These columns I produce every week for Stabroek News are fun to write and fun, also, for the feedback they generate. Sometimes with a column that I expect to raise hackles – the “Our Habits Divide Us” piece for instance – I get the opposite response. On the other hand, the reverse often happens: an apparently “safe” topic causes an uproar. (I should make clear that apart from the online comments, I hear from a lot of readers directly, although the latter responses are usually complimentary.)
Last week, for instance, I expected that “Scant Hope For Our Cricket”, would bring protests for my emphasizing our woeful record in regional unity as reflected in the West Indies Cricket Board, but the comments were mostly to do with bat and ball. That was somewhat naïve of me, but as a West Dem country boy I am allowed some naivete from time to time.
Common sense should have told me readers would ignore the regional unity jibe and zero in on the sport itself, and many of the comments did exactly that. Some readers related where they were on certain high points in West Indian cricket; there were various takes on the diagnosis problem; one writer made the revealing observation that the Canadian cricket team, once dominated by West Indian players, now had none. One writer went back to his childhood, and another suggested Guyana should go it alone as a cricketing nation.
Cricket is certainly an indelible part of our culture – it is imbedded – but the basis of the connection remains somewhat of a mystery.
In the first place, it is a very complex game, both in structure and in execution, and persons new to cricket are usually completely befuddled as to what is going on. Try explaining the leg-before-wicket rule for example, to an American; you’ll have better luck with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Worse yet, try to unravel the Duckworth-Lewis formula for rain-interrupted play; even professional cricket coaches are confused by that. Some of the rules border on the comical, such as the one to decide a tied 20/20 game.
The singularities abound. For one, cricket is the only major sport where the majority of the action (what’s going on between the wickets) takes place at the farthest point from the spectators – wherever in the stands you sit, you are far from the drama – and it is the only major game where a match (Test version, that is) takes 7 hours a day for 5 days. Furthermore, many Test matches end in a draw, and you can often predict that by the third day. In most major sports (soccer; basketball; hockey), it’s 2 hours and you’re driving home, and usually with a clear winner.
Here’s a striking oddity: It’s a 5-game championship series. After the third game, one team is ahead 3-0. Series over, right? Not so in cricket; the teams play out the full 5 games, although the winner is already decided. I’ve never understood that one.
It’s also the only major sport (Test version, again) where the players stop in the middle of the game, everybody leaves the field, and lunch is served; not only that, a couple hours later, they stop again – for tea. Americans hearing about this are convulsed. They call up their friends: “Harry, you’re not gonna believe this one.”
Another thing is that the broadcast facilities for fans in the Caribbean are erratic, at best. It’s getting better in recent years, admittedly, but cricket fans are often reduced to getting information on international games by phoning friends with internet access or short-wave radios; good luck if your particular fixation is results in Australian cricket. Sometimes, even Test matches don’t make the TV screen here, and don’t even ask about regional cricket telecasts.
Furthermore, for more years than one cares to remember, the West Indies are not the cricket champions we once were; indeed we’re one from the bottom. And cricket, particularly the Test match version, can put even a guy on amphetamines to sleep.
But despite all that, Caribbean people remain cricket mad. Except for one memorable occasion in Barbados where fans actually boycotted a West Indies Test match (Bajans ain’t ordinary), we continue to come out for the team, flying our banners, waving our flags, tooting our horns full bore. And even after a loss we’re back next day flying, waving and tooting again as if we just won the trophy.
Despite all the evidence against it listed above, this game remains in our blood. Go to a game at Providence, and don’t watch the cricket; just watch the fans. No more explanation is needed. These are irrepressible, inexhaustible, near combustible people, obviously having the time of their lives and not giving a hoot who’s looking. Cricket brings out the kind of convivial behaviours that you rarely see in other sports. Don’t raise soccer as an example; that’s not conviviality; that’s rowdiness.
Cricket is the only game I know that causes people to set the alarm and wake up at 3am to follow West Indies. Cricket is the game that caused a guy in a lumber yard preparing an order, to actually stop, sit down, say one word to the customer, “cricket”, and calmly tune in his radio to check how much runs who had. That happened to me. It has never happened with any other sport.
What is this magnet that transfixes us, that leads us to abandon common sense, and dream for “our team” in the face of every logical persuasion to the contrary?
What is it that leaves us cussing West Indies one day and cavorting like madmen over a Sarwan four the next day?
Why do we have people in German’s forsaking their soup to catch the latest cricket development on TV? When a man chooses cricket over a German’s soup, that’s a man in a serious grip.
And why is it that successive generations of Caribbean people come along, with no indoctrination, and fall into the same condition of mania? The insights from C. L. R. James in Beyond a Boundary only do it partially for me; the addiction (and I’m one of the afflicted) remains a mystery.
In proof of my point: the line in my song many years ago about the fireman in the Bajan fire station reacting to a fire report with “Madam, phone back later; Sobers batting now.” is my wording of a true incident. (Mind you, to repeat, Bajans ain’t ordinary.)
In conclusion, I’m inclined to proffer, as the writer Bernard DeVoto put it, that “the function of sports, games, and athletics is that of release from the complexities of modern life”, and to quote the psychologist that “with mankind forced to stretch himself to the breaking point, sport is the antidote that brings him back into balance.” However, like CLR’s book, those explanations don’t quite do it for me either.
When a man deserts his job for a cricket broadcast, or leaves his favourite soup to get cold, or comes with his family to the arena of his almost inept team, yelling himself hoarse, something else is going on there that we don’t fully understand.
Perhaps my yardman of a few words has the right take: “You don’t have to understand it; just enjoy it.”
