Given all of the various issues that have been preoccupying the Caribbean, climate change and food security being just two of them, cricket, even as ‘our boys’ continue to ‘rack up’ one humiliating defeat after another, has descended close to the bottom of our scale of hurtful woes.
And why not? After all, even though there can be no question than that such global attention that we have attracted has been due, in considerable measure to all of the good things that the game has done for our collective self-esteem it is also altogether fair to say that we are very much in the process of enduring the ignominy of the cataclysmic decline. This in an era where even some of the relative newcomers to the game have been ‘knocking off’ the once fearsome WI as a matter of course. Across the spectrum of this unbearable humiliation the Caribbean have embarked on a succession of post mortems which – on the basis of the available evidence – appears very much to have drawn a succession of ‘blanks’ in terms of arriving at any clear determination as to why we have lost, almost entirely, the habit of winning which, for a protracted previous period, our cricket used to ‘own.’ The people of the region, not infrequently, out of rushed judgement arising out of wounded pride have been lashing out at those they consider to be the ‘guilty parties…the players themselves, the coaching setup, an often seemingly bewildered Cricket West Indies and a Caribbean Community (CARICOM) that can perhaps contend that in these trying times for the region, it has ‘bigger fish to fry.’
Where the people of the region is concerned it is the complete loss of bragging rights that has been the toughest pill to swallow. Precisely because we have had sorry little else to offer, bragging rights have always been a ‘big deal’ with Caribbean people. England used to be our favoured target, the rationale behind this having to do with cricket seizing every opportunity to steal a march on our former colonial masters. Mind you, cricket, back then, was just about all that we had to shout about, anyway.
After our performances on the field began to slip into a condition of seemingly uncontrollable deficit, the slide eventually metamorphosing into an unchecked free fall, it eventually dawned on us that, as a region, we had lost it all.
The crisis has, more or less, arrived at a junction where those of us who had grown accustomed to ‘big-ing up’ ‘the boys’ have now been reduced to making an assortment of altogether unconvincing excuses for our inglorious descent from the Ayanganna of the game, even as our bragging rights, our long-cherished cricketing collateral, continued to disappear, progressively, with each successive on-field humiliation.
If it would be wrong to suggest that as a region we have lost interest in West Indies cricket, it is also altogether fair to say that the level of interest has declined to a point where the traditional ‘ball by ball’ following of our encounters at Test level, ‘back then,’ via transistors pressed to our ears, has disappeared almost entirely. Nor do we, any longer, storm the various cricketing venues across the region to watch ‘our boys’ perform, the contents of our lunch baskets including generous helpings of pre-conceived notions regarding the outcomes of the encounters. To do so, these days, would be to run the considerable risk of ending up ‘eating crow.’
For some of us the decline has been hurtful to the point where disillusionment shares the same space with a make believe mindset that causes the ‘diehards’ to believe that our cricket is still ‘up there’ with the best and that our contemporary experience amounts to no more than fleeting occupancy of a trough out of which we will soon begin to make our way. This, truth be told, now appears increasingly difficult to fathom. The available evidence simply does not support the daydreaming, the most poignant recent evidence of this being our being ingloriously booted out of the forthcoming Cricket World Cup, a circumstance which up until now, is, arguably, the most poignant point in the continuing decline.
And even if it would be churlish to spare ‘the boys’ the merited credit due from their ‘coming through’ against India in the recent T20 series here in the Caribbean, there can be no question than that the outcome of that encounter changes little if anything in terms of the global cricketing ‘pecking order.’ As we in Guyana might say, one Kiskadee does not make a summer.
It will require both a more generous measure in on-field mindset as well as greater helping of off-field strategic thinking from our regional cricketing set-ups to begin what is likely to be a challenging ascent from where we are these days. Simultaneously, countries in the region, not least Guyana, now possessed of a material capability to do so, have to begin to make serious material and strategic inputs in the various strands of resources necessary to build the game. More than that it is high time that we begin to properly school our Coaches and Sports Administrators to a level that compares with those in some of the rest of the Caribbean as well as in the wider international community. In a global community where sport continues to gain incremental respect and recognition the palpable underdevelopment of Guyana’s sport development is palpably lacking in just about every area.
Certainly, there has been sorry little persuasive evidence that CARICOM, with all of its various other preoccupations, has appeared particularly willing to pay any greater measure of attention to the region’s cricketing woes. Contextually, our cricket will go nowhere unless CARICOM provides the glue that is supposed to hold the region together. The current crisis can only be properly addressed through a committed and robust regional effort.
The salvaging of Caribbean cricket, with all that this implies, will only begin in earnest when, as a region, we decide (and seriously commit to that decision) that our cricket, as part of our historic socio-cultural experience is worth saving. There is, at this time, no serious across-the-board evidence that, as a region, we are collectively and wholeheartedly committed to saving our game. Perhaps the various other distractions are too compelling for saving cricket to be taken on board at this time. But then again, it comes down to just how much the game and what it has done for the region means to us as a Caribbean people. There is unlikely to be any serious going forward unless we can clear that hurdle.
