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From Trinidad Express
Rally round the wrecked Windies
BC Pires
Friday, April 13th 2007
Even after their 85-all out in their last warm-up game, there was hope the West Indies might do well in the only Cricket World Cup the Caribbean is likely to hold. The intensity of support the home team drew (and drew upon) in the first round in Jamaica might have made the difference, on the day, between the West Indies and even Australia. Instead, after topping their first-round group, the West Indies have lost all four second round games by huge margins. Captain Brian Lara even apologised for their very poor performances.
No doubt, there are many charges for the team, captain, coach and all involved in to answer from such few as still care enough to bother to pose questions. Most incredibly-a word that has to be used advisedly in relation to West Indies cricket or its management (another word that has to be used similarly), Andy Roberts, one of the selectors, with the game already lost, publicly disputed the side that took the field against New Zealand. Unsatisfied with Roberts merely shooting West Indies cricket in the foot, Lara gratuitously raised the gun to its head by openly declaring he had not been satisfied with the players chosen!
Clearly, anyone defending the West Indies players would have to be committed, in one way or another. The team's attitude-"team", again, being used advisedly-was summed up by Ian Bradshaw who, at one point, around the 23rd over v South Africa, simply declined to bend over to pick up a ball rolling by his feet, preferring to amble behind it until whenever he might catch up with it-not that that particular single given away made a difference in a 67-run whipping.
The team is not without blame; but to hang everything on 11 day-jobbers would be to, once again, ignore the fabric and seize hold of the frills of a problem going beyond all boundaries. The West Indies cricket team is only a symptom (even if the most glaring) of a Caribbean malaise, and not its cause. There may be all sorts of hope but there really is no reason for the team to do well when everything else in the region is failing spectacularly.
In Trinidad, the Prime Minister is in a quandary over whether to begin fresh impeachment proceedings against the Chief Justice, after the criminal prosecution of the same CJ (for allegedly trying to influence the outcome of a criminal prosecution of yet another former prime minister) was abandoned when the Chief Magistrate, upon whose gratuitous accusations the criminal charges were laid, simply refused to give evidence, preferring to wait for the impeachment proceedings; it puts Bradshaw's declining to bend over to pick up a ball in proper perspective: with West Indian exemplars (see observations relating to the words, "incredibly", "management" and "team") behaving so, is it any wonder that Chris Gayle, Dwayne Bravo and Ramnaresh Sarwan have no real grasp on what is really at stake?
From Guyana in the south (where gunmen last year shot dead the family of a government minister in his own home and, weeks later, staffers at a daily newspaper) to Jamaica, where the prime minister is a devout Born Again Christian, kin to the Pentecostal pastors of Tobago now loudly protesting Elton John's headlining the Plymouth Jazz Festival on 28 April because he is homosexual, the West Indies are falling apart, individually and collectively, and have no idea how to prevent it. For 500 years now, whatever happens in the West Indies has always been dictated from outside; and, 50 years after Independence-a word that has to be used more advisedly than the rest combined- there are apparently no plans for rescue from the Mother Country.
Only the West Indies can rally round the West Indies.
In giving the Sonny Ramadhin Cricket Lecture at the University of the West Indies campus in Trinidad on 16 March, ICC CEO Malcolm Speed himself recognised something everyone knows but West Indians prefer not to admit: in hailing the West Indies cricket teams of the sixties to the eighties as the "greatest phenomenon in world team sport of the 20th Century", Speed acknowledged that the West Indies, 13 sovereign nations (no matter how tiny), separated by ocean and distance, and subject to inter-island jealousy as bitter and pervasive as it was petty, should never have become world players at all, far less world beaters.
Another thing all West Indians know but few like to remember is that the great West Indies teams of the seventies and eighties were, to a man, trained on English county cricket grounds. When ruthless professionalism entered world cricket after Kerry Packer's intervention, and without English county cricket standards to guide and develop them, the West Indies simply reverted to type: the grinning native eager to limbo ever lower for a tourist dollar.
The ICC CWC has revealed much more about the West Indies than West Indians would care to know. Forget the team's exit. If this were genuinely a Caribbean World Cup, could a conch shell ever have been banned? Could the International Tennis Federation outlaw strawberries-and-cream at Wimbledon?
If the Local Organising Committees and the Caribbean Community Prime Ministers' Sub-Committee on Cricket alike capitulated to ICC demands without a murmur, building 20,000-seater stadiums in islands with populations of 65,000 (meaning that, to fill them, a quarter of the population would have to attend games they couldn't afford, because prices were set for outsiders, not locals), if, after half-a-century of independence, the best job most young men can aspire to is hotel yardboy or KFC fry guy, if the Trinidad government bends backwards to accommodate aluminium smelters that could not get environmental approval in real countries, can anyone truly say it was Kieron Pollard who ran down the wicket and vooped?
-BC Pires is changing his name to ICC Pires. You can email your run outs to him at bcmaverick@tstt.net.tt
Rally round the wrecked Windies
BC Pires
Friday, April 13th 2007
Even after their 85-all out in their last warm-up game, there was hope the West Indies might do well in the only Cricket World Cup the Caribbean is likely to hold. The intensity of support the home team drew (and drew upon) in the first round in Jamaica might have made the difference, on the day, between the West Indies and even Australia. Instead, after topping their first-round group, the West Indies have lost all four second round games by huge margins. Captain Brian Lara even apologised for their very poor performances.
No doubt, there are many charges for the team, captain, coach and all involved in to answer from such few as still care enough to bother to pose questions. Most incredibly-a word that has to be used advisedly in relation to West Indies cricket or its management (another word that has to be used similarly), Andy Roberts, one of the selectors, with the game already lost, publicly disputed the side that took the field against New Zealand. Unsatisfied with Roberts merely shooting West Indies cricket in the foot, Lara gratuitously raised the gun to its head by openly declaring he had not been satisfied with the players chosen!
Clearly, anyone defending the West Indies players would have to be committed, in one way or another. The team's attitude-"team", again, being used advisedly-was summed up by Ian Bradshaw who, at one point, around the 23rd over v South Africa, simply declined to bend over to pick up a ball rolling by his feet, preferring to amble behind it until whenever he might catch up with it-not that that particular single given away made a difference in a 67-run whipping.
The team is not without blame; but to hang everything on 11 day-jobbers would be to, once again, ignore the fabric and seize hold of the frills of a problem going beyond all boundaries. The West Indies cricket team is only a symptom (even if the most glaring) of a Caribbean malaise, and not its cause. There may be all sorts of hope but there really is no reason for the team to do well when everything else in the region is failing spectacularly.
In Trinidad, the Prime Minister is in a quandary over whether to begin fresh impeachment proceedings against the Chief Justice, after the criminal prosecution of the same CJ (for allegedly trying to influence the outcome of a criminal prosecution of yet another former prime minister) was abandoned when the Chief Magistrate, upon whose gratuitous accusations the criminal charges were laid, simply refused to give evidence, preferring to wait for the impeachment proceedings; it puts Bradshaw's declining to bend over to pick up a ball in proper perspective: with West Indian exemplars (see observations relating to the words, "incredibly", "management" and "team") behaving so, is it any wonder that Chris Gayle, Dwayne Bravo and Ramnaresh Sarwan have no real grasp on what is really at stake?
From Guyana in the south (where gunmen last year shot dead the family of a government minister in his own home and, weeks later, staffers at a daily newspaper) to Jamaica, where the prime minister is a devout Born Again Christian, kin to the Pentecostal pastors of Tobago now loudly protesting Elton John's headlining the Plymouth Jazz Festival on 28 April because he is homosexual, the West Indies are falling apart, individually and collectively, and have no idea how to prevent it. For 500 years now, whatever happens in the West Indies has always been dictated from outside; and, 50 years after Independence-a word that has to be used more advisedly than the rest combined- there are apparently no plans for rescue from the Mother Country.
Only the West Indies can rally round the West Indies.
In giving the Sonny Ramadhin Cricket Lecture at the University of the West Indies campus in Trinidad on 16 March, ICC CEO Malcolm Speed himself recognised something everyone knows but West Indians prefer not to admit: in hailing the West Indies cricket teams of the sixties to the eighties as the "greatest phenomenon in world team sport of the 20th Century", Speed acknowledged that the West Indies, 13 sovereign nations (no matter how tiny), separated by ocean and distance, and subject to inter-island jealousy as bitter and pervasive as it was petty, should never have become world players at all, far less world beaters.
Another thing all West Indians know but few like to remember is that the great West Indies teams of the seventies and eighties were, to a man, trained on English county cricket grounds. When ruthless professionalism entered world cricket after Kerry Packer's intervention, and without English county cricket standards to guide and develop them, the West Indies simply reverted to type: the grinning native eager to limbo ever lower for a tourist dollar.
The ICC CWC has revealed much more about the West Indies than West Indians would care to know. Forget the team's exit. If this were genuinely a Caribbean World Cup, could a conch shell ever have been banned? Could the International Tennis Federation outlaw strawberries-and-cream at Wimbledon?
If the Local Organising Committees and the Caribbean Community Prime Ministers' Sub-Committee on Cricket alike capitulated to ICC demands without a murmur, building 20,000-seater stadiums in islands with populations of 65,000 (meaning that, to fill them, a quarter of the population would have to attend games they couldn't afford, because prices were set for outsiders, not locals), if, after half-a-century of independence, the best job most young men can aspire to is hotel yardboy or KFC fry guy, if the Trinidad government bends backwards to accommodate aluminium smelters that could not get environmental approval in real countries, can anyone truly say it was Kieron Pollard who ran down the wicket and vooped?
-BC Pires is changing his name to ICC Pires. You can email your run outs to him at bcmaverick@tstt.net.tt
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