By the time the 2022 T20 Cricket World Cup Tournament got underway ‘down under’ just over a week ago, finding a West Indian who honestly thought that the twice winners would make it past that earliest stage that separates the ‘triers’ from the ‘stayers’ could easily be equated with tracking down a needle in a haystack. These days, such positive sentiments as are reflected in Caribbean people’s disposition towards our cricket is much more a function of nostalgic sentimentality than of anything even remotely resembling conviction.
The loss of cricketing ‘bragging rights’ that we have had to endure for a period that now goes back quite a few years has had a profound impact on our pride as a region, since, truth be told, there has been no comparable accomplishment to take the place of cricket as something for the Caribbean to shout about; and if not a great deal has either been written or said about the cataclysmic decline of Caribbean cricket that is mostly because the true lovers of the game find it an emotionally demanding issue to dwell upon, prisoners as we are of the notion that without cricket we have had little else to recommend us in global terms.
The region-wide intense and often raucous ‘analyses’ over the state of our cricket, frequently, ‘over drinks’ has gradually subsided even as we discover that the chimera of supremacy has become a lost cause and that both as individual territories and as a region, these days, we have ‘bigger fish to fry.’
The transformations that have taken place in the game, globally, notably the supplanting of Test Cricket with the various incarnations of the Limited Overs game as a more appealing form of entertainment, have been swift enough to have come perilously close to leaving the Caribbean completely behind. This has to do with more than cricket, per se. It has to do with what one might call a dispositional shift in public attitudes to entertainment as a whole, a craving for racier options that provide instant gratification among global audiences that appear, increasingly, to seek interludes of ‘down time’ from optional preoccupations that are hinged to a decidedly less appealing alternative agenda. With considerable respect to the now long departed C.L.R James, what, hitherto, had been the existence of an audience that had been concerned with cricket ‘beyond a boundary’ has been supplanted by ‘spectators’ who are perfectly willing to accommodate a high tempo CPL Finals alongside an outbreak of Caribbean-style entertainment the moment the last ball is bowled. Here, the window left for post mortems of the encounter are perilously cramped, leaving no room for protracted displays of emotion, one way or another.
What the yesteryear of, more-or-less, a predominance of Test Cricket had done was to lock the game into a behavioural culture of nationalistic jingoism, a phenomenon that afforded individual countries opportunities to experience differing sentiments (euphoria or disappointment) from the outcomes of demanding competitions that had to do with skills and stamina. The game, back then, drew spectators into its punishing twists and turns that tended, somehow, to afford the eventual outcomes a far greater emotional significance. That is no longer, universally, the case. It is the shorter versions of the game, designed as they are to cater to the popular appetite for instant gratification that have left the Caribbean behind. The quality of cricket in our shorter versions of the game provide ample testimony to that reality.
The Indian Premier League (IPL), with its focus on spectacular individual performances, instant gratification and generous monetary rewards, has moved with lightning speed to meet the entertainment demands of contemporary audiences. Instant gratification is the name of the contemporary game and the demands of the shorter formula call for different organizational aptitudes and mind-sets.
Contextually, it is the IPL, of late, that has, to an overwhelming extent, defined cricket, in terms of both the material priorities of the players and the demands of the spectators. What the Limited Overs Game has also done is to erode the barrier that separates us by nationality. As is the case with soccer, particularly, there are no geographic barriers that divide teams by nationality, bringing with that division bragging rights that provide no permanent gratification.
The Caribbean’s initial earliest exposure to the IPL benefitted, mostly, from regional players who had cut their teeth on Test Cricket. There being no early major ‘market’ for shorter versions of the game here in the region until the CPL belatedly came along, it can be argued that while a relative handful of players ‘made money,’ India stole a march on us and on the rest of the world, for that matter. What the IPL did was to take account of both the shift in the entertainment demands of cricket fans’ demands, globally, as well as the incentive which material rewards would give to players to hone their skills to meet the requirements of the T20 game.
It is only the sentimental die-hards of a region with no shortage of nostalgic dreamers that would deny that Caribbean cricket has lost in the maze of the changing dynamics of the game itself. What the new dynamic has done, in effect, is to radically alter the region’s place in the global (cricketing) pecking order. To stay in the game we have to begin to better understand the contemporary realities and to seek to make the kinds of adjustments to our ‘outdated’ mindsets as to just where we are in global cricketing terms; and if the inglorious ‘dumping’ of ‘our boys’ from the 2022 Cricket World Cup at the first hurdle, doesn’t provide us with a poignant message then there arises the great concern that we may never learn.
