A Note on Cricket and the Caribbean

I am writing this a little over 12 hours before the second West Indies vs. Australia's test match begins in Trinidad. Even if the West Indies win this match, which is possible but highly improbable, I will stand by the comments that follow. This is about cricket, but it's wider than cricket. As CLR James so eloquently put it, it goes beyond the boundary. Often it's in our cricket that we see both our triumph and our failures as a society. Any attempt, therefore, to confine Caribbean cricket to the periphery of our society will end up as a wasted exercise. So here goes.

The last time I wrote about cricket, I said that the West Indies was tactically inflexible -- from selectors to captain to individual players. This is a Caribbean ailment that stems largely from our collective insularity; we think in small boxes. We seldom see the big picture, that's why the rest of the world, including those less endowed than us, has passed us by. We slumped from the cricket's mountaintop not because we are less capable, but because the rest of the cricket world has passed us. While others build we destroy.

Our Caribbean has been blessed with superior talent in almost all areas of human productivity, yet we remain the most persistent structurally adjusted region in the world. We alienate our talent, the building blocks of advance and development. As it is in the wider society, so it is in cricket. Democratic tradition and instinct, we have none.

Hooper, the ordinary on-field tactician but superlative inspirator/motivator, was manipulated out of the leadership in preference for Lara, the superior on-field tactician but woeful inspirator/motivator. Do we understand what we want? There is nobody around in whom tactics and inspiration converge, because our Caribbean does not encourage that kind of being. But I should think that as you try to build something called a team out of a bunch of fragile but conceited little islands and mainland enclaves, your better bet is the inspirator /motivator over the flamboyant tactician with no sense of the collective purpose.

With that single Hooper-Lara swap we have undone all that we have struggled and pained to do with our cricket these last two years. We have shoved the Caribbean deeper into the jaws of nothingness. For cricket is perhaps the Caribbean's best chance of escaping that curse of neo-colonial nothingness. Joey Carew and Gordon Greenidge, with Wes Hall in tandem, have laid bare for all to see our Caribbean penchant for self-destruction in the name of progress.

I disagree with Hooper's decision to pull out of the team; the Caribbean inflexibility invariably took over. He should have publicly told the Caribbean and the world of the nasty coup carried out against him, all of it, and then take his place in the team with a clear and superior conscience. Hooper is not, and has never been, the charismatic public figure that we Caribbean people, to our eternal peril, love to love.

Nor was he the statistician's wonder. Yet, he represents something peculiar in our Caribbean makeup - he does not pander to the crowd. For all its collective wisdom and creative energies, our Caribbean public is all too easily intoxicated by the sense of sweet smelling superficiality. Carl Hooper, and those of his kind, beckon us to look beneath the surface.

And so we promptly lost at Bourda despite three centuries from our bats. It proves that cricket remains a team sport, something our Caribbean superficiality constantly forgets. Lara's wonderful statistics mean precious little if they cannot aid the desirable outcome. We could hardly bowl out the Australian once. Yet to my amazement, and I suspect that of many sane West Indians, we carry almost the same third-rate bowling attack into the second test match. What crooked and tortured logic!

All week the pundits have been parroting about the "new look" team. What "new look" team? You have the same old Dillon/Collins axis of failure and under-production. Bernard can hardly bowl worse than Collins and he can bat. Tino Best can definitely out-bowl Dillon on any surface on any day. Yet we omit Bernard and Best. I suppose we will play them in Antigua when we are three down. After singing the praises of Samuels up till a few days ago, we now contemplate, and by tomorrow will insert, Sarwan for Samuels. What tragedy! If Samuels is better than Hinds and Ganga, and he certainly is, then must play ahead of them.

We are a mixed up lot of ex-colonized outposts locked in the mentality of willing self-destructors. Viv Richards, I suspect, stands erect, but the others who run our cricket, like their brothers who run our public affairs, are messed up. But are they not the products of our collective existence? Ponder.

* David Hinds lectures in Caribbean and Africana Studies at Arizona State University in the USA. He is also a political and social commentator who has written on Guyanese and Caribbean politics. More of his writings can be found on his GuyanaCaribbeanPolitics.com website.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was written and submitted before Chanderpaul was pulled out of the final eleven at the last minute.