Save West Indies Cricket

In sport trends come and go players change shape records get broken and traditions change. Certain sporting brands transcend this and become etched on the consciousness of the non-sporting public. The yellow shirt of Brazil, the black shirt and silver fern of the New Zealand rugby team and the pinstripes of the New York Yankees baseball team. The sporting brand I find most iconic is the maroon cap with palm tree and cricket stumps of the West Indies cricket team.

I started watching cricket in the eighties and one of my earliest memories of watching cricket is IVA Richards swaggering to the wicket maroon cap on head gum chewed and a look around as if to say to the fielding side “just watch this ball flash past you to the boundary.” My cricketing hero was BC Lara a flawed genius on the cricket field, who, when good was the greatest.

Now that iconic West Indies brand is struggling to survive, cricket would be far poorer without it. The problems of cricket in the Caribbean are many. The Caribbean is next to the biggest consumer of young athletes in the world. The United States college system offers education and the way out of the ghetto for many West Indian youths who previously would have been attracted to the cricket field.

Geopolitical organisation is a huge problem for the West Indies. Sixteen independent and proud countries from next to the coast of the United States to twenty five miles away from the coast of Venezuela form the West Indies cricket board. The only thing that links these Islands is unfortunately slavery, the English language and the game of the ruling colonial class, cricket. Politically the board can not organise itself. Witness the chaos regarding the abandoned second test and the financial carnage caused by Sir Allen Stanford. Despite this throughout the eighties the West Indies played cricket with a style, flair and dominance that was inspiring.

Cricket needs the West Indies to be a force because although it can not provide financial power or huge numbers of players, it provides the game of cricket with a soul. The noise and chaos of a Caribbean test are as important as the quiet reverence and tradition of the first Lords test of the English summer. The international cricket council needs to stop cow towing to some of the money men. Think of the difference the money spent in the IPL player auction would make in the West Indies or the English counties trip to Abu Dhabi for pre season training being switched to Barbados or Antigua. Lose the West Indies and lose cricket.

The greatest cricket book ever written was penned by CLR James a Trinidadian and cricket nut. This book perfectly evokes cricket in the Caribbean. It would be awful to think that this type of prose would be consigned to history as the game disappears from the West Indies.