I am weak on globalization, and can't help you much with post national theory, but I have watched cricket for a while. And the role cricket plays in Netherland, and Joe's descriptions of the game, are two of the many joys of the book.

Cricket, once the most traditional of sports, is fast becoming the most modern of games. In its original Test match format it was a contest that fostered complexity and subtlety. Watching cricket provided a satisfying way to keep time in abeyance. You could happily sit for seven or eight hours and something significant might happen, or it might not. After five days the game would, more often than not, end in a draw.

Yet the lack of a trite result did not prevent many narratives being played out. It is no coincidence that cricket, rather than unthinking, brand heavy, football, is the preferred sport of nearly all of Britain's pre-eminent playwrights (Pinter, Stoppard, Hare, Gray...). In 'The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games' Ashis Nandy writes 'cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English'. It possessed a fatalism which was once suited to the Indian temperament.

I use the past tense because this is the cricket of the last millennium, the cricket that Hans (and Joe) grew up playing. When he arrives in New York in the 21st century he discovers that everyone else is playing a different game. Whereas he has been taught to keep the ball (and himself) on the ground, his team-mates throw the ball, and caution, to the winds. The experience is dislocating. It is yet another thing, along with 9/11 and the rest, about which Hans doesn't know quite what to think. He stubbornly continues to play his own way. He becomes torpid.

Near the end, of course, Hans opens up his game and is liberated. Meanwhile, and this is either incredibly prescient or happy coincidence, cricket was undergoing a similar transformation. The pivotal moment was India winning the Twenty2O World Cup, a version of the game that lasts three hours, always produces a winner, and is the antithesis of Test match cricket. This was a historic moment for a country with little sporting
heritage, a country of over a billion people which has won fewer Olympic gold medals than Ireland, a country which is no longer fatalistic but capitalistic.

The money men moved in. To update Ashis Nandy, Twenty20 cricket is an Indian game ruthlessly promoted by the Indians and with a big enough push it looks set fair to be, nonsense phrase, the sport of globalisation. America once thought it could teach the world to play baseball instead it will be reminded that it once played cricket.

Even the dear old MCC is getting in on the act, when next year it sends a touring party to the States which will follow the same itinerary trod by its predecessors a century and a half ago. Forty years ago the MCC colluded with the apartheid regime in South Africa to exclude the Cape coloured Basil D'Oliviera from their cricket. The MCC President then was Arthur Gilligan, one time member of the British Union of Fascists and author of an article entitled 'The Spirit of Fascism and Cricket Tours'. Now as it marches to the Twenty20 beat it is Mike Brearley, the most erudite of England cricket captains, and author, inter alia, of a series of essays entitled 'Who speaks for Psychoanalysis?'.

The pace of change is so swift that Chuck's 'American Dream' of establishing a cricket team in New York no longer seems fanciful but instead, with a little fleshing out, is a credible business which could be placed in front of hard-hatted businessmen. In his honour, we should perhaps label the document the Ramkissoon project. Move over Murdoch, here come the post national entrepreneurs.