I have been here for over 2 decades

All the threads on the first page in the rum shop have not gone past one page...most have less than 10 replies

Looks like WI cricket is dead for real....or older posters are.....

O shunt....the backroom is just as bad

Is it Trump war effect?

@Narper

Between Trump and Scammy, can anything prosper? 😂

@Narper

Once, not so long ago that the sea had had time to forget, Caribbeancricket.com felt like a little republic of talk, one of those West Indian inventions where men and women who had never met face-to-face could still argue as if they’d grown up under the same mango tree.

A poster, an old hand from decades back, told me that was the place where the interesting characters abode. He spoke their names the way elders speak of cricketers from the leather-ball days: with a mixture of amusement and respect, as if each personality had a signature shot, each argument a familiar flourish. Some, he said, moved on. Some were banned. And whether by exile or by choice, the benches emptied. It’s a small thing, people will say, just a forum, but anyone who has lived in these islands knows how “small things” carry the weather of a whole society. When the lime changes, the village is changing too.

Now the backroom has the feel of a noticeboard outside a chapel: obituaries posted like weekly scripture. Death is not new to us; Caribbean people know how to mourn and how to sing over sorrow, but it is the way the living speak that tells you what the place has become. Where there was once rough fellowship, there is now too much naked accusation. A man can be charged with any sin, and proof is treated like a luxury item. The old quarrels used to circle back to cricket; now, too often, cricket is merely the excuse to cut somebody down.

And perhaps that is why the broader grief lands so easily on the tongue: because the same sourness has seeped into the game itself. West Indies cricket was never only a sport. It was a kind of public music, calypso dressed in whites. It carried rhythm and mischief, boldness and invention. It made room for flair without throwing discipline overboard. It was our way of saying to the world, "We are small, yes, but we are not minor." We can be elegant and ferocious in the same way. We can make a contest into theatre and still win it.

So when people say CWI has destroyed Caribbean calypso cricket, they are not merely cussing administrators as Caribbean people like to do. They are describing a cultural loss. Administrations come and go; the deeper wound is when the spirit of a people’s game becomes unrecognizable, when the thing starts to feel manufactured, managed, sanitized, and emptied of its native swagger.

The “true West Indian cricketer” lives now mostly in memory, and memory is a hard place to live. Think of the batsmen and bowlers who once rearranged our sleep as casually as they rearranged a field. We stayed up late into the night, eyes red, or woke before daybreak, missing rest that we would never get back, because there was a match somewhere on a transistor radio, and our blood insisted we had to hear it. Those were the hours when schoolchildren became old men in the morning, when workers went to the job on two hours’ sleep and still smiled, because a man from our side had made 90 look like a dance.

Some of us were lucky, genuinely lucky, to witness some of them live. Not on highlight reels, not as clips chopped into bite-sized greatness, but over a long day when you could feel momentum change like wind. Now the special ones are part of the island archive: stored in anecdotes, in arguments, and in the way an elder will pause mid-sentence and say, “But you had to see him; yes, you had to see him.”

In Trinidad and Tobago the lament takes on a local accent, as all West Indian laments do. People will tell you plainly: Bassarath has allegedly ruined T&TCB and its cricket. It is a heavy charge, and whether every detail is fair is not even the first point. The first point is the sense of betrayal, the feeling that the stewards of the game have treated it like property rather than inheritance. Cricket in these places was never meant to belong to officials; it belonged to communities, to clubs, to schoolyards, to the quiet men rolling pitches, and to the loud ones talking in the stands.

And then, as always, comes the sermon we are instructed to accept: change is inevitable; time is fleeting; endings are necessary so new beginnings can come.

Caribbean people understand time. We understand how quickly a good thing can fade. We understand that empires pass, fashions pass, and heroes pass. But inevitability is not the same as justification. Not every change is a fresh season. Some changes are simply decline dressed up in modern language. Some endings do not lead to new beginnings; they lead to vacancy.

So when you say, “I don’t see a new one ahead,” it is not merely pessimism. It is a question, sharp and honest, thrown into the open air: where is the replacement? We saw it with India at the recent WC. Where is the new West Indies that will make us lose sleep again for the right reasons? Where is the new cricket culture that people will defend not out of habit, but out of love? Where is the new forum, literal or figurative, where disagreement still carries a thread of respect and where the game itself remains the centre of the circle?

Maybe it will come. The Caribbean has surprised itself before.

But a chronicler must write what he sees, not what he hopes will be convenient. And what many of us see, at present, is this: a region with a glorious cricket past, a restless and quarrelsome present, and a future that has not yet offered its evidence.

In such times, the old work remains. Remember carefully. Speak plainly. Keep the stories intact. Because if the new dawn ever does decide to show itself, it will still need people who can say, without exaggeration and without apology, what the light once looked like when it was bright.

I have given up on CWI cricket Narps...

Sarge

@Narper

Nah, it's more than likely because of the changes to the board layout and navigation.

The forum pages used to show around 50 threads per page, but now they only show 15. Threads people might be interested in get pushed back to the second and third pages, where few people go, so most users never notice them.

I brought it up with Arawak but he said he won’t change it. The site also isn’t very easy to navigate on mobile, which doesn’t help.

In the backroom, Stupidjones' low-value AI-generated copy-paste posts, like the one above, never get replies apart from Halliwell. They end up pushing more substantive threads onto page two or three where hardly anyone looks.

Agree that its very likely the recent change to the interface.

I rarely post. But nowadays I can't even be bothered to read. Being on here feels like walking on eggs.

@VIX

Nah, it's more than likely because of the changes to the board layout and navigation.

I agree with this!

...................VIX

Stealing someone's thoughts.

VIX

11/26/24, 4:47:56 PM

VIX avatar image

debut: 2/6/03

17,426 runs

In reply to ray

why yuh stealing my lyrics breds?

eh??

Felonious Trump

This is one also....

So VIX got caught plagiarizing.... wahahahahaha

Zsa Zsa caught him...

Math question for an 11 yr old

He was called stupid by Courtesy for not being able to solve his child's math question.

His insecurity shows up on occasions by attacking others, just an empty fountainhead. 😂