Reports of the death of West Indies cricket have been greatly exaggerated

theguardian.com
On Wednesday, Jermaine Blackwood scored a century against England. The West Indian player’s innings was a mixture of the sublime and the sloggy – one moment straight driving Ben Stokes for six, the next edging jammily through the slips. His chancy, improvisational performance was of an entirely different sort to those his team-mates played to save the match later in the week. In the second innings, when his team needed blockers, not blasters, Blackwood charged down the pitch and got himself out just as the new ball was due. The 23-year-old appears to think stonewalling is as arcane and irrelevant a craft as, well, stone walling.

Blackwood was soon being discussed as both a thrilling renaissance of West Indian flair and a cautionary demonstration of how T20 is shaping the Test match game. When CLR James described the great all-rounder Learie Constantine in Beyond a Boundary, he repeatedly wrote of a cricketer doing things “his own carefree way”. “He was ‘on the go’,” said James, “and if to remain on the go required the invention of a stroke on the spot, invented it would be. There, for me, is where a future for big cricket lies.” Sir Viv Richards may have fulfilled that prophecy, but maybe James saw further still, to today’s world of switch-hits and Dilscoops.

West Indies fans and players, we are often told, have little interest in Test matches any more; the national sport is in trouble. I was at the Antigua ground for Blackwood’s innings and the stands were half-empty, just as the doom-mongers advertise. Two days earlier the place had been bustling – that’s what happens when you grant people here a half-day holiday to celebrate the start of a Test series. Grass terraces thronged with fathers straight from work and mothers who had picked up their kids on the way. A crowd of twenty- and thirtysomethings dominated the party stand – where the music blared and the girls danced – and teenagers skulked on the fringes of the ground, arms draped round their current sweetheart. The atmosphere was akin to a funfair.

But then, the crisis in West Indian cricket has been talked about so long that the word itself has ceased to have much meaning – how can a crisis, which is supposed to be a decisive point, last a decade? James would have had plenty to decipher in the state of the game these days. What would he have made of the legacy of Allen Stanford, whose fraudulent millions built a giant artificial coral reef to keep people off the public beaches and whose jackpot prizes changed the course of cricket in the Caribbean? Cricket and social culture remain as connected as ever here, be the game in convalescence or terminal decline.

It is my first time in the Caribbean, a place of deep history. As soon as I arrived I realised I had only ever grasped it in the most superficial sense. James wrote that “analysis that is not technically based is mere impressionism”, so impressions are all I have. My first is that everywhere I go, people have an opinion on cricket, whether they follow it or not. In Antigua, young football fans watching Mortal Kombat kills on YouTube know the players’ names and the team’s history. In Trinidad, club cricketers may be passionate about the sport but care nothing for West Indies’ fortunes. One friend told me he had stopped following the team years ago because they had broken his heart.

None of this suggests a lack of love for the game, just a lack of desire to support a disastrous team through thin and even thinner. At one club, an official told me they never promote their kids’ cricket programme because it would be instantly oversubscribed. At another, players proudly point out team-mates who have played for Guyana or Windward Islands or Canada Under-19s. There is huge admiration for anyone selected for national honours – too much, one player confides to me – and the West Indies players command greater respect as individuals than as a team. Even Chris Gayle’s desertion to the richer pastures of IPL and BBL is met not with resentment but a shrug of acceptance. If you were offered that opportunity, why wouldn’t you take it?

A friend whose work has encompassed the cricket and educational spheres has encountered a common attitude in both worlds and notes the thick gold chains weighing round the necks of Kemar Roach and Sunil Narine, markers of status if not success. “One of the biggest tragedies for West Indies cricket – and for the Caribbean as a whole – is this certain thing that is focused on ‘me’ and doesn’t have a sense of community,” she says.

But this doesn’t sound a solely Caribbean issue. The recurrent plot-points in West Indies’ cricketing saga – an overlong spell of defeat; frustration with the way the game is run; the problematic management of egotistical players – are all things England has experienced not just recently but throughout its history. Some of those challenges will only grow as international cricket transforms into a rotating buffet of all-star leagues.

In the west of Trinidad, however, I had an entirely different encounter. I visited a pretty place called Preysal, where the cricket ground looks like a village green and everyone tenders great honour to Mr Baksh, the schoolteacher who until his retirement had coached every boy in town. He took me for a drive down Preysal’s main – almost only – road and I was just starting to think that this was a place out of time, somewhere that existed only in the imagination of VS Naipaul, when he pulled up at Denesh Ramdin’s house. The West Indies captain learned his sport here. His family still live in this community where “Teach” is the village elder and where the women’s cricket group builds houses for the local homeless.

We like to give teams labels: West Indies are “troubled” and “chaotic”. But it is not the whole story of Caribbean cricket. Their stoic draw against England proved that they are far less predictable than that. And as James wrote of his national side: “We’re moving too fast for any label to stick.”