Dig it all up - and rebuild!

January 08, 2000

For starters, we need to dig up all the present cricket pitches in the Caribbean and replace them all with true pitches like that of Sabina and Kensington of yesteryear. Just as we in T&T need politically to dig up the Constitution and dig up the EBC.

For Christ's sake, what are we waiting for? Sitting, looking at our pathetic performances in Australia, one can only conclude that our cricket can no longer be described as being of "test-standard".

If Test cricket were to be organised like the football leagues around the world, our cricket team surely would have been demoted out of the Premier League and left to wallow in the minor divisions until we raised our game back to established Test standards.

The biggest worry seems to be that the managers, the WICB, are unable to diagnose the problem ­ always the first step in the process of outlining solutions. If they cannot properly diagnose the malaise, then they must go. And go now!

In this very space we have advanced the view: "We were schooled in the unity of opposites, the dialectics of all natural phenomena... Everything has to be seen relative to its opposite in order to get at the reality, rather than be swayed and be duped by mere illusion. "For instance, we would say today the West Indies cricket team cannot 'bat' because they cannot comprehend modern pace and spin 'bowling'. They cannot bat because they cannot bowl.

"The bowling to which our batsmen are accustomed is stuck in the past. A batsman's shot selection is dependent on his reading of the bowling, and in the Test arena our batsmen today enter the realm of the unknown. "To bat competently, you have to know the bowling... West Indian bowling today is a lot of crap when compared with the other test-playing countries... and has been so for quite some time."

None of our present bowlers, with the exception of Walsh, can keep line and length as the Australians ­ McGrath, Gillespie, Bichel, etc do as a matter of course. Lara and company are forced to play every ball as if their lives depended on it, while our bowlers continue to persist with their nonsense.

The New Zealand captain expressed it best when he disparagingly dismissed our bowlers as mere "bounce bowlers". They hammer the ball midway onto the pitch and wait for something to happen. They seem to lack the cerebral acumen to think batsmen out. But, in the past, this was not the case. Lara had to face Garner to learn and to hone his skills, but from whom will Ganga and company learn, moreso since the opportunity of daily county cricket in England has been closed off to us "for good"?

The point is, while the cricketing world was cowering to the might of our fast bowlers, we at home conspired to resurface all our pitches, changing them all from fast-paced pitches to dead pitches. That change, whether inadvertently or not, served to mitigate against our fast-bowling art and prowess. These dead pitches have helped to nurture only "bounce bowlers".

For starters we have to dig them all up, from Jamaica to Guyana. Give us once again the kind of pitches aspiring young fast bowlers would relish bowling on, and on which they could easily develop a repertoire of special deliveries to deal with the peculiarities of opponents.

Only in this way will Campbell and Ganga ever learn to do better than merely coming forward tentatively onto the front foot to poke around. They will then learn to dance naturally.

You dance in order to bat, watching the ball intensely and making each stroke a combination of two and three moves. Like deceased Fredericks, like Haynes, like Greenidge, like Richards who danced.

And these are not the people whom we chose to coach the young batsmen. We chose people with certificates. How many times has it been said that precisely is the problem with Caribbean civilisation? When will we learn certification has nothing to do with education?

People "certified" with a mind-set are in fact the problem because they are never capable of breaking loose. Education is about re-examining and re-interpreting experiences within one's environment so as to come to terms with new realities, all the time measuring and re-measuring length and line, focus and space. That's why we dance. And that's why our worst politicians and worst batsmen are those who cannot dance and cannot break loose! Much more, anon.

e-mail:brenco@tstt.net.tt