This is far from the most propitious juncture at which to set before the people of the Caribbean the calumnies of their cricket. On the other hand, given the seemingly ‘incurable’ love affair which Caribbean people have developed for the game it is questionable whether the option of simply forgetting about cricket and getting on with the rest of our lives is the more practical one.
Not so, one feels, particularly when most of us are likely to respond to indifference to the state of our game by proffering that cricket is, in fact, an intrinsic part of our lives and that it would be, to say the least, churlish to turn our backs on the game at a time when it appears to need us most.
As one of the many reviews of CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary proffers, what has, over the years, happened within the boundary lines of Caribbean cricket, has had a profound impact on our social existence outside of those confines. That is why, painful as it might be, we cannot evade the responsibility to accept the prevailing painful truths that have to do with where Caribbean cricket finds itself.
We have never been able to compartmentalize our emotional selves from the game. That propensity can easily become a burden in circumstances where we have ‘bigger fish to fry.’
The addiction is understandable. Not too many moons ago our cricket had served the same purpose of that prized set of China, one of the few possessions of value, something to ‘shout about’ in an otherwise impoverished home. Time was, when, even as poverty and perdition had become the lenses through which the ‘developed world’ perceived us, the Caribbean’s steady ascendancy in the arena of cricket, particularly during the 1980’s, afforded us a coveted share of the international headlines as ‘our boys’ emphatically altered the balance of global recognition by proffering performances on the field of play that made us count in the wider scheme of things.
Fast forward. Much of the rest of the cricketing world have raised their game. We have retrogressed. In just over a decade and a bit we have been ‘clawed back,’ ruthlessly relegated. Our die-hards have been left thoroughly deflated. Our performances leave us nothing of consequence to crow about. Some amongst us have embarked on convoluted intellectual ‘pilgrimages’ in search of justification for our cricket’s retrogression, refusing, even after the truth had long fixed them with an unblinking stare, to accept that, in a whole host of ways, we simply lacked what it took to get to the top of the pile and to stay there. Our passion for the game as Caribbean people simply did not allow us to accept that, beyond cricket, in the wider system of things, what goes around comes around.
Searches of the kind on which our die-hards had embarked frequently yield the kinds of ‘tall tales’ that are rooted in the dimension of fantasy that reposes in our Caribbean story-telling culture. This propensity materializes particularly in circumstances where there are formidable psychological barriers erected to deny access by naked truth. So it has been, in large measure, sometimes, with our search for the reasons for our cricketing decline.
The real value of cricket to the Caribbean had been in the role it had played in allowing us to parade what we believed to be a legitimate claim to being equals with those that see their ways of life as superior. It was the only credential that afforded us that ‘we belong’ prerogative. Cricket had allowed us to fashion fanciful images of who we are that extended beyond the game itself. You lose that and – emotionally at least – you lose a great deal.
Caribbean cricket’s on-field decline has been more profound if only because it represents a wider sense of a loss of place at that aforementioned table of entitlement. What else is left for us to make an authentic noise about on a global stage?
It is therefore altogether understandable that we have (some of us, at least) taken the loss of our cricketing power hard. It had appeared that we were prepared to make allowances for, perhaps, a swift rejuvenation. That, it is now abundantly clear, is not about to happen.
Coming to terms with the reality that in cricketing terms we are, quite simply, no longer ‘in the frame,’ has been a bitter pill for die-hard Caribbean cricket fans to swallow. There is something in the Caribbean emotional psyche that makes being silenced difficult to endure. There are others of us, thankfully, who at least find some measure of emotional exhalation in hanging on to the region’s ‘glory, glory’ cricketing days, symbolized, particularly in the era of the eighties and a bit beyond when the betting, invariably, was on a ‘whitewash,’ whenever England encountered ‘our boys,’ whether home or away. Those, of course were the days of blistering pace and explosive batting, the spectacular emergence of that mix of excellence and genius manifested in the play of the likes of Viv Richards, Brian Lara, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh, the late Malcolm Marshall et al and the various others, when we measure that suite of talent against what obtains these days that the emotional chickens have come home to roost.
It is not, one feels, accidental, that many, perhaps most of our hitherto ‘die hard’ disciples of the regional game have not, it seems, batted an eyelid over what, in effect, has been two signal junctions of recent shame in the regional game, first, a string of performances in the recently concluded T-20 World Cup sufficiently inept to make the point our team simply did not belong in the competition, in the first place; afterwards, there was the disdainful brushing aside of our patently under-talented regional ‘Test’ team at the hands of Sri Lanka, the latter humiliation underscoring the reality that whoever or whatever is steering the ship as far as a hoped-for performance renaissance is concerned, our cricket is going nowhere fast in its search a condition resembling redemption.
Sadly, it is not just that loss of excellence in our play that used to evoke such popular adulation, colourful authorship and enlightening intellectual discourse of which the Caribbean has been robbed on account of its complete loss of place in the global cricketing pecking order. In that regard we can at least, hark back to the team’s ‘glory, glory’ days and perhaps comfort ourselves in the saying that what goes around, comes around. The question that lingers hauntingly, however, is whether Caribbean people, preoccupied with those other parts of a demanding agenda that have to do with their overall existence, are equipped at this juncture to make further emotional investments in the challenge that inheres in the effort it will take to rejuvenate their belief in our cricket.
