West Indies cricket: Lament for a lost superpower

Fri, Jan 30, '15

I’ve never been much of a one for sympathising with the opposition, particularly in cricket.

Brought to awareness of the great game around the time of Allan Border’s triumphantly vengeful sweep through England in 1989, I learnt that when your enemy is down, you rejoice, and when your enemy falls even lower, you laugh uproariously.

This, I have always been given to believe, is one of the joys of sport: the ability to take pleasure in the misfortune of others, just as they take pleasure in yours. After all, when Australia has gone through the darkest of dark times in the past, the rest of the world never seemed particularly sympathetic.

That time in the late ’80s, of course, was also the heyday of the West Indies, and nothing then seemed less likely than a day coming when I would not only feel depressed about the lamentable state of an opposing cricket nation, but that that cricket nation would be the Windies. And yet here we are. I feel almost as sad about the state of Caribbean cricket as I have when my own country’s been losing. What on earth has happened to me?

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