Rather like Brazil in football, West Indies are seen as the exemplar of all that is best in the game

Dare we presume that the West Indies have crossed a line, or are at least closer to crossing it than they have been in the last decade and a half? Beating a mediocre England team 2-0 (with one Test to play) at home might not signify much. But that fails to take into account the margin of defeats (by 381 runs and ten wickets), the manner of play which recalled their best years, or the determination of their captain Jason Holder, who had said two years ago, “In the next two or three years we’ve got to be aiming to be around No. 5 or 4 in the world. It’s not going to happen dramatically that we go to No. 1.” When things appear inevitable, it is cause for celebration.

If you grew up during the years when the West Indies ruled, you carried with you a sense of regret at their steady descent into ordinariness, and then into something pathetic. For there was always something about their cricket that set the blood racing. They have won just 39 of their last 187 Tests, 17 of them against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. Under Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards, they won 63 of 124 Tests, losing just 20. They had the best batsmen, the fastest bowlers, the most prehensile of catchers. Scoring against them put batsmen in the highest class; mere survival made a statement too. Dilip Vengsarkar who once made a single-digit score came in for praise from Lloyd for his determination.

Personification

“‘Cricket is we…’ , West Indians are fond of proclaiming to the world,” says Hilary Beckles, the Barbadian historian in the introduction to Liberation Cricket. Rather like Brazil in football, West Indies were seen as the exemplar of all that was best in the game; and all that appeared unattainable too. Garry Sobers was perhaps the personification of this. He remains unique — the finest cricketer to have played the game. No one batted like him, bowled fast like him, bowled spin like him or fielded like him.

As the slide began, we looked for excuses. Perhaps ‘West Indies’, an artificial construct anyway — the only team which was not a nation — had reached their expiry date. There was talk of the team breaking up into the constituent parts, with Jamaica and Antigua and Barbados and Trinidad fielding their own independent international teams, with their own boards and their own separate histories.

Barbados once had a team that could have beaten most Test countries. Frank Worrell, Garry Sobers, Everton Weekes, Clyde Walcott, Conrad Hunte, Wesley Hall, Charlie Griffith, Seymour Nurse, David Holford were more or less contemporaries. Then there was Des Haynes, Gordon Greenidge, Keith Boyce, Wayne Daniel, Collis King, Joel Garner, Malcolm Marshall, Sylvester Clarke.

In a letter to Worrell, the Trinidad-born writer and Marxist guru C.L.R. James, said, “I perpetually wonder that a little scrap of West Indian territory has produced Garfield Sobers and you..”

The Holder angle

Jason Holder belongs to this island and this tradition. Made captain at 23 when neither his batting alone nor bowling alone would have assured him a place in the side, his double century in the first Test against England and four-wicket haul in the second mean he will not have to be picked for captaincy skills alone. That he will miss the final Test owing to his team’s slow over-rate is a travesty. When a team wins in three days, over-rates become irrelevant, but who will tell the ICC that? We need more common sense rules.

The problem in the West Indies was fuelled by both an intransigent cricket board and a bunch of superstar players who couldn’t pull together. There was no Worrell-like figure to unite them in the manner he had done in the 60s when he converted a group of outrageously talented players into a team that played with pride and passion. If anyone had thought about it then, Worrell might have been called the man with a “degree in people”, like Mike Brearley was later. Worrell had a degree in economics from Manchester University.

For years, despite evidence to the contrary, the West Indies were dismissed as “calypso” cricketers, a happy-go-lucky bunch of guys, with little rigour, even less discipline and apt to crack under pressure. But there was obviously more to it than that, as articulated by Viv Richards who wrote, “Cricketers were at the vanguard of West Indian liberation…In my own way, I would like to think that I carried my bat for the liberation of African and other oppressed people everywhere.” It was never about the cricket alone.

Perhaps the celebrations are premature. Perhaps the West Indies will disappoint us again. But lovers of their game are used to clinging on to the smallest sign that things are on the mend. The captain has both dignity and performance; players talk of Test cricket being supreme. A young bowler, Alzzari Joseph plays on despite the overnight death of his mother, and his skipper dedicates the victory to him and her memory. These are good signs.