There is no silver lining behind the dark cloud of controversy and chaos that has bedeviled West Indies cricket for so many months and perhaps the most regrettable consequence of the recent impasse between the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and the West Indies Players’ Association (WIPA) has been a gradual and now marked decline of interest among Caribbean people in the fortunes of the regional game. We may, of course, contend that reconciliation between Caribbean people and the game they love reposes in the fickleness of the West Indian disposition. What prevails may not be a permanent falling out; for the moment at least, however, the rift exists and it is real.
The media have sought to keep the issues that mire our cricket alive as best it could by providing reportage on the evolution of what has sometimes been a comical negotiating process. By the same token they have sought to sustain the waning popular interest in West Indies cricket itself. Those to whom the game has mattered most, however, those who have lived by it and been entertained by it have lost interest in the fracas and – for the time being at least – in the welfare of the game itself.
Evidence of this is to be found in the fact that the recent end to the feuding between the Board and the players brought no collective sigh of relief from the people of the region. They are aware that the experience of the past few months has left our cricket even more hobbled than it was before the confrontation between the WICB and WIPA and that it will take more, much more than arriving at a settlement on issues of monies and contracts to bring the sorry saga to an end. Bureaucracy and Caribbean cricket are strange bedfellows; that, perhaps, above all else, is what the impasse has taught us.
Real cricket, at least as far as West Indians are concerned is about the throngs of fans that idolize their heroes, parade their knowledge of the game at street corners and in rum shops across the Caribbean and storm the grounds in their thousands to shout their lungs out. Not too many die hard cricket fans in the region care who the President of the WICB is. Indeed, prior to the current dispute which placed the WICB in the spotlight it is doubtful that a great many fans even knew who the WICB President was. We care about the game not about its bureaucracy. That has always been the very essence of the culture of the game as Caribbean people know it and while it has to be acknowledged that cricket, globally, is currently in the throes of an understandable transformation, whether or not our own cultural interpretation of the game will follow suit is by no means certain. We have, perhaps, become far too set in our ways.
Those of us who, as followers of the game, had felt, perhaps, that we were its real owners, can now be under no illusions that that is decidedly not the case. The players whom we admire and adulate are now far less responsive to the idol worship that we have bestowed upon them over the years. For them, it is no longer sufficient that they be regarded as gladiators recruited to entertain. Ownership of the Caribbean game, the global game has changed hands. Rather than being the property of the people of the Caribbean whose psyche has been shaped to such a significant extent by cricket, the game now has an institutional owner, the international leisure and entertainment industry which, for the moment, is fronted by the IPL.
Those who regard the transformation as good for the players and good for the game itself may have a point. Everything changes and why shouldn’t cricket. There are those, however, the traditionalists, the old-fashioned West Indian fans, who regard the changes as being reflective of a loss of the game’s purity, its innocence.
If, for example, you are a West Indian fan, you would be inclined to dwell on the recent humiliating defeat of Floyd Reifer’s makeshift team at the hands of Bangladesh, an occurrence that says much about the lack of depth in Caribbean cricket. If, on the other hand you are prepared to come to terms with the fact that the changes that Caribbean cricket is going through are in fact a microcosm of a wider global transformation of the game itself then you would probably be just as interested in which Caribbean player is likely to secure the most lucrative IPL franchise next season than you would be in the fortunes of the West Indies team.
Still, you cannot help but feel an overwhelming sense of sadness over what may well be the end of an era. Cricket is reinventing itself to embrace the changes in global society, the expanding market for mass entertainment; so that as a West Indians we may well have to surrender the luxury of sitting in the stands and biting our nails and crossing our toes and fingers, hoping that our boys come out on top. In the future we could find ourselves shouting for a Dwayne Bravo or a Chris Gayle or a Sarwan not only because they are part of the regional cricket team with which we have always identified but simply because they happen to be part of a region to which we too belong.
Big money in sport did not begin with cricket. But there is really nothing you can do to prevent the players from observing what is happening in those other sports – sports like basketball, football and tennis, for example – and if cricket has found a way to reinvent itself in order to make it more marketable and the players wealthier then we should not begrudge them that. On the other hand, the enhanced sense of self-interest being demonstrated by the players brings a measure of distraction to the game which does not please everyone.
There are those, for example, who never really understood nor cared, for that matter, about the nature of the dispute between the Board and the players and who remain bitter over what they saw as a desertion of West Indies cricket by Gayle and company during the Bangladesh tour to the Caribbean. That was an understandable reaction that came from the very heart of their cultural understanding of Caribbean cricket. There are some things that will outlive whatever changes the game of cricket undergoes.
Talk of ‘going it alone’ as a cricketing nation that has emanated from Trinidad and Tobago in recent times and, more recently, inserting Darren Ganga as West Indies captain following his heroics in the recently concluded Champions League Twenty/20 series is no more than a distraction from the central issue which, if anything, only serves to further confuse and perhaps even inflame an already distressing situation. For a start, any attempt by any of the current territories comprising West Indies cricket to become Test-playing nations on their own is bound to give rise to a fresh wave of controversy that is likely to extend into the realm of politics and create inter-regional rifts that would take ages to heal; and at any rate if Trinidad or any other territory is able to break ranks with the rest of the Caribbean that would mean that some players from some of the other territories will never be able to play test cricket since it is highly unlikely that a Grenada or a St. Lucia, for example, will be able to do all that is necessary to become an independent Test-playing nation.
As far as the Ganga issue is concerned, one had thought that that had been put to rest a long time ago. If there is manifest evidence that Darren Ganga is an astute tactician and an able leader there is at least as much evidence that his substantive performance as a batsman does not entitle him to a place in the Caribbean side. At this juncture the team is far too weak and the batting much too brittle to risk a captain whose tactical brilliance will probably not be anywhere near enough either to compensate for the substantive weaknesses of the team, or to negate the capabilities of the opposing side.
