A few years have now elapsed since cricket fans in the region have ceased to descend into abysses of moaning and groaning each time that ‘our boys’ have sunk into the doldrums of one of those familiar defeats.
What happened on Friday at SuperSport Park was by no means altogether surprising for two reasons. First, the floorboards in the West Indies’ Test batting continue to emit a creak to which we have now grown accustomed. The second reason has to do with the fact that South Africa’s pace ‘enforcer,’ Kagiso Rabada, is one of the world’s elite pace bowlers. So that, perhaps, we can comfort ourselves in the knowledge that what happened to ‘our boys’ on Friday could have happened to any other Test team in the world.
All of these considerations, however, would not have entirely staunched the tirade of fussing and fuming among those cricket fans whose interest in the game remains imprisoned in the now long gone era of us being ‘on top,’ still stubbornly refusing to accept that at this point in time the Caribbean side now dwells decidedly in the doldrums and, save and except it derives out of sentiment, one is unlikely to find anyone putting their proverbial pot on the fire for a West Indies win even against some of the more recent entrants into the ranks of international cricket.
This, reality, of course, still would not bring an end to the continuous sniping at the players, the coaching staff, the WICB and even Caribbean governments. All of this, of course, will have to be overlooked, forgiven. The tirades are no more than reflections of our passion for the game and what, in many cases, is a deep and protracted condition of mourning over the fact that our treasured bragging rights have disappeared like butter ‘gainst the sun. One question that arises here has to be with whether or not the region’s relatively muted response to last Friday’s drubbing does not mark a turning of the proverbial corner insofar as comparisons between the good old days and the contemporary calamitous circumstances are concerned.
If we are going to feel more than a tinge of regret over the fact that Rabada’s rout thoroughly spoiled Joshua Da Silva’s stellar performance behind the stumps (seven catches in South Africa’s second innings), the end result of the encounter at least served as a timely and emphatic reminder that the days of the region’s cricketing supremacy will take much more than a few years to return and that even if we were to return there we are unlikely to be perched on an unreachable pedestal. More than that, in the ‘dream world’ of high expectations in which some of the Caribbean still dwell and whether we like it or not, today’s Caribbean test team comprises a handful of emerging players, a greater number who are there ‘on probation’ and a few who are there on account of their ‘experience’ rather than their stellar CV’s, a combination that simply cannot ‘deliver the goods’ with any consistency. Kemar Roach, of course, remains the enigma in a West Indies team, which, by its very nature, is bound to experience a great deal of ‘chopping and changing,’ going forward.
For the most part the dismal batting performance of the West Indies when they went to the crease the second time around was attributable to South Africa’s place ‘ace’, Rabada, a ‘world class quick’ player who, arguably, could have laid waste to any of those other international Test batting lineups, though, when ‘our boys’ get ‘rolled over’ like happened at SuperSport Park, one is tempted to wonder whether there are not occasions on which a talent deficit might not be compensated for by a more generous measure of grit, determination and ‘digging in.’
Here, one might ask, whether our talent limitations apart, there may not be something missing in our psychological approach to, first, recognizing those junctions at which there might be mountains to climb (the ‘digging in’ factor) and whether that mindset cannot become more pronounced as part of our coaching curriculum. Under pressure, our current Test team appears to lack that Grit 101 coaching component that might, at times, compensate for its current talent deficit and which (who knows?) might see us through, not always, but from time to time. To the contrary, one gets the impression that a prominent dimension to the West Indies’ losses, these days, is a disturbing brushing aside of our batting by opposing teams that have come to believe that once you set our batters what one might call ‘a reasonable score’ the brittleness of our batting means that the bowlers are always in with a chance.
Presumably, the Caribbean is still in a process that we loosely describe as ‘rebuilding,’ even though, the challenges here are manifold. To come up with players who, eventually, may turn things around, we are going to have to invest heavily in the game from ‘bottom up,’ generously pumping resources into facilities, expert coaching and the creation of opportunities that will afford our emerging talent to test themselves against what we loosely describe as ‘high class’ opponents. However much we insist to the contrary there have been too many instances in which, when confronted with high-class opponents in any department of the game, these days, we simply get ‘rolled over.’ We have to find ways to change that.
The sad reality of Rabada’s rout is that it serves as, what, these days, is, perhaps, a bearable reminder that we have descended to the bottom of the pile (any other cricketing nation, these days, would fancy their chances against the West Indies) and that there is, still, no real evidence that we have begun the journey to ‘rising again.’
