Lara and cricket

By Bukka Rennie
April 05, 2003

My fellow columnist, Tony Fraser, has expressed the view that it is an indignity and an affront to us and our glorious cricketing history for the West Indies Cricket Board to seek now to employ an Australian to coach our cricketers.

He has a point and it forces us to lament the culpability of the board in its failure throughout the glorious years to put in place the necessary infrastructure to guarantee our continued prowess.

But future planning has never been the forte of Caribbean civilisation. A kind of spontaneous madness has always been our great strength as well as our great weakness. It is why I detest so much the term "calypso cricket", which serves primarily to promote what may have appeared to many as reckless abandon and overdone exuberance. But it was never only that.

We need to ask ourselves honestly what made our game of cricket that great in the period after the war (1945) up to the early '80s in order to be able to pinpoint the variables that were involved. With those in mind we can then seek to recreate and/or simulate certain required conditions and so chart a new "road-map" (that's US war jargon) for the future. The major variables, in my estimation, were as follows:

(i) The war (1939-1945) signalled the demise of the British Empire, the "winds of change" had begun to blow and the whole colonial world was awakening to a new sense of self and purpose.

Cricket, with its socialising graces and sense of civility, had been promoted to the world as a key cultural tool in the quest of cementing and maintaining the British Imperial Empire, and therefore this engagement called cricket had by necessity, since the British taught it so well, to be a key motivational tool in the quest for political-economic independence and was an integral part of the social armoury of the colonial world against the former masters.

Every Test match put nation against nation in a kind of substitute for war. Our sense of well-being was at stake every time the West Indian team took to the field.

(ii) In every village, in every nook and cranny, youths were taught the rudiments of the game by elders as a matter of course.

(iii) The preferred version of the game that was played everywhere, even on the beaches of the Caribbean, was the version called "pass out" and "fight fuh innings". In a previous column, it was stated that "...no other form of the game can get the batsman to move his feet as pass out..."

(iv) County cricket in England, by proxy, became in fact our professional academy; it was there that our finest honed their innate talents and skills playing professionally on a daily basis.

Then suddenly England curtailed this employment of West Indians and our would-be stars were left without enough cricket to become world beaters. We simply do not play enough cricket at the domestic level in the Caribbean. That is key.

Having said this, the next variable is captaincy. That takes us to Brian Charles Lara. It never ceases to amaze how we deal with this gentleman.

When Lara was selected to rejoin the team, after his voluntary lay-off, under other captains (Jimmy and later, Hooper), there were many scribes in the Caribbean who insisted that "Lara must be made to understand in no uncertain terms that he is not captain and he must accept authority..." An allusion to innate character flaw.

The reality has shown that Lara readily accepted authority and played his cricket as we know he can, taking both the Australians and the Sri Lakans by the scruff of their necks and so silenced all the critics. And sure enough as time went on the mediocrity of leadership revealed itself. Now we have turned to Lara again.

In a column on Sir Frank Worrell, an icon of leadership per se, the following was stated: "...to be a leader of stature one must not only possess the capacity to motivate; one must be a change agent that embodies the new demands of the times and the particularities of the vision for the future. A great leader must through his action transform how people see themselves and eventually affect how they behave. A great leader ‘touches people's lives' in ways that are enduring and indelible..."

True it is hard today to throw up such leaders given the objective, vulgar materialism, the rule of the almighty dollar, that pervades and corrupts every single core value that once defined our existence. But that is precisely why we cannot stop seeking to promote our ideals that are different to what now readily obtains in a world that is fashioned after the crass commercialisation of America, the new Cultural Imperialist Empire with its own battery of games played in their own peculiar manner and style.

The rebuilding of the integrity of West Indian cricket must be a multi-faceted process involving not only the establishment of the academy as has been done but must also involve the people in their communities at all levels. Our republican State must take responsibility to promote and to implement the requirements as did the colonial State.

The game must be played as we wish it to be played at all levels from the age group five and upwards, utilising all the versions, methods and mechanisms that we as a people have worked out and developed over the years.

An Australian coach will never be enough. It was our style of play and approach to the game that the other academies around the world, particularly the Australians, studied and use for the development of their game.

However as indicated above, if cricket is a reflection of the state of our civilisation, then it will behove Caribbean society to develop a new sense of purpose and collective vision, in context of the present global realities, that will serve to generalise a new popular social consciousness such as that which came after the Second World War.

Finally, it is for the new captain, subjectively, to fashion new ways on the field with the young Sarwan as his understudy. It is once again time to "elevate and bind a timely sense of West Indian or Caribbean nationhood through this very glorious game of bat and ball and character..."