There will be no boisterous region-wide public post-mortem of the West Indies’ early exit from the 2019 Cricket World Cup. It is yet another sign that as a cricketing region we have moved on. The era of emotional sackcloth and ashes as a knee-jerk response to failure, is now behind us. The mindset has changed. Since, these days, we back the West Indies to do well much more out of hope than expectation, lack of success no longer imposes the kind of emotional burden that it used to.
Nor is it a question of Caribbean fans having given up on the West Indies team. The fact is that we simply cannot allow the now commonplace underperformance of the team to become the whole of our agenda. After all, have we not, over the years and with all of our various other headaches, expended sufficient time, talk and emotional energy analyzing the tragedy that has befallen Caribbean cricket and what it will take to change that circumstance? As Guyanese are inclined to say ‘we got bigger fish to fry.’
For any Caribbean cricket fan to burst into a fit of uncontrollable weeping over the team’s performance in the 2019 Cricket World, would be to indulge in an exercise in the most blatant hypocrisy. After all, not even the most entrenched fans amongst us would have placed a serious wager on ‘our boys’ getting to the final four, far less winning the tournament. The manner in which the tournament was structured dictated that teams perform consistently, rather than simply have the occasional ‘good day’…and occasional ‘good days’ have become the standard fare in the West Indies’ performances on the field. Getting into a position to be part of that final four would have required consistency over the long haul and that feature is simply not a part of the West Indies’ present game. Wins, these days, come in raggedy patches.
One way of looking at the decline in West Indies’ cricket is that we are no longer ‘burdened’ with being the best in the world so that we are no longer confronted with the task of living up to expectations. That way, arguably, the hurt of defeat becomes more bearable. The problem is that that is not the way in which the West Indian psyche works. A decade and more into the decline, die-hard supporters of Caribbean cricket still stubbornly refuse to digest the reality that the West Indies have not only been ingloriously evicted from the hallowed halls of the elite in international cricket but that it could take another generation and more before we are able to reclaim a place at the table of high performers.
Setting aside the fact that those privileged seats at the ‘head table’ are now occupied by teams that the West Indies repeatedly and contemptuously brushed aside in the past, (here teams like England and India come readily to mind), there is also the reality that these days, cricketing nations which, hitherto, did not even merit a mention on the international radar, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, being amongst the best examples, now fancy themselves as, at least, equals of the West Indies on the field of play.
For cricketing nations like India and England, for example, significantly enhanced standards have come through greater investments in the game, mostly in technology and in nurturing talent. In the instance of India, it has been, as well, a matter of mobilizing its own huge local market for the game and with it much of the rest of the global market, against the backdrop of its IPL, cloning the fan hysteria of soccer’s World Cup in the process. Apart from being the biggest ever private sector investment in cricket anywhere in the world in the history of the game, the IPL is, and not accidentally so, a laboratory that affords the Indian cricketing establishment the opportunity to recruit the best of global cricketing talent, thereby exposing their own players to the highest level of limited overs competition in the world.
By contrast, Caribbean cricket continues to be an extension of the rest of Caribbean society, caught up in its compelling distractions, not least, those that have to do with matters pertaining mostly to poverty and politics, so that while cricket is unlikely ever to be removed from our list of favourite past times, we must live, these days, less in the nostalgic moments of times past and more in the contemporary reality of persistent underachievement. We had dominated in an era when Test Cricket was most of what the world knew and when the game, frankly, was markedly more one-dimensional. That has changed. One of the more profound changes has been the heightened consumer demand, passion, if you will, for the more gladiatorial format offered by the limited overs versions. Different kinds of mindsets, talents and techniques are required these days to become proficient in the shorter forms of the game and Caribbean cricket has still not quite gotten there yet. To be sure, we have over time, produced our own handful of Gladiators in the likes of Chris Gayle, Andre Russell, Keiron Pollard, Dwayne Bravo and perhaps one or two others. These, however, are exceptions to the rule. Elsewhere, in the cricketing world, there is evidence that emerging players are being bred specifically in the gladiatorial mold, fashioned to ‘spear in’ half a dozen unplayable ‘yorkers’ in a row or to contemptuously dispatch what would conventionally be regarded as ‘good’ balls disdainfully out of the park. Fielding too has become, much more than in times past, a matter of athleticism and acrobatics. The differences in technique and approach required in the limited overs game are much greater than sometimes appears to be the case; and that is a reality that Caribbean cricket is yet to come to terms with.
Now that we have been, even before the conclusion of the initial round of the tournament, ingloriously evicted from the competition, the post mortems will inevitably kick in, only this time, with far less intensity than had been the case in the past. The reality is that with so many other matters on our plates, we are no longer prepared to sell our loyalties to Caribbean cricket cheaply. So that while the nostalgic reflections on those better days will continue to surface in our armchair reflections on the game, we are clear in our minds the ‘good old days’ are gone. The season of ruling the roost is over!
Mind you, even if we acknowledge the time-worn axiom about there being a time and a season for everything, it must still be heartrending for those Caribbean people who have literally made West Indies cricket a part of their lives to stomach the manner in which, these days, we roll over, surrendering with a kind of mediocrity that inflicts horrendous damage on our collective self-esteem. There has always been something in the Caribbean mentality that says that if we are to go down, we must do so kicking and screaming and doing everything to stay afloat. There are simply too many instances in which ‘our boys’ are simply rolled over.
It is, for example, tough to accept that while we at least managed to compete against a ‘form’ team like New Zealand we were disdainfully swept aside by, Bangladesh, like ourselves, one of the Tournament’s minnows. This, after brushing aside Pakistan, one of the more talented if unpredictable teams in limited overs cricket, a result which, for a fleeting moment, raising hopes that we might at least compete vigorously for a place in the final four. The Bangladesh game, frankly, provided just the sort of humiliating outcome for the West Indies, that illustrates the opposite directions in which the two teams appear to be going.
Part of the culture of West Indies cricket reposes in the adulation of our individual heroes and even in our condition of overall humiliation the post mortems will still dwell, and understandably so, on the standouts. In this instance it is really only the undoubtedly talented Shai Hope who earns really noteworthy mention here. In a sense, however, by singling out Hope, all that we do is point to the reality that while the team that participated in the 2019 Cricket World Cup was probably the best that we could muster (it is in the nature of the region’s selection critics to make arguments over whether or not we got the selection right) the competition was simply too good for us.
