Writing in Wisden in 1986, at the peak of the Caribbean's cricketing supremacy, David Frith argued that West Indies cricket had inspired the entire Afro-Caribbean people: "In the pre-war depression years, Don Bradman stood for the powers of endurance of the ordinary bloke. His triumphs brought pride and inspiration to the masses of struggling Australians in town and bush… For ten years now Viv Richards has done something similar for the black man."
In that winter of 1985-86, England had endured a brutal 5-0 defeat on their tour of the Caribbean, having also been "blackwashed" at home in the summer of 1984. An array of brilliant West Indies batsmen—led by Richards—and a seemingly endless battery of fast bowlers had once again blown England away.
Like most cricketing kids who grew up in the 1980s, I came to associate both success and style with the West Indian team. The most terrifying cricketer in the world was Malcolm Marshall, the coolest was Jeffrey Dujon, the best and most iconic was Viv Richards. Even the most passionate England fan knew that the West Indies were playing at a higher level. They were the masters now.
But their dominance had been brewing for decades. In 1950, the West Indies won a watershed victory against England at Lord's. The Three Ws—(Frank) Worrell, (Everton) Weekes and (Clyde) Walcott—were a middle order that would have graced any team. In the 1960s, with an attack spearheaded by Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith, the West Indies developed a reputation for fearsome fast bowling that survived for three decades. Above all, in Gary Sobers, they found the kind of genius who adds glamour to any sport. Having started his test career as a left-arm orthodox spin bowler, Sobers soon became one of the world's great batsmen. As if that were not enough, he was a quick, left-arm swing bowler who could switch to "chinamen" wrist-spinners. He was lithely sensational in the field and a charismatic captain. There is much talk in modern cricket about having two dimensions to your game; Sobers had six.
James's book, which ranges from touching human portraits to the big sweep of politics and race, leaves you in no doubt that West Indian cricket drew upon a profound discontent: "I haven't any doubt that the clash of race, caste and class… stimulated West Indian cricket… In those years political passions, denied normal outlets, expressed themselves so fiercely in cricket precisely because they were games."
The dominance did not endure. Since the retirements of Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, in 2000 and 2001 respectively, plenty of promising young West Indian fast bowlers have emerged, but none has consistently led the attack. The test teams of the late 1990s and 2000s have found themselves near the bottom of the ICC world rankings. For the last four years the West Indies have been eighth—above only Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. The Trinidadian Brian Lara has broken most batting records in the book during this period, but without a team to match.
Yet the brand association continues. Few sports and places are as closely identified as cricket and the Caribbean. Now, as they prepare to host the 2007 World Cup, the West Indies are actively cultivating their cricketing culture and infrastructure as never before. The World Cup, it is hoped, will not only be a great sporting carnival; it will also be a catalyst for a new era of Caribbean cricket.
It is easy to write of "the West Indies" without being sure exactly what it means. Geographically, we know it to be a cluster of territories—mostly islands, although Guyana is part of mainland South America—dotted around the Caribbean sea to the east of Central America. Its most westerly major island is Jamaica, just south of Cuba; the most easterly is Barbados, once the first port of call on the slave trade routes from Africa; and, to the south, Trinidad nestles off the coast of Venezuela. Less well known is that constitutionally the English-speaking parts of the West Indies have no real central administration or federal affiliation. Apart, that is, from the University of the West Indies—an autonomous regional institution—and the cricket team. Small wonder there has always been a political dimension to West Indian cricket: they only come together to pick a test team.
In December 2006, I visited three very different islands to watch the preparations for the World Cup: St Lucia, Barbados and Grenada. I started out in St Lucia, and soon discovered that organisation is not its strength. The roads leading from the airport at the south of the island are terrible. The driving is worse. And the atmosphere can best be described as intensely tropical. St Lucia is a volcanic island—pushed up from the ocean floor a few tens of millions of years ago—and the result is a mass of mountainous tropical forest. I arrived in the early evening, but it seemed eerily dark, as if night were the basic order of things. The foliage didn't so much flank the roadside as overwhelm it. I wondered if any St Lucian had ever returned home from a holiday to find that their house had vanished under a thick covering of forest. It's a place where nature seems to be doing a pretty good job of keeping man at bay.
We ate by the waterside in Castries, St Lucia's capital city, at the Coal Pot restaurant—a few feet away from where the chef had been shot dead a couple of days earlier. "It's no big deal," Ernest reassured me. "London has its polonium killings; we have the odd incident too."
There are countless ways to explain the relative decline of West Indies cricket. Some say that it is purely cyclical, and that renewed success is just around the corner. Others blame financial and administrative mismanagement, which have led to a lack of investment in training and infrastructure and constant switches in personnel (there have been eight West Indies captains, and almost as many coaches, since 1991). Others point to a decline in club cricket, once a major source of competitiveness. Perhaps the single most common explanation, however, is that American culture is eroding the popularity of cricket, especially among the young. Sports such as basketball, baseball and ice hockey, broadcast on US satellite networks, are widely seen as more lucrative and glamorous than cricket. Football, too, has become very popular in recent years.
However, when I asked Deale Lee, the World Cup's legal counsel, about the impact of rival sports, he was sceptical. "The former greats also had a broad sporting education. Richards played soccer, Holding was an athlete, Sobers was brilliant at pretty much everything—so I'm not sure that argument holds up. It's deeper than that. There were so many factors that went into the West Indies' extraordinary success in the 1970s and 1980s. There was a racial dimension, a postcolonial statement, an emerging voice expressed in cricket. It was a perfect storm. You can't just recreate that at will when the circumstances have changed." Yet it is surely true that US culture has had an impact on how young people view themselves. When Sobers was playing, West Indian culture was still broadly tied to its colonial past—so much so that CLR James could write that Barbados was "an island which has known no other strain but British." Such a claim would be absurd today.
Barbados is as ordered as St Lucia is wild; Homo economicus is very much running the show. The roads are good, tourism ever-present and the airport slickly modern. Other Caribbean islands mock Bajans—as the natives of Barbados are known—for being dull burghers, lacking the dance and festivity of the true Caribbean spirit. But as the Trinidadian CLR James put it, "Barbados is the fount and origin of West Indies cricket." Of the 13 West Indian test players who have averaged 45 or better, six are Bajan—Weekes, Sobers, Walcott, Worrell, Seymour Nurse and Conrad Hunte.
They can bowl too. For the Port of Spain test against Australia in 1984, the West Indies attack was Wayne Daniel, Milton Small, Joel Garner and Marshall. Meanwhile, in South Africa, where a "rebel" West Indies side was touring, the attack consisted of Sylvester Clarke, Franklyn Stephenson, Hartley Alleyne and Ezra Moseley. All eight fast bowlers were from Barbados. In the same year, as if to underline their supremacy, Barbados even managed to win the Shell Shield, the main West Indian domestic competition (now called the Carib Beer Cup), with seven of those eight unavailable. As the cricket historian Mark Williams concluded, "Barbados had a side capable of taking on any country in the world."
But Barbados had been slower than most islands to accommodate black cricketers. The game developed in an orderly rather than revolutionary fashion, as cricket subtly shifted from being the game of the social elite to its position as a national institution. Barbados, you suspect, has been too comfortable ever to rush anything.
Over a rum punch at the Barbados Yacht Club, I met Peter Short OBE, who was president of the Barbados Cricket Association for 20 years and subsequently president of West Indies Cricket. He is an elderly white Bajan—of the old ruling "plantocracy"—with a long white moustache and perfect manners: "The grounds will be ready for the World Cup, but the great challenge is going to be transport and accommodation. Several cruise ships, floating hotels, will dock in Bridgetown harbour. And then there is getting everyone around. At least it's been agreed there'll be no extra immigration checks when moving from one island to another."
But he had a more serious worry. "I'm a bit concerned about losing some of the local flavour," he said. "There is a comedian called Matt Fingall who claims to cast a spell on opposition batters with his 'duppy dust.' He's been banned from the World Cup. It's just fun—but fun is a big part of cricket's charm here. The regulations are so strict that there is a danger of the World Cup being less distinctively Caribbean than it should be."
I asked Short what explained the West Indies' recent playing record. Revealingly, he focused on the reasons for its initial supremacy rather than on any subsequent decline. "English county cricket had a huge role to play. It was a wonderful training ground for our best players, almost all of who played in your championship. Very few do so now." He is right. The tradition of West Indians in the County Championship dates back to CA Ollivierre, who played for Derbyshire from 1901 to 1907. It reached its pinnacle in the 1970s and 1980s, when almost every county seemed to have one great West Indian fast bowler, sometimes two. (Of the 49 overseas players in county cricket in 1977, 27 were West Indian. In 2007, there are just four West Indian-born players in the county squads, two of whom are hoping to go on to play for England.)
Caribbean influence on English county cricket was by no means limited to overseas players. County teams benefited hugely from the contribution of Afro-Caribbean Britons. The Derbyshire team of 1993 included Frankie Griffith, Alan Warner, Adrian Rollins and Devon Malcolm, alongside the West Indian Ian Bishop. Middlesex enjoyed a successful 1980s, thanks not only to the Bajan "Diamond" Wayne Daniel, but also to the combined efforts of Roland Butcher, Norman Cowans, Wilf Slack and Neil Williams (all four played for England). Now, with the retirement last summer of Paul Weekes, not one of the Middlesex squad is of Afro-Caribbean descent. There are many non-white players coming into the county's academy, but most are from the Asian community.
According to the Guyanese-descended Phillips brothers Trevor (head of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights) and Mike (a writer), the causes of this declining interest among black Britons mirror some of the factors affecting West Indian cricket. The West Indies' lack of success in recent years has clearly had a big impact. Cricket is no longer a source of pride and aspiration for young British West Indians, who, like their Caribbean counterparts, are more likely to be drawn to rival sports like football or athletics. As the former Gloucestershire captain and England all-rounder Mark Alleyne put it, "The West Indies' decline must have had some kind of impact. Dave Lawrence [who played for Gloucestershire and England in the late 1980s] wanted to bowl quick because he saw Michael Holding at the Oval."
Yet according to Trevor and Mike Phillips, the declining popularity of cricket among the younger generation is also the product of factors specific to the black British experience. In recent years, while cricket has continued to be popular in its traditional strongholds—villages, clubs, public schools—it has largely disappeared from England's inner cities; black Britons have probably been disproportionately hit by this. For aspirational immigrant families, too, having a son as a sportsman is no longer quite as prestigious as it was; these days ambitious black people are more likely to become lawyers than cricketers.
Grenada, similar in size to Barbados but without the glitzy associations, has faced big upheavals in the past two decades. In 1983, Maurice Bishop, the prime minister, was assassinated by a hardline proto-communist faction within his party. Ronald Reagan, thinking that one communist state on America's doorstep (Cuba) was more than enough, decided to invade. The US met with little resistance, and the invasion set the island on a more settled path. But just when Grenada was blossoming, natural disaster struck with 2004's Hurricane Ivan. The popular Calabash hotel, where I stayed, was one of the few hotels to survive.
Grenada has never been a powerhouse of West Indian cricket. The island had to wait until 1993 for its first test cricketer—the wicketkeeper Junior Murray. Perhaps this lack of past success partly explains the ambition of its World Cup preparations. In 2005, when Grenada's plans for a state of the art stadium were running behind, to whom did the island turn? China: a deal to build Grenada's cricket stadium was struck with Beijing. I watched the workmen—550 neatly dressed Chinese wearing straw hats—toiling every day from 7am to 11.30, then 1 to 6 and 7 to 11. Whatever the Chinese motivation, the Grenada ground—even among so much natural beauty—will be a remarkable feat of ingenuity.
What of the trajectory of West Indian cricket? When I asked Peter Short if the World Cup could make cricket as central to the Caribbean as it used to be, he was too diplomatic to sound explicitly downbeat, but I sensed a quiet scepticism about what the World Cup will leave behind. The arguments about mismanagement, motivation and American influences will continue, but perhaps there is a deeper explanation for the Caribbean's cricketing decline, one hinted at in CLR James's argument about why the West Indies were so good in the first place. Theirs was no ordinary success story, based on a predictable business plan or mission statement. It was organic, unpredictable and intertwined with concepts of identity and self-expression. Those forces cannot easily be manipulated or reignited when circumstances change. In other words, the underdog spirit does not always survive success. Failure is the natural state of affairs in sport. Victory, for it to be sustained, needs constantly to reinvent itself.
A former captain of Western Australia once told me how he had used his state's supposed isolation within Australia as a collective motivation. "In the 1960s and 1970s, we had a strong sense that the eastern states looked down on us, excluded us and guarded against our progress in general. I believe there was some truth in that caricature. But I also exploited it to motivate us and unite us against a common enemy." It worked. Unfashionable Western Australia, with a population a fraction the size of New South Wales, won six Sheffield Shields—Australia's first-class competition—between 1971 and 1982; five of them in seven years.
The state of Western Australia has subsequently moved forward. Economically it has boomed, buoyed by strong international demand for its natural resources. But its cricket, though still strong, has not quite recaptured the success of the 1970s. Maybe that is a coincidence, but perhaps they have lost the benefits of being the underdog.
A sense of dissatisfaction can sharpen ambition. It brings the peaks of aspiration into clearer focus. But the motivation that helps you to reach the top of a mountain will not necessarily help you to scale the next one. And the hardest thing is to find a renewed hunger to climb again straight away. Often, what goes missing is the quality that CLR James described in Beyond a Boundary, the sense of challenging the former masters that galvanised those glory days of the 1970s and 1980s. But you cannot come of age twice. You have to think of another reason to be brilliant.
Ed Smith travelled with Abercrombie & Kent (www.abercrombiekent.co.uk)
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