WI World Cup Ouster No Surprise!
“Today I saw the worst cricket match ever played by a West Indies team” – Keith Rowley, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.
The foregoing quotation comes from a social media post by Prime Minister Rowley and was carried in the Trinidad Express online edition of 27 June 2023. The post came following the regional team’s pathetic demise at the hands of the Netherlands, a footballing nation, in the Cricket World Cup 2023 50-Over qualifying tournament.
The Express newspaper continued with Rowley’s post, “This amateurish demoralizing embarrassment has to stop. Playing for West Indies requires a desire to fight, to believe, to win. To saunter through to defeat is unacceptable.
Playing for West Indies must be a treasured privilege available only to the best that are prepared to show character in defence of our legacy and our pride.
Those to whom these truths mean nothing must not be allowed out in West Indies colours.”
But just when it was thought that the embarrassment was over, the West Indies cricket team serve dup something even more demoralising and debilitating. The team lost to Scotland, a nation known for football and rugby, in a manner that may well leave Caribbean lovers of the sport permanently scarred. Having scored a paltry 181, using only 43.5 of the allotted 50 overs, Scotland soundly walloped them, easily winning with seven wickets in hand.
Perhaps, more than anything else, is the fact that when the one-day international world cup began 48 years ago, the West Indies team was considered the most feared amongst the cricketing nations. They easily won the first two editions in 1975 and 1979 respectively. Interestingly however, the team lost in the finals of the third edition of the world cup to India in 1983, with an amazingly despicable display that saw them grasp defeat from the jaws of victory, very much as displayed in this year’s qualifying tournament. 40 years later, the West Indies cricketers have eagerly revealed to the people so four Caribbean region and the entire sporting world that we are capable of achieving the lowest possible depths in the game without any shame whatsoever.
Some reflections
West Indies cricket has experienced myriad challenges through the years. There have been periods of successes and of failures; of glory and of disappointment. There have also been periods of overt and of covert racism in the sport and discrimination of all sorts has never been far away.
Throughout the foregoing, the sport has been able to retain the support of fans across the region and in the diaspora, sometimes, almost defying reason and logic.
We have moved from the colonialist tradition of white leadership to the typical mulatto to that of the blacks of both African and Indian descent.
The era of Learie Constantine, Alf Valentine, Sonny Ramadhin, set us up on the world stage as newcomers of increasing importance in the sport, even though the constituent countries of the regional team were still under the yoke of colonialism. Thanks to CLR James and Learie Constantine, our growing popularity in the sport was used amongst our peoples in the Diaspora in the United Kingdom to become the political platform for the Independence movement, a phenomenon not sufficiently acknowledged at the time, nor at present.
Then came the era of the ‘three Ws’ – Frank Worrell, Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott, all Barbadians. They renowned in the sport when they played and were genuinely feared when at the wicket.
CLR James led the charge, speaking out against the racism in West Indies cricket and the discriminatory practices that allowed the Board to deliberately overlook the undeniable leadership qualities evident in Worrell. Eventually the Board relented, and Worrell’s captaincy is now the stuff of legends in the sport.
Garry Sobers emerged and became one of the best craftsman ever to take to the cricket field, leaving a remarkable record as batsman, bowler, fielder, and genuine all-rounder.
The onset of Kerry Packer’s innovative and financially lucrative project changed the sport for all but particularly for Caribbean cricketers. The outcome for us in the region was exciting and brutal dominance of the game for almost a decade. History recounts the exploits of Viv Richards, Clive Lloyd, Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Ritchie Richardson, Larry Gomes, Deryck Murray, Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner, Colin Croft.
Thereafter, the history of West Indies cricket gradually returned to the earlier period where one or two individuals, at a time, created their own places of honour but the team never managed to share in the glory. The odd players sustained the sport’s belief that this region has the capacity to produce good players while at the same time, bemoaning the significant decline in the teams’ performance and ranking amongst an increase in nations playing the game under the ambit of the International Cricket Council.
From bad to worse
The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago was clearly incensed when he made the post to which we have been referring in this Column. The Trinidad Express newspaper quoted this part of his post, “The stench of today’s embarrassment didn’t start today it had a long gestation period in two decades of disappointment so those who were ‘expecting’ should not come looking for any exemption here.”
Rowley is correct. The decline of West Indies cricket has been occurring for several years, decades, in fact.
Increasingly, where other cricketing nations were once eager to invite the team to series in their respective countries, so that their lovers of the game would enjoy the delight of some of the world’s best stars in the game, the system has been going in reverse. The West Indies cricket team is no longer the crowd-pulling enterprise that it once was.
The latest debacle that is the West Indies team’s embarrassing dejection from the Cricket World Cup 2023 at the qualifying stage and at the hands of literal cricketing minnows like the Netherlands and Scotland, at once justifies and cements the decision by nations not to be keen on playing hosts to the West Indies cricket team, and this, any time soon.
The Worrell ethos
Frank Worrell’s remarkable performance as captain of the West Indies cricket team sets him apart in the history of the sport in our part of the world.
Worrell was the ultimate professional in all aspects. He saw the experience of cricket as integral to his ongoing education and life’s work. The likes of legendary fast bowler, Wes Hall, often sings the praises of Worrell. He noted that while several of the team members at the time were playing professional cricket in England, Worrell was always engaging them in respect of their personal and professional development. He encouraged them to educate themselves, understanding that there is life after cricket, and a career is essential for survival of self and family, a feature that is now part of every major international sports federation’s mandate.
Money versus professionalism
People are often motivated differently. In life, we have often been taught to believe that the primary motivation of the individual human being is money. The thinking is that money can buy almost everything that one would need in life.
There are some who believe that the Kerry Packer cricket project was essentially about showing that the sport, if properly organised and marketed, could bring financial benefits to all stakeholders. In this regard, the project was taken on board by global stakeholders who did different things with varying degrees of success.
The shorter versions of the game emerged from further experimentation and their successes all centered around their capacity to attract greater levels of sponsorship, revenue from the sale of television rights and a seemingly ever-increasing fan base around the world.
In the Caribbean, the Stanford Cricket experience fuelled financial windfalls for cricketers from the region, many of whom became millionaires. Of course, they were oblivious to the fact of the financial indiscretions of Allan Stanford that eventually led to his long prison sentence and the collapse of what appears to have been a decidedly false ‘empire’.
The introduction of the Indian Premier League is the latest innovation in the sport of cricket, bringing a model and franchises that have been so successfully implemented in different cricketing nations around the world.
Cricket today is synonymous with money. The traditional version of the game is struggling to survive as the shorter versions facilitate immediate gratification for all stakeholders, all measured in ‘cold, hard cash’.
Today however, there is ongoing debate as to whether the sport of cricket is about skill competencies or just another financially enticing attraction where the athletes are pawns encouraged to do what is required to ‘make a buck’ and ignore the niceties of values, integrity, good example and responsible professionalism.
In the world of sport, we have witnessed the powerful impact of money. While it has afforded many athletes the opportunity to earn enough to live comfortably, it has also spawned near-immeasurable corruption at all levels of sport, almost everywhere.
Our Caribbean cricketing reality
In the Caribbean, our cricketers have, for the most part, lost all sense of what the sport has meant to us as a society, through history. Disturbingly, most of our cricketers do not even care to know of the sport’s history for Caribbean peoples.
Most of our young cricketers do not know of the region’s cricketing heroes, nor do they care.
In many respects, for many of our young cricketers, it is more important to count the dollars than to even have an understanding of personal and national pride and their relevance to their sporting careers and their impact on the youths exposed to them, future generations of the Caribbean.
This brings us to the comment of Prime Minister Rowley. While clearly his comment is very correct, it is long overdue.
The problem is that the likes of our Caribbean politicians are a reflection of what our society has become, in large measure, because of them and their leadership. Many have overseen the loss of morality and ethical standards, not just in the society but often, in their own lives, leaving themselves as decidedly poor examples for our youth, for generations to come.
The cricketers who have been our region’s representatives over the past few decades, are the products of the mix and match that has emerged as leadership in an increasingly dysfunctional Caribbean. As Rowley has argued in respect of the long haul to the current state of our cricket, so too, we may use his own words to best describe what the Caribbean has become…”The stench of today’s embarrassment didn’t start today it had a long gestation period …”
