Last Friday’s editorial on the Limacol Caribbean Premier League (CPL) came close to being a purist’s lament for the lost virtues of Test cricket in the region and a hankering for the halcyon days of West Indies cricket. Anyone who regards this as a futile exercise in nostalgia and a stubborn refusal to move with the times may be in danger, however, of missing a deeper truth about cricket’s place in the social history of the West Indies and in our regional psyche.
Cricket is to the West Indies what football is to Argentina, Brazil or Uruguay, with both sports capable of arousing strong passions and intense national pride. Both sports, interestingly enough, were brought to the Americas by the English: cricket to the Caribbean by the colonists and football to Latin America by traders, engineers and other adventurers. Both sports, notwithstanding their English origins, have over time become inextricably intertwined with notions of national or regional identity.
Uruguay, for instance, won gold in football at the 1924 and 1928 Olympics, then hosted and won the inaugural World Cup in 1930. These feats not only confirmed the country’s supremacy in football but also ratified its standing on the international stage and endowed it with a prestige far beyond its small size and almost non-existent military and economic clout. And, of course, Uruguay’s upset of Brazil in the 1950 World Cup final at the Maracanha has become the stuff of legend.
Similarly, Brazil’s three World Cup triumphs in 1958, 1962 and 1970 did much to endear not only Brazil’s brand of football but also the spontaneity, creativity and effervescence of Brazilian culture to the world. The fortunes of the country have ever since been closely linked to the exploits of its football team, hence the current crisis of political and economic confidence following Brazil’s humiliation at the 2014 World Cup.
Sporting prowess, particularly for countries emerging from a tumultuous history of colonialism, dependence and imposed inferiority, has generally been integral to the creation of the myths of nation-building. For the West Indian nations that would emerge from 1962 onwards, cricket would play a similar role to that of football in their continental neighbours.
Thus CLR James, writing in Beyond a Boundary (1963), of the West Indies tour of Australia in 1960-61, which saw Frank Worrell’s team losing the series but triumphing in an unprecedented and never-seen-again-since manner in the way their play won the hearts of the Australian public, could posit that cricket had changed the world’s perception of the West Indies: “Clearing their way with bat and ball, West Indians at that moment had made a public entry into the comity of nations.” And the great period of global dominance from 1975 to 1995 was to coincide with the coming of age of the individual, independent West Indian countries and the flowering of regional integration, as the Caribbean Community (Caricom) reflected the unity, self-confidence and success of the West Indies cricket team… or was it the other way around?
The past two decades have, however, seen West Indies cricket losing its way, Caricom stagnating and that other pillar of West Indian unity, the University of the West Indies resembling more a collection of national campuses than a truly integrated regional institution. It can be no coincidence that our regional sport and our regional structures of unity have been simultaneously suffering crises of governance and accomplishment, even as the winds of change seem to be transforming the world beyond our capacity to adapt and compete.
Now, the new West Indies Cricket Board director of cricket, Richard Pybus, has persuaded the Board that a CPL-type franchise system for regional first class and one-day cricket, which will go hand-in-hand with a system to ensure uniformity of coaching, must be introduced to improve regional standards. Under the proposed system, each country or franchise would choose 10 players on one-year retainers in addition to five other players from around the region. It is not yet clear what provision would be made for preserving the national identity of the team.
There is unassailable logic in making changes to raise the standard of the game across the region, especially in a region that is supposedly intent on global competitiveness based, among other things, on deeper integration and freedom of movement. The English counties and the Australian states have had overseas players and player mobility for some time now and arguably boast the two most competitive first class systems in the world. A counter-argument would be that counties and states are not countries and, in an ideal world, countries should not be franchises, although the CPL has shown that people in the Caribbean have embraced franchise cricket.
But adapt we must, if we are to survive, rebuild and prosper. The big question is, do we subsume national identity for the regional good? West Indies cricket has shown us that national identity and regional pride are not incompatible. Will cricket, therefore, again provide an example for the whole region?
