ABSTRACT
This chapter considers three recent novels centered on cricket to examine the extent to which organised team sport is sustained by the idea of the nation state. Modern cricket and the nation are joined at the hip. The loyalties of the football fan are club loyalties: cricket's fan following has just one focus, the national team. The novels The Match by Romesh Gunesekera and Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka, cricket serves as a proxy for the nation state. The dramatic tension of these two novels centres on the struggles of their protagonists to rescue the game they love from the toxic nationalism. Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland is a story of migration and return, of nostalgia and memory. Cricket, in The Match, is episodic, not enveloping: it is a ritual of belonging at a distance. The novel is about leaving Sri Lanka behind, or rather, finding a diasporic relationship with the protagonist's south Asian home.
