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Calypso cricket fades away - Article Toronto Star
« on: November 17, 2009, 01:11:54 PM »
http://www.thestar.com/sports/cricket/article/726574--calypso-cricket-fades-away


Calypso cricket fades away
November 17, 2009

Garry Steckles

 
West Indies cricket legend Sir Vivian Richards is seen in Toronto in this 2002 file photo.

BERNARD WEIL/STAR FILE PHOTO
 
What went wrong?

How could one of the greatest teams in the history of sport – any sport – go from a swashbuckling, world-conquering dynasty to a pitiful and pitied basket-case in just over a decade?

We're not talking about the Montreal Canadiens here, even though they haven't won the Stanley Cup since the early '90s, an intolerably long drought by the standards of hockey's most illustrious franchise. And we're obviously not talking about the Leafs.

No, this is about the West Indies and cricket, and about the misfortunes, and the not-too-distant possibility of the demise, of a team that dominated the venerable game for much of the second half of the last century.

What a story it was. For decade after glorious decade, teams put together from a collection of tiny Caribbean nations – there's no such country as the West Indies – ruled the world. And they ruled imperiously, with style, with panache, with the sort of swagger that no other cricketers, no matter how talented they were, could hope to match

It was called Calypso Cricket ... and it was a wondrous thing.

Each victory was savoured and celebrated, and beating England, the former colonial masters of every cricket-playing Caribbean country, was the biggest source of joy.

In the words of the late Michael Manley, best known as a charismatic and controversial prime minister of Jamaica but also the author of A History of West Indies Cricket: ``Beating England was more than a sporting success. It was the proof that a people was coming of age. They had bested the masters at their own game on their own home turf.''

It was called Calypso Cricket ... and today it looks as though it's dying, judging by some recent lowlights:

The West Indies is routinely thrashed by the game's leading teams and bottom of the top eight nations in both Test match and One-Day International rankings

The region's international players embroiled in a protracted strike over contracts, only recently settled, the latest in a series of acrimonious disputes with the West Indies Cricket Board.

A makeshift Windies team, in the midst of the senior players' strike, was humbled at home by Bangladesh, an enthusiastic but unquestionably second-tier cricketing nation.

A home Test match against the old enemy, England, was abandoned, humiliatingly, after just 10 balls because of the unsafe pitch in a stadium only a couple of years old.

On and off the field, it's a litany of disaster almost incomprehensible to shell-shocked supporters of the West Indies.

How bad is it?

Here's what Tony Cozier, the doyen of West Indian cricket journalists and an internationally respected observer of the sport, has to say: ``From every indication, the game in these parts is now in its death throes.''

Cozier isn't alone in his despair. Calypso cricket didn't come by its sobriquet by chance; more than any other sport, more than any other team, cricket in the West Indies has been played to the sound of music, much of it written about the game and the men who play it. The official ``bard'' of West Indies cricket is the calypsonian David Rudder, who, when he's not touring, lives in Ajax. The man who composed Caribbean's cricket anthem, Rally Round the West Indies, was asked how things could have deteriorated so dramatically and so quickly.

``What went wrong? Well, we didn't plan ahead, we took our blessings for granted, the world changed around us and the things that had driven us in the past were no longer important to the newer generation. Black pride and its militancy, the shrugging off of our colonial legacy, Frank Worrell completing the West Indian version of the Jackie Robinson journey, these things have been historically severed.''

Great memories of the West Indies go back a long way, to the days of the Caribbean's pre-Second World War giants Learie Constantine and George Headley. But the real birth of calypso cricket can probably be pinpointed to a single Test match and a single day: June 29, 1950.

The West Indies had just beaten England for the first time in England, and they'd done it at the hallowed home of cricket, Lord's, the historic London ground. It was a momentous occasion, and, after the last English wicket had fallen, the legendary calypsonian Lord Kitchener, who was living in England at the time, led a throng of West Indies supporters, singing and dancing, in a joyous parade around the field, and then on to Piccadilly Circus. Kitchener's great friend Lord Beginner, also living in England, promptly composed one of the earliest and certainly most famous of the hundreds of songs, most of them calypsos, that would be written about cricket: It was called Victory Test Match – better known as Cricket, Lovely Cricket.

In the decades to follow, calypso cricket would go on to heights that not even the jubilant fans who sang and danced with Kitch could have envisaged.

The West Indies dominated cricket for much of the second half of the 20th century, and much of that success had pace – generation after generation of lightning fast, unrelentingly aggressive bowlers – as its foundation stone, complemented by some of the most accomplished batsmen ever to play the game.

What, Rudder was asked, made the West Indies so special, so different: ``We're special because the basis of our very existence is based on a general lawlessness. Slave trade, piracy, you name it. What we have done is we've transformed this lawlessness into the very foundation of our beauty, e.g., Viv Richards hitting across the line and dominating the cricket world with shots that one will not find in any cricket manual.

``The swashbuckling style of the pirates of yore is now a blessing in the hands of a West Indian batsman.

``The staid and officious game, in the Caribbean, is conch shell, abeng (a horn), DJ hi-fi, bouncing stands and bouncing fans and the noise, always the noise of ten thousand coaches and managers in the stands.

The Windies' most successful era was from 1980 to 1995, when the sides led by Clive Lloyd, then Richards and, for the final few years, Desmond Haynes and Richie Richardson, didn't lose a Test series.

Then, almost imperceptibly at first, things started to go wrong. The greats, inevitably, were retiring. But, for the first time in decades, many of their replacements were not quite as good, not quite as dedicated to the cause of the West Indies. Almost inconceivably, the seemingly endless supply of fast and ferocious bowlers started to dry up. For the better part of a decade, the last two of the truly great pace men, Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, shouldered the brunt of the fast-bowling burden, but the days of the all-conquering West Indies attack were drawing to a close. When those two retired, just after the turn of the century, they were effectively over.

Gradually, reluctantly, the supporters started to acknowledge what had become sadly obvious: the region's players simply weren't as good as they used to be. It's an inescapable conclusion: The Windies have won only seven of the last 32 Test series they have played.

Things have deteriorated to the point where authorities in Trinidad and Tobago are talking of breaking away and competing as an independent nation.

This month, the Windies face the daunting prospect of a tour to Australia, which recently was toppled from the top of the Test rankings but remains a formidable team. Then the powerful South Africans will visit the Caribbean.

Not so long ago, the prospect of these two series would have had fans relishing epic encounters ... won, naturally, by the West Indies.

Today, even though the end of the players' strike means the Windies have sent their senior squad Down Under, all but the most starry-eyed of Caribbean cricket fans can realistically hope for is that their team will put up a respectable fight.

And they continue to wonder: What went wrong?

Garry Steckles, a former senior editor at the Toronto Star, has been writing about cricket and Caribbean culture for more than three decades. He is author of the recently published Bob Marley: A Life, the first in a series of biographies of prominent Caribbean lives by Macmillan, the U.K. publishers.



 

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