Dance and break loose

01 Jan, 2000
For starters we need to dig up all the present cricket pitches in the Caribbean and replace them all with true pitches like that of Sabina and Kensington of yesteryear, just as we in T&T need politically to dig up the Constitution and dig up the EBC.

For Christ-sake, what are we waiting for? Sitting, looking at our pathetic performances in Australia one can only conclude that our cricket can no longer be described as being of "Test-standard".

If Test cricket were to be organised like the football leagues around the world, our cricket team surely would have been demoted out of the Premier League and left to wallow in the minor divisions until we raise our game back to established Test standards.

The biggest worry seems to be that the managers, the WICB, are unable to diagnose the problem which is always the first step in the process of outlining solutions. If they cannot properly diagnose the malaise, then they must go. And GO NOW!

In this very space we have been known to advance the following view: "... We were schooled in the unity of opposites, the dialectics of all natural phenomena... Everything has to be seen relative to its opposite in order to get at the reality rather than be swayed and be duped by mere illusion.

"For instance, we would say today that the West Indies cricket team presently cannot 'bat" because they cannot comprehend modern pace and spin 'bowling'.

"They cannot bat because they cannot bowl. The bowling to which our batsmen are accustomed is stuck in the past. A batsman's shot selection is dependent on his reading the bowling, and in the Test arena our batsmen today enter the realm of the unknown. To bat competently you have to know the bowling.

"West Indian bowling today is a lot of crap when compared with the other Test-playing countries....And it has been so for quite some time..." None of our present bowlers, with the exception of Walsh, can keep line and length as the Australians ­ McGarth, Gillespie, Bichel etc. do consistently as a matter of course. Lara and company are forced to play every ball as if their lives depended on it, while our bowlers continue to persist with their nonsense.

The New Zealand captain expressed it best when he disparagingly dismissed our bowlers as mere "bounce bowlers". They hammer the ball midway onto the pitch and wait for something to happen. They seem to lack the cerebral acumen to think batsmen out. But in the past this was not the case.

As we said before "...the West Indian team fell from the pinnacle of Test cricket the moment our bowling art deteriorated.

"For the decade and a half that we ruled the cricketing world, to quote Rudder, our bowling attack consisted of four fast bowlers and one or two part-time, amateurish spinners tossing up 'lollipops' according to Boycott.

"That worked for us because Roberts, Holding, Croft, Garner and Marshall were truly gifted as were Walsh and Ambrose who came later. And not only were they fast and accurate but they understood the game, were genuine students of the game, could think batsmen out being capable of picking up technical faults of batsmen.

"Most of all they were professionally disciplined and committed to the West Indian historic purpose.

"That was the kind of quality that our batsmen had to face and get acclimatised to in the then Shell Shield play-offs and therefore they could easily face the rest of the world ..."

Lara had to face Garner to learn and to hone his skills, but from whom will Ganga and company learn, moreso since the opportunity of daily County Cricket in England has been closed off to us "for good"? The point is that, while the cricketing world was cowering to the might of our fast bowlers, we at home conspired to resurface all our pitches, changing them all from fast pace pitches to dead pitches.

That change, whether inadvertently or not, served to mitigate against our fast-bowling art and prowess. These dead pitches have helped to nurture only "bounce-bowlers".

For starters we have to dig them all up, from Jamaica to Guyana. Give us once again the kind of pitches that aspiring young fast bowlers would relish bowling on, and on which they could easily develop a whole repertoire of special deliveries to deal with the peculiarities of opponents.

Only in this way will Campbell and Ganga ever learn to do better than merely coming forward tentatively onto the front foot to poke around. They will then learn to DANCE naturally. You dance in order to bat, watching the ball intensely and making each stroke a combination of two and three MOVES.

Like deceased Fredericks, like Haynes, like Greenidge, like Richards who DANCED. And these are not the people whom we chose to coach the young batsmen. We chose people with certificates.

How many times has it been said that that precisely is the problem with Caribbean civilisation? When will we learn that CERTIFICATION has nothing to do with EDUCATION? People "certified" with a mindset are in fact the problem because they are never capable of breaking loose.

Education is about re-examining and re-interpreting experiences within one's environment so as to come to terms with new realities, all the time measuring and re-measuring LENGTH and LINE, FOCUS and SPACE.

That's why we DANCE. And that's why our worst politicians and worst batsmen are those who cannot DANCE and cannot BREAK LOOSE! Much more, anon.

e-mail:brenco@tstt.net.tt