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| CLR Jame's gravestone, Tunapuna |
I’m not sure I can bear a whole summer of How Do You Solve a
Problem Like the West Indies? All day every day on the radio, there was a
relentless talkfest on the subject with some cricket game going on in the
background. Oh, the furrowing of brows, the bewildered headshakes, the
well-meaning suggestions, the raising of suspicions, the advancement of
theories, the weighings-in and weighings up, all gently taken apart and put
down by an extremely patient Fazeer Mohammed, who may be my new hero. By way of
intermission there was How Do You Solve a Problem Like Bellerive?
The two problems aren’t unrelated. The irresistible call of
the West Indies Problem is due of course to the great height from which the
West Indies has fallen: how did, how could the most compelling and dominant of
cricket “franchises” come to this? That much is explicitly stated. I wonder
though whether the obsessive quality of the rumination is because alongside the
spectre of the past glory of West Indian test cricket is the spectre of a future
decline of Test cricket in general, conveniently symbolised by Bellerive.
I’m not sure the decline of West Indian cricket is
reversible. Fazeer Mohammed made the comparison with the World Series cricket
crisis. Before the cricket establishment came to an accommodation with Kerry
Packer, you had a second-rate test side because the best players were poached
for World Series cricket. Many of those poached players were West Indian. If
that accommodation had never been reached and if the cultural shift in the
attitude of the establishment towards players had not happened, the situation
of cricket in general could have become like West Indian cricket today, where
test cricket is the second tier because it has been abandoned by the most
valuable players, because they were not treated as particularly valuable. I
take this to be Fazeer Mohammed’s point: West Indian cricket simply is world
cricket without that evolution. And then a vicious circle sets in because when
the talent is drawn away from test cricket, the interest is drawn away too, and
when the interest in test cricket falls away, the talent falls away too. I
think it might have gone too far down that road to recover.
But does it matter? T20 can only become the most popular
form if most people prefer it, and if most people prefer it, most people are
happy and if most people are happy, well, isn’t that our purpose as a society?
In a capitalist democracy, no one can hear Jim Maxwell scream. For all we know
humanity is irreparably poorer for the decline of vaudeville in the face of
cinema. But how would we know? And if we knew, how could we care? I’m not sure
you can run a tastes good vs good for you argument in the matter of
entertainment.
I keep wondering what CLR James would say. His West Indies
fit the idea of the colony that is more conservative than its colonist, which
in turn fits Fazeer’s suggestion that the West Indies cricket establishment is
behind the rest of the world in terms of industrial relations, for want of a
better word. CLR James defended sport against his Marxist colleagues who saw
sport in general as an opium of the people. Would he defend T20 against cricket
colleagues who see it as an opium of the people relative to Test cricket?
The World Series cricket comparison is especially useful
when it comes to those (that’s you, Nannes) who basically say Chris Gayle just
wants to put up his feet on a Chesterfield stuffed with cash. Because I’m
pretty sure that’s what they would have said about Lillee and Chappell and
clearly then, as now, there is much more to it than that.
