The day cricket needed a therapist

Fizz is a case study. When Mustafizur Rahman, a.k.a. Fizz, the unassuming fast bowler with deceptive slow cutters, was auctioned for Rs 9.2 crore, Bangladeshi media once again started paying attention to the Indian Premier League. It was a smart move for the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR), the franchise that bottled “Fizz”, to keep Bangladeshi audiences emotionally and financially invested in their city. In pure market terms, getting Mustafiz made perfect sense: he brings Bangla-speaking viewers, advertising revenue, and cross-border traction.

Then comes the news of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) fudging the Fizz issue. They cited instances of “atrocities against the Hindus” in Bangladesh to ask KKR to release their prize catch. Fizz was released, not because of form, fitness, or franchise strategy, but because of “security.” Cricket shifted pitch. Bangladesh’s response was immediate and bold. If security cannot be guaranteed for one Bangladeshi player, how can it be guaranteed for an entire national team that is expected to participate in the upcoming T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka? Such diagnostic reasoning placed the hosts in a difficult situation. If the “security” concern is valid, then the three matches that Bangladesh is scheduled to play in India in February should be moved to Sri Lanka.

The International Cricket Council seems unconvinced. Changing the schedule with only a few days remaining presents a logistical challenge, along with issues of ticketing, viewership, ad revenues, hotel bookings, air travel, broadcast grids, and match sequencing and so on. Therefore, it is no surprise that ICC reacted with a language of power, threatening exclusion and loss of demerit points. Although there are precedents of venue changes in cricket history, ICC is a bit taken aback by the unusual resistance posted by Bangladesh.  Then again, they need to understand that this demand is not the tantrums of a small team but an attempt to protect the national dignity of a country of 18 crore.

Fizz is no longer the focal point; cricket has taken that role. Let us imagine the rectangular cricket pitch as a psychoanalytic couch and allow Cricket to speak. Let us locate ourselves beyond the border, outside the ring, to psychoanalyse the game incarnate. The patient cricket has presented Mustafiz as a symptom that will reveal deeper anxieties. Cricket will tell us how the manufactured hype over the shorter version of the game is driven by the logic of money and haunted by the spectres of neocapitalism. Cricket is the new religion that provides “opium for the masses.” It stages a spectacle in a modern-day arena where players are like gladiators brought in from across the globe. They are bought and sold like slaves, and every action is translated as data points. Audiences are data, monetised by entrepreneurial franchise owners.

As we move from the manifest content to the latent content of cricket, we will become aware of the national and, by extension, international ecosystem where commerce is tied to geopolitics. When capital collides with ideology, even capital is reminded of its limits. The Mustafiz episode serves as an example. KKR belongs to the microstructure of viewers and revenue, while the state owns the macrostructure. KKR wanted “the fizz” to keep bubbling; the state declared the imported carbonation to be dangerous.

This selective reasoning denotes an asymmetrical power system where a big nation identifies itself as the Self and views the rest as the Other. The timing of “othering” Bangladesh could not have been worse. Just last month, the participation of the Indian minister of external affairs, S Jaishankar, in the funeral of Begum Khaleda Zia was seen as an attempt to thaw a frozen relationship between neighbours. The decree by the ICC boss and former BCCI honorary secretary, Jay Shah, dented the attempt. The “commonsensical” diplomacy of Jaishankar met the “crowd-pleasing” powerful cricket diplomacy of Jay Shah.

From its couch, Cricket will tell us of its colonial past when displays of power were common. The memory of domination leaves behind a psychological residue that does not fade with partition or independence. C L R James, in his “Beyond a Boundary”, posited that cricket was never just a game. It was a social text through which empire, class, and resistance were encoded. The sportsmanship of cricket gives the façade of ethical staging of conflicts without denying equality. However, once the equality is removed, James warned, the game loses its mask of civility and begins to discipline.

Yet, in movies like “Lagaan,” we encounter a discomforting truth. As a former colony, India learnt cricket out of a necessity to master the colonisers’ game in order to avoid punishment, taxation, and exclusion. Cricket was a strategy of survival, a way of negotiating power rather than exercising it. The fictional movie is stranger than facts. It is unfortunate that in the subcontinent, cricket is becoming a stage for asserting power and dominance in a postcolonial milieu. Time, as history repeatedly shows, can be cruel to victims who forget the psychology of their own ascent.

Cricket in the subcontinent is not simply entertainment. It has a ritualistic aura. It is proof of arrival in a game once controlled by others. The alleged attempt to exclude a Bangladeshi player under the rhetoric of “security,” therefore, revives the familiar grammar of colonisation, resulting in an assertion of power that is not merely offensive but retraumatising. Already, the Bangladesh team is threatened with loss of points, future scheduling disadvantages, and institutional penalties. 

Sigmund Freud claimed that civilisation survives by repressing aggression and channelling it into sanctioned outlets through a process called sublimation. Sport is one of humanity’s most effective sublimatory inventions. It allows hostility, domination, rivalry, and loss within a sanctioned package. Sports, particularly between neighbouring states with unresolved histories, can divert tensions away from borders and into scoreboards and convert geopolitical anxiety into sporting rivalry.

The Fizz episode has done the opposite. Instead of hiding the aggression, state actors have exposed it to a frenzied mob, inciting media outrage and fuelling nationalist fantasies. The Indian authority has turned Fizz into a scapegoat, purporting to offer relief from racial anxiety and manage internal tension. His exclusion is political, diplomatic, and symbolic. However, such scapegoating can be addictive and reciprocal. We do not know who started it, but once begun, this scapegoating will continue, prompting repetition. The disciplining of Mustafiz is more than about one player. The team itself can become the next scapegoat.

The “enjoyment” circulating through this game of standoff is another manifestation of modern ideology, which, as per Slavoj Žižek, does not simply repress aggression; it often organises enjoyment in controlled space. Sports is an arena where “You may be violent—but only here.” The confrontation between nations in sporting matches allows national pride to thrive, producing jouissance (enjoyment)  in authoritative threats. Fans enjoy outrage without responsibility. The crowd takes on a collective and anonymous form that allows them to enjoy the enacted aggression.

Cricket acts like the carnival of mediaeval times, when ordinary people were allowed to invert rules and mock authority. Mikhail Bakhtin claimed that carnivals protected society by letting aggression laugh at power instead of attacking it. Stadiums permit shouting, humiliation, emotional excess, and symbolic violence so that real violence remains unnecessary.

Realpolitik, the commonsensical diplomacy of Jaishankar, would have allowed this sporting licence. But Jay Shaha had pitched cricket as an arena of security paranoia and punitive discipline. Instead of letting aggression burn itself out under lights and rules, they are forcing it back into politics, where it becomes volatile. If cricket could speak from the psychoanalyst’s couch (i.e., the pitch), it would say, “I was created to control your aggression, not to incite fear. I am not the border. I am the cushion.”

Dr Shamsad Mortuza is professor of English at Dhaka University.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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