhat resembles a medium-sized Las Vegas casino. It contains 46 classrooms for the Islamic instruction of children after normal school. There are about 600 children locally and, Hanif avers, 'every child goes.' It cost £2.7 million to build he says. Where did you get the money from? I ask. From the 'community', Hanif says, from 'here and abroad', in particular from Saudi Arabia via 'an interest-free loan'.
Back at the cricket, tea is being taken. Mount and Garforth take it separately, the Garforth players removing sandwiches from plastic bags outside the pavilion while the Mount players are inside. There is an attempt by some Mount players to fraternise - one of them, unbidden offering to replace the rubber coating of a Garforth bat-handle, but all it leads to is a new bat-handle. Play resumes.
Earlier, Hanif had used the word 'ghettoisation' for Batley, and I had assumed he meant it pejoratively. Now, when he uses the word again, I suddenly realise he might mean it approvingly, and ask him if this is so. 'Yes' he says. 'I think it is the way.'
A phrase of Solly Adam had struck me at the Shell garage, but now his optimism seemed misplaced. 'Like my wife always says,' Adam had said, 'A garden always looks nicer if there are different coloured roses.'
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