The SNP, Cricket and Soft Unionism

There were at least a dozen people on my flight from Edinburgh to Cardiff last week who were clearly heading to Wales to watch the test match. This was not a surprise, given that tests held at Headingley and, perhaps especially, Old Trafford attract plenty of spectators from north of the border. There is much more enthusiasm for cricket, and much more cricket actuallly played, in Scotland than many people in England appreciate.

And there’s much more cricket in Scotland than some Scots appreciate too. This is especially true of joyless, chippy, narrow-minded, prejudiced nationalist members of the Scottish parliament, plenty of whom see the game as an unwecome, if irrelevent, interloper at best and, doubtless, an agent of English colonialism at worst. This, naturally, is Class-A piffle.

So, it’s not a surprise that Sandra White, an SNP MSP from Glasgow, has put down a ridiculous parliamentary motion decrying the amount of attention paid to the Ashes series as “over-the-top” and demanding that cricket be purged from Scottish television screens.