The Ronins

The great calypso music that once used to reverberate across the cricket stadiums has turned into a dirge. I won’t go into the complacency of the authorities in assuming there would always be an assembly line of pace bowlers to replace the former greats or that the boys taking a dip in the beach will walk onto the grassy fields with a bat in hand and conquer the world. That we know. Neither is any point in going over the crisis in player contracts, sponsorship conflicts, board mismanagement. That we have read. There has been collapse all round; public sector failure, the board mismanagement; the greed of private enterprise, holding the players to ransom. What now- as a group of player’s troop onto the Australian stadiums- is the question.

Chanderpaul, a captain by default, Brian Lara, with more shades in character than spots on a leopard, and group of talented young batsmen are in Australia. There seems to be no passionate group ideal to enable these men to bind together and march. There is no use comparing them to the players in the past. Those great West Indian teams were glued by the race issue. As CLR James wrote, race played a positive role in the development of West Indies cricket; black power and fight against the colonialists propelled the players from different countries to stay united and march triumphantly across the grassy cricket fields world over. Make us grovel? Yeah right, we shall show who will be crawling on the knees. In the West Indian case, the race had supplanted the nationalist feeling that fuels other cricket teams.

Now the society has changed, there has been structural adjustment; West Indies has been economically, politically and socially dislocated. Those bricks of anti-colonialism that held the wall of solidarity among people have fallen. Basketball is eating into cricket, rap is silencing calypso, Kentucky and French fries are munched more by the youth, cable TV has ushered in a cultural invasion. Xenophobia is out and with that patriotism also is on the wane; there is an element of jingoism behind patriotic sporting feeling anyways.

Lara gave a hint of a West Indian captain's troubles when he told Shaun Pollock and Graeme Smith, who led the respective World teams in the recent Super Series against Australia, that "they now have a little understanding of what it is like to captain a team whose players come from different countries. In the West Indies, you have guys with different passports and cultures and you have to try to bring them together over a three-month period. I know you can say the West Indies teams of the 1970s and 1980s did that but times have changed. If you were in Brisbane when the West Indies team arrived you would have seen the Jamaicans heading to dinner in one group, the Guyanese all together in another group".

The way forward for the team lies via the individual salvation. As Tony Cozier wrote recently on the West Indies tour of Australia, "it could be individual self interest that strengthens the team ethic on this tour and beyond"

Lara, the most celebrated loser in cricketing history, will like to taste the champagne after victory; Chanderpaul, who has stood at the other end to Lara many a time to grieve a defeat will probably like to etch his name in history as the captain who led them out of dark shadows of defeat; Ramnaresh Sarwan, would probably like his headband to soak more in the sweat of a win, and score runs and push for the captaincy spot.

As the definition of nation state changes in the shrinking global order, the passions that fuel the people residing within an archaic boundary, and hence, it’s sporting stars, will also change. Us v them catalyst might become impotent to move the heart of people, as who forms ‘us’? And in this age of rootless amnesiac culture, it might well have to be a collection of individual disparate dreams, men coming together not under a flag or race but as ronins, even in sporting fields. West Indies cricket might well head that way.