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Cricket and National Pride

May 09, 2011 Editorial

As avid fans of the glorious game of cricket, the eyes of most Guyanese were glued on their TV screens last Saturday as India and Sri Lanka battled it out for the championship of Cricket World Cup 2011.
Without (at this time) there being a world championship of test cricket, the One Day World Cup, which comes around every four years, is the closest thing to a world championship. Eventually India won bragging rights.
Scenes of euphoria of the Indians in and out of the stadium immediately flooded our screens. The cricketers did a lap of honour with their icon Tendulkar on their shoulders; in breathless interviews they acknowledged their motivation to win the Cup for him in this, his record sixth appearance.
But above everything, they expressed their joy to win it for their country after 28 years in the wilderness. All across India, its 1.2 billion citizens that had retreated into their homes and any other place that had a TV screen, poured out spontaneously into the streets.
With horns honking, cymbals clashing and tassas rolling they made merry through the night under the fireworks bursting overhead. It is said that nations become unified when their people participate in collective actions: India last Saturday night was a unified nation.
And surely it is not out of place to ask what our cricketers and our cricketing administrators were thinking as they witnessed those scenes. It was our own CLR James, surely the greatest intellect the Caribbean has produced, in his magisterial “Beyond the Boundary” that first expatiated on the nexus of cricket and nationalism for colonial peoples. In that instance, we West Indians. If the British highlighted the value of cricket by claiming that the battle of Waterloo (against the rampant Napoleon) was won on the playing fields of Eton, then James emphasised that cricked played no lesser a role for us.
We might have been a subjugated people, still told by the British that we were not “fit” to rule ourselves, but James described our vindication when in a game quintessentially British, men such as Headley, Constantine, the three “W’S” et al took on our overlords and literally beat them at their own game.
While slavery and indentureship might have objectively honed us into a people, that unity was only made manifest on the cricket fields where we could at long last express the qualities that uniquely made us “West Indians”. Our style and panache made us popular all across the cricketing world, not least (nor incidentally) among the nations that had also long been colonised by Britain.
By the time James passed away in 1988, we had been acknowledged champions of the game in all its variations – already on top of the test and one-day worlds. But the rot had already started to creep in.
And today we wallow in the depths with the minnows of the cricketing world; the WI now a cricketing destination that excites no one. That Shahid Afridi has asked to be rested from Pakistan’s upcoming tour is certainly not unrelated to our lack of challenge to the better teams. And we ask once again, what are the thoughts of our cricketers and administrators at this time?
Do we not have any icons whose “hands” they do not want to fall? Do the aforementioned names not matter? What about (in no particular order) Richards, Sobers, Kanhai, Lloyd, Lara, Marshall, Holding and so many others that are household names across the cricketing world?
Are our modern day cricketers not motivated to raise their level of performance by being bracketed with these immortals of the game? Are they yet unmoved after witnessing the effect of India’s win on their people?
Over the years we have emphasised in this space this notion that cricket is not just a “game” for the people in the West Indies. Reform to turn around our performance must begin with the several administrative boards. As Guyanese, it is a shame and disgrace that our local board fiddles with rigging its elections while the game is burning into the ground. Quo Vadis?

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