Now Jamaica have qualified all Jamaicans will be uplifted. The sportswear companies, media corporations and the merchandising moguls set out their wares too, all vying for a piece of this festival of corporate multi-culturalism. Then there is the question of multicultural teams. What makes football interesting is that it provides one of the few spheres in which ideas about identity, ethnicity and race can be expressed, embodied and performed. The outcome, the authors maintain could either be the representation of nationhood as 'a grotesque pageant of fixed archetypes' or as a 'carnival' in which old divisions are breached.
Cricket clearly offers similar possibilities.
It is time then to study fan behaviour from the sociological perspective rather than treat it as a facile test of loyalty.