Five days of wonder
by VANEISA BAKSH
Seepersad Naipaul, the father of V. S., as a reporter for the Trinidad Guardian, began many of his stories climactically. "Amazing scenes were witnessed yesterday," became his trademark opening, and thinking about his penchant for finding the unusual in every story he pursued, I wondered what he would have been like as a cricket reporter. Not in his time, but in ours.
After the last Test match against Sri Lanka ended and Chris Gayle, the losing captain, came to the microphone, it was interesting to see how he handled the same old speech that his predecessors had been making for years.
He was motoring along quite mechanically: other team played better cricket, back to the drawing board, taking away positives . . . until it seemed too much for poor Tony Cozier to bear. He had to interrupt and ask Gayle what were those positives.
Gayle had to think; but eventually came up with the 50s by Ramnaresh Sarwan, the 83 by Dwayne Bravo and the three wickets by debutant Suleiman Benn. Then he said that the team had done well to play five days of good cricket. Nothing could have been more revealing about the pathetic standards we now hold.
We celebrate getting past 50, we forget that sloppy fielding cost Jerome Taylor a fifth wicket, and we are happy just to last the five days.
It is true that is something of a feat given the recent record, but for Gayle to say that the team played good cricket is stretching it beyond belief. They never showed that they were up to Sri Lanka's standard.
Comments that the pitch favoured Sri Lanka are an indictment on the capacity of the team to adapt and on the selection panel to choose appropriate players for the conditions. As the Sri Lankan captain Mahela Jayawardene pointed out, his team came from halfway across the world and had to adjust to the conditions, and they did. They wanted to win, they set out a game plan, and they stuck to it successfully.
Jayawardene led like a captain should; which brings me to something I constantly harp on: the qualities of good leadership. Our leadership generally seems to lack emotional intelligence, and it shows in the lack of sensitivity to the people around them, and the inability to motivate and inspire.
I'd say it was not wise to play Marlon Samuels under the circumstances of the investigation; he seemed unable to get into the game, and given the lack of counselling for troubled minds, it's pretty certain he has had little guidance through all of this.
Leadership requires all kinds of skills and capacities, and not everyone is equipped to stand in front. Gayle, who has been said to have inspired his teammates on the West Indies team, made a surprising comment after his Jamaica team played Guyana in the Stanford 20/20 tournament semi-finals. Gayle said that it was a difficult team to captain. Has anyone asked Gayle to explain the nature of the difficulty? Has anyone followed up on this with a view to understanding and perhaps helping Gayle and his team sort out their problems?
The overall situation seems so intricately flawed that it is past the stage of condemnations. It feels cantankerous to blame any one person or thing. Truth be told, it is all of us to blame because the cricket culture is simply a reflection of what we have become.
And it will go wherever we are going.
* This column is republished with permission from the Barbados Nation newspaper where it first appeared.