Monday, March 13, 2017

Sports culture in the Caribbean – The myth buster

West Indies Cricket Team, with the plethora of talent and the great fervour with which they played the game left fans and rivals alike in awe for the best part of two decades in the 20th century. Right from the era when they were given the Test status produced some brilliant cricketers. Even in the first ever Test series against England in 1928, West Indies had the likes of George Challenor, Freddie Martin, Herman Griffith and above all Learie Constantine. The earlier unofficial matches which the team played against the county teams and other unofficial tests from the 1890s certainly helped the game develop in the Caribbean.
While athletics and other sports have its own fan following, cricket holds a special place in hearts of the people.©Sky Sports 

In this side of millennium, however, everything seems to have gone downhill and it is hard to believe the fact that this very team has produced players like Jeffrey Stollmeyer, George Headley, Charlie Griffith, Sir Garry Sobers, Basil Butcher, Rohan Kanhai and many man other world class players including the legendary teams during the 1970s and 1980s that fans swear to be the best ever to set foot on the cricket field. This all now seems as a great fairy tale.

Why have the West Indies failed as a team in the last two decades? Is it a failure of the administration, lack of proper infrastructure or the inconsistency and the low payout of both domestic and international cricketers? There have been countless debates on the subject and while some of them come to the conclusion that it is due to lack of proper domestic structure or that the youth have lost interest in cricket and have moved towards other sports and athletics.

While the fact that there is a huge fan following of athletics in Jamaica if not all the Caribbean nations, the ground reality is that cricket is by far the favorite sports among the fans. Any learned man will tell you that one cannot make it big in sports like football or basketball in the Caribbean. There is simply not much pay, world class infrastructure facilities for the players or other sports. The sheer fame that the cricketers get reflects how much the fans like the sport. You can see young people playing cricket almost everywhere. As the former West Indies Test captain Dwayne Bravo once said in an interview people get it so wrong when they think that the youth in the Caribbean prefer playing other sports over cricket.

Young people can be seen playing cricket almost everywhere in the Caribbean ©Getty Images
One thing that sets cricket apart from other sports is that this is the only sport that players from all the Caribbean nations play together as one team. This is a great motivation factor for the youths to choose cricket over other sports. While there have been some conflicts among the players and the WICB in the last decade, cricket finally seems to have the progressive route with a good domestic set up for FC and List A matches apart from the T20 leagues. In the last few years, due to the pay dispute between the board and the players, the focus of the players surely shifted towards banking themselves the lucrative offers in the IPL and other cash-rich T20 leagues from the world over however, the regular domestic structure has meant that the young players are thinking beyond just playing T20 leagues. Surely the progress is slow but it has started to get visible at the domestic level which is a great step forward. Players like Kraigg Brathwaite and Alzarri Joseph coming up to the scene at very young age and Keiran Powell switching back to cricket last year after having a stint at baseball shows the popularity of the sport in the Caribbean.

If players are given better pay and proper opportunities, then cricket in the Caribbean can get back its glory days and as far as the popularity of the sport in the youth is concerned, it is here to stay.

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