Bangladesh will doubtless celebrate its first ever victory in a test series without much concern for the fact that the landmark has come at the considerable expense of Caribbean pride and the exposure of our own cricket to further, unbearable humiliation. It may be, as well, that what the Bangladeshis have done is to preside at a ritual dance on the grave of Caribbean cricket as we know it. Trinidad and Tobago has dropped the first hint that the glue that has kept the region together when almost nothing else appears to have worked may now have become too cracked and worn to hold for much longer; and even if the balkanization of the regional game still exists in the realm of what is no more than a veiled threat the fact of the matter is that we may well be witnessing a gradual unravelling of what was once thought to be an iron-clad manifestation of Caribbean togetherness.
No one cares particularly for a dissertation on the political morass into which our cricket has sunk. We have had too many of those on other regional issues and those have done little by way of resolution. What matters and what bemuses and saddens cricket lovers is the sudden and frightening transformation of what we believed all along to be a sport that held us together into something else, though what that something else will eventually turn out to be is still anybody’s guess. For the moment at least it bears a frightening resemblance of a descent into chaos.
What we know is that things have changed – decidedly for the worse – since, whatever the motives for the strike action by Gayle and company, it is the biggest stakeholder in our cricket, the people of the Caribbean, who have come out the real losers. Lest we forget, it is the adulation, the intense celebration and the accolades that have been bestowed on our cricket by those who love the game so passionately that have sustained it.
The irony is that the unseemly confrontation between the West Indies Cricket Board and its nemesis, the West Indies Players Association, over cash and contracts is unfolding in a protracted season of decline, a period of underperformance that makes a mockery of the standoff. It is a Caribbean pantomime, no less.
What has set Caribbean cricket apart from our various other pursuits as a region is the manner in which, up until now, it has held itself above excessive political intrusion, offering us pure and splendid entertainment and affording our people opportunity to engage in the nationalistic pursuit of applauding the feats of their own home-grown heroes while collectively celebrating the collective accomplishments of the Caribbean as a whole. All that could change in a global environment in which the game of cricket itself has undergone its own considerable transformations.
What has changed the most, perhaps, is the way in which the players now see themselves. Though we are loathe to admit it the truth is that the commercial underpinnings of international entertainment that have long been evident in other sports has finally caught up with cricket and the players now have greater expectations than simply playing for pride and recognition. What this means is that the sense of nationalism – or regionalism in the case of the West Indies – may well have been supplanted by a more global view on the part of the players; and that view, perhaps, transcends the smallness of the region and, as well, takes a greater amount of self-interest than has been the case in the past.
The advent of WIPA means that the WICB no longer owns the game and WIPA says that it is about the protection of the players, their rights and their future. Its emergence is perhaps a logical response to the globalization of the game and the new economic opportunities that this has opened up for the players. WIPA is a players’ union, no less.
Inevitably, what we are now witnessing, what now characterises the game is a tenuous balance of power between the establishment that has traditionally controlled both the game the players and a new force, a players force that is now demanding a far greater say in how the game is run.
Here, it is not simply a question of the rights and wrongs of the current impasse but the reality of a transformation that cannot be separated altogether from the wider transformation of the game itself.
What is perhaps more significant and what ought really to concern us is that we have now arrived at a juncture where the balance of power between the players and the administration is shifting and the fact that an entire contingent of West Indian players refused to take the field in a test series is a poignant manifestation of the sheer scale of the changes that are taking place.
The real question is whether in that shift in the balance of power those transformations, are a good or a bad thing for our cricket. Certainly, it bespeaks a new environment, one that may well be fraught with uncertainty, with the possibility of even more muscle-flexing along the way; possibilities that raise questions about the future of the game as we, West indian, have come to know and love it. That leaves us marooned in a condition of the most unbearable uncertainty.
