They come from far-flung lands across the vast expanse of the Caribbean Sea, from the shadows of the majestic Blue Mountains of Jamaica to Guyana, the jewel atop the crown of the continent of South America and all of the disparate lands in between, but somehow for lo these many decades since 1928 under the aegis of a geo-political designation called West Indies under which umbrella they have come together – men and women with a unique characteristic flair, finesse and flamboyance to play a game called cricket as no other nation in the world can. They have played cricket with skilled abandon at times mischaracterized as cavalier, from Sir Learie Constantine of Trinidad and Tobago, George Headley of Jamaica, to Rohan Kanhai of Guyana, to Carlos Brathwaite of Barbados.
It is men playing a boy’s game, and now young women playing a girl’s game with their field of dreams stretching from the DCC to Dhaka in Bangladesh, from Sabina Park to the Sydney Cricket Ground and from Kensington to Kolkata, with aspirations that sometimes culminate in a journey