A London historian of Indian politics reads about Bramblewick Rovers fighting over lateness and remembers the Parsi cricketers who toured England and lost with style
Sunday, 25 October 2026. Hampstead. The clocks went back, so I am awake early with an extra hour, a pot of chai and a book about Indian cricket, 7.15am.
A Team That Fought Itself
The London Prat’s report on how six Bramblewick Rovers players were suspended after a teammate arrived seven minutes late is the funniest piece of sports writing I have read this year. A reserve midfielder’s Fiesta breaks down outside a Greggs. He walks past the sausage rolls, arrives seven minutes late and is set upon under the captain’s new rule that late arrivals must fight a teammate. Six players get involved. Two are arrested. The supporters note it is the most coordinated movement the team has managed all season.
I read it with my extra hour of Sunday morning and laughed until the chai went cold. Then I turned to the book on my lap, which happens to be about Indian cricket in the nineteenth century, and found myself thinking about a very different team, one that also lost a great deal, but did it with considerably more dignity.
The Parsi Cricketers Of 1886
In 1886, a team of Parsi cricketers from Bombay toured England. It was the first Indian cricket team to do so. The Parsi community in Bombay had taken up cricket enthusiastically from the middle of the century, forming clubs, practising on the maidans and eventually challenging European teams. The 1886 tourists were enthusiastic, well dressed and, by most accounts, not yet strong enough for English opposition. They lost most of their matches. They won one.
What strikes me, reading the Bramblewick story alongside theirs, is the attitude. The Parsi tourists arrived on a long sea voyage, played in unfamiliar conditions, lost repeatedly and kept turning up, on time, in whites, with immaculate manners. Nobody punched anybody. They came back two years later, in 1888, a stronger side, and did better. Within a few decades, Parsi, Hindu, Muslim and European teams in Bombay were contesting a famous annual tournament. Indian cricket was on its way.
Discipline, Empire And A Greggs
The report’s captain, Darren Gristle, believes personal responsibility can only be reached through the threat of personal injury. That is, sadly, a very nineteenth-century theory of discipline, the sort that ran British public schools and much of colonial administration. The idea was that order came from fear. Historians of the Raj have spent a long time showing that it did not. It came, when it came at all, from cooperation, consent and people deciding together that a thing was worth doing properly.
The report’s moral philosopher says the punishment exceeded the offence, and notes that it is still more proportionate than paying four hundred thousand pounds for a striker who has scored only parking fines. I would add that the history of empire is full of punishments that exceeded the offence, and of expensive appointments who scored nothing. Some of them got statues.
The Council Task Force
The detail that delighted me most was the council’s eighty-five thousand pound task force on punctuality, which will report in twelve months because several members are unavailable until March, and whose launch began forty-five minutes late because the chamber was double-booked for a meeting about parking meters. I spent part of my doctorate reading reports from nineteenth-century commissions of inquiry in India. They were often vast, often late and often concluded that further inquiry was required. The Bramblewick task force would fit perfectly on the shelf beside them, bound in red cloth, unread.
What Sport Teaches About Politics
My grandmother, who was born in Lahore and came to London in 1961, followed cricket her whole life. She said the most important thing about a team is not whether it wins, but whether it can lose together without falling apart. Bramblewick fell apart over seven minutes. The Parsi cricketers of 1886 lost almost every match and came home a team. One of those is a lesson about football. The other is a lesson about nations.
When I teach my students about Indian nationalism, I often start with cricket, because it shows how a game imported by rulers can become a way for the ruled to say: we are here, we are organised and we will keep coming back. The Parsi tourists were not making a political speech. But turning up on time, in whites, in the rain, to lose with dignity to the people who ran your country was, in its quiet way, a very political act.
The Extra Hour
The extra hour is almost over. The chai is finished. Bramblewick Rovers will play Nether Wobbling Town next week with five players, the kit man and a ninety-one-year-old centre-half. I hope they lose with dignity. I hope they come back. I hope, one day, somebody writes a history of them, and it is kinder than they deserve, the way history usually is to the teams who kept showing up.
For more of my diary, the home page collects my entries on Indian political history, royal news and the long habit of the past to turn up in the present. This week it turned up in a dressing room in Bramblewick-upon-Soot. Next week, who knows. History is always seven minutes late, and it always arrives.