LAHORE: Renowned author and winner of several awards Romesh Gunesekera considers watching cricket just like watching Greek tragedy.

He was speaking in a session on ‘Cricket, citizenship and the post-colonial narrative’ on the third day of the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) on Sunday. Novelist Omar Shahid Hamid was also a participant in the session, moderated by Georgina Godwin.

Mr Gunesekera said he was born in Sri Lanka and brought up in the Philippines as both countries remained a colony of the British but he did not see any cricket in the Philippines. He said most of the cricket playing nations remained colonies of the British in the past, including India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Australia; however, with the passage of time cricket became a South Asian spectacle with a lot of emotions running high but as the money started coming, it became more interesting and attracted negativity like fixing.

“It’s a spectacle where the players are gladiators. Winning is not everything but it’s about the process. It’s a beautiful game, irrespective of how it’s played,” he said.

Mr Hamid found South Asians crazy about cricket and said that element of women, especially in cricket, had attracted him to write about it. He said he had seen how females/young women in Pakistan constantly struggled and invested their time in the sports.

Mr Hamid added cricket became a lucrative source of income due to match-fixing. “It was easy to bet on ball by ball and Pakistan and Indian laws did not give severe punishment to the people involved in it.

He said fixing came under gambling laws and the people involved in it had to pay some fine and were ready to get away with it.

Mr Gunesekera read out a passage from his book The Match, showinghow a child who was watching the match with his father saw that a batsman playing a shot that hit and killed a pigeon in the ground and the fielder taking its corpse. The child succeeded in taking a picture of it and later also winning an award on that picture.

Mr Hamid said he had recently some weeks back met a bookie who had developed a mobile application for match-fixing and how they were planning to fix matches of the recently started the Pakistan Super League (PSL).

Published in Dawn, February 24th, 2020