Dear Editor,
The Barbados Nation has now added its considerable voice to what is now the continuing saga of Caribbean cricket. I say considerable with the full knowledge that if we were to consider the human resources that contributed to the making of Caribbean cricket over the years then Barbados would qualify as the primary source, and therefore perhaps the one with a formidable claim to speak on the issue. Equally, I would like to believe that in acknowledging that status it would do so with due humility and a sense of fairness constitutive of the community of cricketers to whom it speaks.
It was not, therefore, without some surprise and disappointment that we read “Time to move on, Shiv.” What was particularly disturbing was the reasoning that followed. The argument is that Shiv’s best days are behind him and the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) needs to bring new blood on board to rebuild the team. And this may be as good a time as any to do so. An ailing and aging warrior needs to be sent to pasture. No sentiments or second guessing. In the Nation’s view, “Performance must be at the core when it comes to cricketers and what they must deliver; there is no place for sentiment nor retention other than based on merit.” No problem here; winning at all costs, no time for wasted sentiments.
Not so quickly, some suggested. The statistics were quickly disinterred to suggest that there is a debate if merit is the issue, because the present reading appears slighted and self-serving, proffered to justify something else. And if the statistics are suspect then …
This, however, is only one terminus of the debate. And it is unfortunate that most of it seems to have ended there.
Another argument suggests since the late ʼ80s and early ʼ90s globalization ate away at the heart of Caribbean cricket. This was when individual cricketers began to realise that they could claim and secure for themselves fees and rewards the WICB could not afford or refused to pay. Expectedly, players simply opted for what was there and quickly forgot that there was something called the Caribbean to which they were either ethically or morally committed. Caribbean cricket management appeared confused and helpless in the face of a native revolt. One critic described the Board’s response to its challenges as the “forever bumbling, forever capricious … an object of derision in most parts of the cricket world” (Sambit Bal). Remarking on recent efforts to fix the rot Tony Cozier noted, “It just wouldn’t be West Indies cricket without an accompanying state of turmoil.”
Moreover, we remember only too well the name calling and shouts of nemakharam that came from the keepers of Caribbean cricket as West Indian players opted for the best deal in the market place – ironically the one few bright spots in international trade in which some of our products could fetch such high prices. The IPL only made it so much worse. Players seemingly and openly taunted the WICB. At the end of the last World Cup Gayle publicly made it known that while he was unavailable to play in the upcoming series with England he was certainly available to play for his team in the IPL.
Finally, we could hardly overlook the debacle of the cancelled series with India in October 2014 when the WICB admitted to the withdrawal of the team but then turned around and blamed the players and the ODI captain for the accompanying “scandal.” How and when did the players, including captains, acquire the authority to determine the terms and conditions of international tours?
To bring all of this to a head, there is no doubt that the WICB has had a difficult time with West Indian players over the last twenty years and has desperately sought ways of corralling, controlling, disciplining them for the least infraction, including the blame which was dumped on them after the Indian debacle. The WICB sees in this, let’s call it ‘the Chanderpaul incident’ one fictive moment in which it can play ‘boss’ and get away with it; to play to the gallery and show the Caribbean multitude they have both the determination and will to rein in unruly players and restore the glory of Caribbean cricket. One shot, the removal of Chanderpaul, and bingo there it is – the Holy Grail! Is that what we are really asked to believe here? The last twenty years have not done very much to inspire any such confidence.
I would like to believe that the community we seek to fashion, in which we incidentally play cricket, is one born of the imagination of our foreparents and the battles lines they had to draw. For some in my generation that imaginative voice has always been CLR James where his visionary narrative, Beyond a Boundary, remains singular and exemplary.
And that vision, I want to suggest, was about how we commit ourselves, both individually and collectively, to the community in which we find ourselves. The former, we came to appreciate, was born of the struggle and subsequent rights that were conceded to ordinary men and women as they sought to find security and confidence in each other. The rights of communities foregrounded in the rights of individuals – the necessary quid pro quo of our citizenship – to unfrock the one was to disarm the other. In the same way the individual cannot find security in a fragmented multitude, the multitude cannot find security in a dismembered individual.
Chanderpaul is of us and we are of him. His request is reasonable and eminently realizable under the protocols of the two-Test Australian tour. To win or lose is not likely to improve Caribbean cricket in any measurable manner. To put it as sentiment v merit is to mistake the meaning of both. Merit itself has no measurable objective yardstick, as we have come to know from our more subtle and nuanced critics. It is more art than science. The argument about merit seems dubious and complicit. Is Rousseau’s “general will” incapable of accommodating an individual choice, especially if and when that ‘choice’ is graspable and within easy reach? His utopian vision casts a disavowing shadow, while its realization is the essence of the communal bond. It cannot be otherwise.
What we are struggling with and seem to lament most, one author movingly noted in another context, is the “end of the bourgeois subject … traditionally … framed in terms of the growth of monopolies, the end of classical free enterprise, and the proliferation of what was once known as the ‘organization’ man.” The present crisis in our cricket is “reflected in the increasing fragility and vulnerability of the older bourgeois individualism, its deterioration under conditions of large-scale institutions and the decline of that capitalist competition which brought individualism into being in the first place ….” What we seek to do by objecting to the WICB selection process is to try and hold on to the last remnants of the defining moments of that individuality as it came to us through the characters of the game – Grace, Bradman, Worrell, Gavaskar, Imran Khan, Kallis, Jayasuria. Without them there is no game but bread and circuses.
To proceed as the Selection Committee decided and Lloyd announced is only to remind us of the confusion that characterises the WICB and the mistrust that has arisen between players and the Board. It cannot hope to repair the damage by insisting it wants to play boss without acknowledging the disconnect with players.
Yours faithfully,
Rishee Thakur
