Guyanese under 30 years of age will likely have no knowledge of it, but there was a time in our country when there was a ritual, common in many of the middle class homes, that involved the process of bringing wood floors to a shine by buffing them by hand using wax. It was laborious work, carried out on hands and knees, with none of the wonderful electric polishers of today; it was muscle power and patience and copious sweating on a hot day. Furthermore, unlike the fast-drying polyurethane finishes we have now that can last for years, the wax finish dulled quickly so that the hand-rubbing exercise had to be frequently repeated – perhaps every couple months or so.
The Martins family on West Demerara was one of modest means and moved in modest circles, so the waxed floors I refer to here were not on my radar. Indeed, I was probably about 12 years old when I first saw one in a two-storey house on Lamaha Street. I don’t recall whose house it was, or why I was there, but I remember like yesterday walking through the front door and the shock of this expanse of dark-brown shining floor spread out before me. I was a raw country boy; I had never anything even close to that on any floor anywhere; I stood there and gaped. That would have been about 60 years ago.
Last week, in this newspaper, there was a fine column on Test cricket by my friend Ian McDonald in which he wrote eloquently about the game. He said: “I have no doubt that cricket is in fact the greatest game yet invented. No other sport compares with it in the number of skills displayed: batting skill; bowling skill; throwing skill; catching skill; running skill. It requires fitness, strength, delicacy of touch, superb reflexes, footwork like a cat, the eye of a hawk, the precision and accuracy of a master jeweller. It involves individual skill and nerve and also unselfish team play. It calls for short-term tactics and long term-strategy. In the course of a good cricket match there is a mixture of courage, daring, patience, aggression, flair, imagination, expertise and dour defiance that is certainly unequalled in all other, more superficial, games. It is not at all surprising that cricket has inspired by far the best and most varied literature of any sport.” Let’s be clear. I may quibble with Ian’s rating of “the greatest game yet invented”, but his delineation of the skills and qualities the game demands can withstand scrutiny, and I also agree that at times Test cricket is truly captivating. At the same time, however, I don’t think the Test cricket devotees lamenting its problems (Ian is a fervent member of that list) take into account some other issues that apply.
In the first place, Test cricket, like Guyana’s waxed floors, is largely a creature from another time, and the critics of the shorter versions of the game don’t seem to take that change in mind. Essentially, there is scant room in modern life, with its faster pace and quick results, for a sport that often lasts for five full days, with long periods of inaction, and frequently, after the second day, you know it’s a draw. Persons under 30 years of age in today’s world are not going to be attracted to such a sport when the more exciting shorter games, done in one day, are available, and the numbers at the stadium turnstiles are showing that. As I told a friend of mine, who is in Ian’s camp, “You don’t put up with a straight razor, anymore; or spend six days travelling to England by ship. You’re texting instantly instead of using telegrams that take a week to go and come. How do you manage to sit for 8 hours, 5 days in a row, to see a game? In which other team sport does that happen? Why are your children running when you try to corral them to go to a Test match?”
At another point in his Ian on Sunday column, Brother McDonald expressed this hope: “Cricket is a game great enough to rise above the limitations of this overly commercial age. In cricket we will always have dramas and performances to match any in the past.” As much as I respect his projections, the indications are otherwise. I recall a short conversation a few years in Cayman, with a WI Test Series approaching. “So what do you think about cricket?” The young man’s answer came back like a shot: “Bo…ring.” I have heard the arguments from the purists attempting to refute the “boring” label. I grew up with Test cricket and recognise the elements they proffer, but I also recognise, at the same time, that those elements require a commitment to time that is going to be hard to propel in this fast-paced world. Thousands of young fans, and particularly so many female ones, are now flocking to this shorter fast-paced cricket, and therein also lies the other dilemma – money. The T20s and ODIs are generating earnings beyond belief, at the gate and from broadcasts, for both the promoters of the game and for the professional athletes who play it. In the face of that evidence, those Test cricket devotees who are hoping for a turn back to the Test game are hoping with their heart and not their head. I sympathise with them.
Sorry, Ian and the rest of you gentlemen, but the reality is that we’re not going back to the time of waxed floors in Guyana; to when you picked up your girlfriend on a bicycle, and there was no birth-control pill. We’re not going back to four hours churning ice cream; or when a shilling from your visiting uncle was heaven. We’re not going back to taking a photograph and waiting four days to see the print. In today’s world, most of us simply don’t have time for one cricket match lasting five days. Now, it may be that the world was a better place 60 years ago – particularly the hand-churned ice cream – but unfortunately that world is no more. I haven’t seen a waxed floor for years; ditto for a Test match.
