Geoff Russ: Why did Canadian passport holders cheer against Canada?
Revisiting Norman Tebbit's 'cricket test', and the question of national loyalty.
Morocco’s national football team, one of the best teams in the world, has once again beaten Canada’s plucky underdogs at the FIFA World Cup. As in 2022, when Canada last lost to that same side last Saturday, many Moroccan nationals and Canadians of Moroccan descent celebrated Canada’s defeat in the streets of Montreal and elsewhere.
Those jubilant fans may hold a Canadian passport, speak one of Canada’s official languages at work or at school, and enjoy the expansive Canadian welfare state. When it came to choosing where to give their hearts, their most heartfelt loyalties were on display for all to see.
Norman Tebbit, the late British Conservative politician who served as a Cabinet minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, once posed a question that Britain has never been able to lay to rest. It became known as the ‘cricket test’.
When England’s cricket team played India or Pakistan, Tebbit’s cricket test asked which side Britain’s South Asian population would back. Were those citizens still more attached to their ancestral homeland, or to the country they had immigrated to?
To this day, many British Asians — though hardly all — are still ‘happy’ to fail that cricket test. How any one person feels about the cricket test speaks volumes about how people view nationhood and identity, neither of which is insignificant in our globalised world.
When it really matters, who are you?
Despite the vast numbers of cricket aficionados who have arrived from the Indian subcontinent over the past five years, Canada is better suited to a ‘football test’. Four years ago, Morocco defeated Canada at the last World Cup. It was reported that Montreal’s Moroccan community, which numbers about 37,000 people, gathered to watch ‘their team’.
Crowds of Moroccan supporters on the city’s Jean-Talon Street, the hub of so-called ‘Little Maghreb’, cheered wildly as the team representing the country in which they lived fell. The scenes were repeated on 4 July, when Canada was eliminated from this year’s World Cup by Morocco yet again.
If Canada’s elimination from a prestigious sporting tournament is the source of somebody’s joy, what exactly is Canada to them?