It's just not cricket

On a 43 degree day I didn’t feel like doing much except keeping cool and sitting in front of the tv to watch the cricket (a rare feat) and some reading in between. As Sri Lanka beat Australia I watched the trumpeter and a few drummers kick off what looked like a baila tune or two. However, a similar attempt to keep a band playing at the previous match at the Melbourne’s Telstra Dome was apparently thwarted, after crowd complains, by the ever reliable boys in blue. According to a Sri Lankan – Australian, Laknath Jayasinghe, who wrote in The Age op-eds during the week.

….this, and other far more cutting and racially motivated language, is what confronted me and my friends - all Australians from migrant Sri Lankan backgrounds - when we decided to sing traditional, festive Sinhalese songs to amuse ourselves during what was a very one-sided cricket match.

There was dancing, and some from the broader Anglo-Australian community joined in. To me, this was multiculturalism in its truest and most joyful sense.

So it was incredibly sad to hear a collective grunt of displeasure from a large body of spectators seated nearby, sneering suspiciously at our "foreign" activities. This was followed by a collective sigh of relief from this same section of the crowd when the boys in blue, whom they had complained to, asked us to stop singing and dancing …

This is nothing new. In the past I’ve been to a few AL vs OZ games in Melbourne and invariably when the baila starts playing and people get together the boys in blue materialise as if an alarm has gone off in their deterrence detection meter. More about that later. The next day a friend forwarded the following email ( edited for minor cleansing) which was written by a mate who was at the match providing context for the above cited article. It provides an insiders view.

What happened at the Dome was this. The first half I really enjoyed the banter because there were a few Aussie guys with the beer in their hands who were countering our cheering with Murali taunts ( and we were 10 guys who started shouting in Sinhalese (native language) and then turned to English when we started copping it - so that people can understand). Anyway that was good fun and both parties enjoyed it and we even had a bit of a chat during the 40 minute interval. Then came Part 2.

Part 2 happened when the band started playing and the about 150 or more Sri Lankans got together on one part of Level 3 at the Dome and started singing sinhalese songs/ This is when the crowd around us got apparently uncomfortable (or maybe offended) and asked the cops to make us stop. In between some Aussies teenagers got between the singing group and started to yell in English. So the cops came and they asked us to leave and told that if we want to sing that we should take it outside the stadium. So most of us did a lap around the Dome and watched the remaining 30 odd overs at the big screen outside the Dome .Honestly, I thought we copped a bit ( and there were some very minor scuffles !) but I didn’t relate any of the events seriously to 'other more broader issues' until I saw this article and looking at a lot of things, I do agree with a lot of the content.

My response in another post…TBC.