How dictatorship killed cricket’s dream and patronised football in Italy and Argentina

Italy cricket’s grand old man Simone Gambino fishes out the history. “Italy was unified in 1870 and the English helped a lot to unify. They did pour the mass of capital into industry in the north of Italy. Textile industry in particular. And in Milan, Genoa, and Turin, the three cities in the northwest of Italy, there were many Englishmen who started playing cricket and football. This was the beginning of football,” he says.

The English names the English assigned to the cities remain. But cricket did not. “Mussolini hated the English. So everything that was English, he kicked it out, and obviously cricket disappeared,” he says. He built grand football stadiums across the country, restructured the league, pumped in money, and hosted the 1934 edition of the World Cup that Italy won but under the shadow of rigging games. The story goes that Mussolini invited Ivan Eklind, the referee appointed to take charge of the hosts’ semi-final with Austria, to an exclusive dinner. The next day he awarded a controversial penalty to Italy. Italians defended the crown the next edition, but Jonathan Wilson, in his seminal book Inverting the Pyramid wrote about the manager Vittorio Pozzo “made full use of the prevailing [fascist] militarism to dominate and motivate his side.”

A decade later in Argentina, Peron too recognised football’s infinite powers to galvanise his political narrative. His government granted generous loans to football clubs to construct stadiums and infrastructure. His favourite club Racing received 16,700,000 pesos to build the Estadio Presidente Perón. His wife Eva, though, would play a bigger role wiping the slate of cricket clean.

In 1947, she sought the outfield of Buenos Aires Cricket Club for a fundraising function. The cricket body refused and she ordered the wooden pavilion to be razed down and burned. Cricket historians consider it a symbolic moment when cricket in the country, popular from the late 19th century, met a brutal death, as chronicled fabulously by journalists Timothy Abraham and James Coyne in the book Evita Burned Down the Pavilion.

Involved in the crossfire was Argentina’s greatest cricketer, Clement Gibson, son of planters who settled in Argentina in the 19th century. He was a swing bowler with a devastating leg-cutter that pitched on leg-stump and hit the off-stick, and a celebrated figure in Cambridge and Sussex. In a tour game against the touring Australians in 1921, he grabbed six wickets in the second innings to mastermind a famous comeback after England XI were bundled out for 43 in the first innings. A decade later, Douglas Jardine summoned him to attend a camp for the Bodyline series. But he picked up an injury and shortly returned to Argentina with a healthy haul of 249 wickets at 28, to look after the wild sprawling ranches.

After a dispute over his brewery, the first lady commissioned two sets of hitmen to kill him. He had fled to the family’s northernmost ranch. They never returned, assumed dead and Gibson lived till he was 76, making occasional visits to his son in England. Cricket, by then, was confined to the few English families that still lived in the country and survived as a relic of the era of British planters. Argentina still plays cricket and in an expanded T20 World Cup format the ICC is envisioning could one day qualify.

But on the whims and vendettas of leaders and dictators hinged the fate of sports. Perhaps, cricket would not have thrived in Latin America or Italy or the Netherlands. Perhaps, the English did not stay long enough. Even if they were, cricket was never the sport of masses, confined to the gentry clubs, in all these countries. Football was the masses’ opium in the barrios and favellas. The game did flourish in the nitrate mining communities of Atacama Desert in Chile as well as Mexico, Uruguay and Panama (where West Indies great George Headley was born). Maybe, cricket could not capture the local rhythms as football did, or captured its sensibilities. Or you could imagine, the subcontinent’s sport of choice if the English had not lingered too long. Or if it were the Portuguese or the Dutch or the Spaniard. Perhaps it still could have been cricket. But Italy qualifying for the T20 World Cup makes you dwell on conjectures. What if Mussolini and Peron encouraged cricket? Or the princes of India’s states patronised football? History of sports is thus the history of empires and emperors too.