Dealing with the missing Caribbean flavour at the World Cup

These are strange times when West Indies cricketers are formidable T20 commodity but have missed the one-day brief.

Two months after an eventful but forgettable 2007 World Cup in the West Indies, Dave Martins, of the Tradewinds band, recorded a calypso named “Take a Rest” and couriered it to radio stations across the Caribbean. Typically, calypsos celebrate the good times and honour the greats, like Lord Relator’s “Gavaskar” or King Short Shirt’s “Vivian Richards”. But this was satirical, intended to take on the West Indies cricket board for all its wrongdoings that had sullied the name of a sport that once united countries in the region. Criticising the board for financial mismanagement, for making “Holding and Viv Richards cry” and holding it accountable for the rift with Chris Gayle then, this calypso was an emotional outburst that almost penned its own lyrics, asking everyone responsible for the mess to ‘take a rest’.

West Indies cricketers are formidable T20 commodity but have missed the one-day brief (AP)

In the 16 years since that World Cup, West Indies slipped and tumbled till they ran out of ground, ultimately ushering in a time when an ODI World Cup without them is no longer unthinkable. This is the first World Cup without the Windies team.

It was entirely their doing, ignoring two formats that gave West Indies cricket everything at the altar of T20s; depriving themselves of everything needed to stay relevant as a team. The slide was markedly evident in 2019 — they made it to the tournament via qualifiers — when West Indies dragged themselves from one venue to another, stringing just two wins out of nine league matches.

An inspirational spell of pace bowling decimated Pakistan for 105 before West Indies fell 15 runs short of Australia’s innings in the next game. A washout against South Africa in Southampton though heralded a strange sequence of games where West Indies just didn’t turn up. Towards the end, the campaign had been reduced to more of a farewell for Gayle, who himself wasn’t in the best of form. Also palpable was an indifference that made it all the more difficult to understand how exactly the players reacted to a spectacular fall from grace — not making it past the group stage for the first time since 2003.

Which is all the more perplexing because this coincided with a time Caribbean players were proving to be formidable in T20 cricket, winning consecutive World Cups in 2014 and 2016, fashioning outrageous wins in franchise cricket, redefining the format and promising a very different but still acceptable renaissance in West Indies cricket.

Maybe it’s just about how the game is perceived in the Caribbean now. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was all about pride, a sense of collective identity for which Clive Lloyd and Richards fought so passionately. But in the last decade or so, money has had a spellbinding effect. It was inevitable that the once mighty West Indies slowly turned into a bunch of prizefighters who rallied together once in a while for an ICC event. In a middling format like one-dayers, the incentive was bound to wane some day.

Which is unfortunate because West Indies players have built a unique catchment audience in India thanks to their storied involvement in IPL. At the heart of this fame is their freewheeling approach to cricket. Batting was either defence or attack, no grafting or boring running between the wickets. Bowling was rarely fast — all cutters, yorkers, slower balls and mystery spin. Fielding was as calypso as it could get — on the one hand Gayle stood like a post at slip or fine-leg while on the other Kieron Pollard, bigger if not taller, was willing to risk his body on the rope for a catch. But they were also entertainers. If Gayle’s version of “Gangnam dance” became the hook step of every Indian, Dwayne “DJ” Bravo got the IPL faithful swooning to “Champion” at every venue. They played hard, partied harder. What was there not to love about them?

Cut through the noise though and you will find West Indies cricket mired in problems that should have been addressed a long time back. Rifts between players and the board have persisted right from the 70s but even back then West Indies found a way to prove a point, sometimes to the world, sometimes to their own. Pushback has come from within, from the greats no less. Some of them like Joel Garner even joined the administration, but West Indies cricket kept finding ways to head into trouble.

“West Indies board is a boys’ club, you see,” Richards had told HT six years ago. “They haven’t had the best advice. Michael Holding was always critical. If you are saying something critical, you are pushed aside. And I am not going to stop saying.”

Uniting small countries for a sport is always an arduous exercise. And once existential questions like club over nation start bubbling over, it becomes hard to focus on the game alone. To that end, West Indies did magnificently to wear a common cricketing identity for more than 100 years and stay on top in nearly forty of those. For now though, one-day cricket will have to deal with a West Indies-shaped hole.