Dear Editor,
Will West Indies cricket die?
“‘Clarke, we’re depending on you. You have to win this race. We can’t win the cup otherwise. You can`t come second either, Clarke. You have to come first’
“He did not ask me how I felt. He did not ask me if I needed water. He did not ask me if I needed a massage. Or a handkerchief soaked in ice water, to wipe the sweat from my face…
“But I had been winning the 880, the last race of the meet, for the past three years, and everybody expected that I would win this one, a fourth time. This was the last race I could run before leaving Harrison College.”
So spoke Austin C Clarke, in Membering, an autobiography of sorts with Nobel prize-winning potential. The author whom I have known and whose work I have read for some 60 years, that just keeps getting better and better, characterized those words of the games master before his only losing 880 yards college race as “words of expectation, not of encouragement.”
I quote them because the writer believed they had an enormous impact on his rather remarkable literary, academic and political life in North America, especially in the sixties and seventies. Since this is not a book review, I will say no more than guarantee the reader the kind of literary pleasure that comes to those who want to read their “contemporary black civil rights history struggles” from one who participated in them, and writes elegantly and passionately about them.
If West Indies participation in international cricket were to end, as has been predicted often in the last decade or so, I suggest it is in the attitude reflected in the passage quoted above that perhaps the most plausible explanation lies. The change in that attitude is a sine qua non of its reinvigoration.
For half a century West Indian cricketers competed with the best in the world, and dominated for a significant part of that time. When times changed and their fortunes were reversed, West Indies cricketers as a team, became in the West Indies, the most despised sportsmen ever.
Most administrators and fans, sadly, fail to see the obvious: The opposition today is far more professional than they ever were, and much more motivated, notwithstanding the current weakness of the West Indies, to defeat and wherever possible, humiliate, the regional team.
In consequence of the above there must be, as conditions of revival, the following new rules, whether they be formal, informal, or notional, for West Indies cricket:
- It is a fact not subject to dispute that there were times in the latter half of the twentieth century when West Indies teams were ordinary, as well as extraordinary.
- There must be unity of purpose between administrators and players going forward.
- There must be a recognition that there are not enough good players in the region to exclude any player for non-cricketing reasons, except for high crimes (not misdemeanours).
- It must be considered a cardinal sin to even acknowledge the existence of islands or other units or different ethnic groups in the selection process.
- It must be acknowledged that preparation for international encounters today require much more than was required in the twentieth century, and as in all other areas of human activity, a more scientific approach, recognizing the importance of the mental element in sport, must be adopted.
Yours faithfully,
Romain Pitt
