I do have a food post in the works (more like in the mind!) but this is what has taken up some of my leisure and blog time. Cricket World Cup. I’ve now been to the refurbished Kensington Oval for 3 matches and was going to do a post similar to that on Guyana’s National Stadium at Providence. But then in the world of West Indies cricket or indeed world cricket, much has now been taken over by thoughts of the retirement of Brian Charles Lara from international cricket. Like the Manicou, my stint as a cricket follower is inextricably linked to BC Lara. When he burst onto the international scene was right about the time that I started paying attention to that thing that Dad always had on the radio on our long drive home from school (excruciatingly boring at the time to listen to stuffy Brit commentators describe a ball rolling across grass somewhere), or the game that dominated the one television station at unreasonable times. I didn’t start paying attention to cricket because of Lara, but it certainly helped that he was such a batting genius, a world class player who commanded international attention even before he broke those records. We had a star.
(For the record, I was already a fan and staying up late at nights during that Australia tour to see him in some of those remarkable innings when he scored the 277 and in the Oval on the next home tour when we got sold packs of nuts that were the Lara special because each brown bag had exactly 277 nuts - or so the Nutsman said!)
There are those who discount him because he is a star, not wanting to deal with celebrity in a sport arena (ha!), but coming from a small, twin-island nation, in the middle of a conglomerate of some even smaller island nations (and Guyana!) to be able to lay claim to the Prince of Port of Spain as one of ours cannot be discounted. Particularly since I have always had the feeling that I started this cricket thing when the Windies were clearly a team to be reckoned with, no matter what the status of the indivicual countries in other sports, or in economics or any other field of assessment. Unfortunately, I don’t think I saw the team continue along that path. Viv Richards retired. Greenidge and Haynes. Richardson. Ambrose and Walsh. It’s ok for players to retire, for eras to come to an end, but it seemed like as the years of my fandom continued, the status of the Windies just continued to sink. And no, I am not connecting it to myself. But I know there are a lot of you out there like me, who wonder why we couldn’t be fans of the team in its heyday. Why did we get sucked in on the eve of what seems like a decades-long decline? (And why we’re still here, but that’s the nature of support…)
But I am distracted. Back to my point. In the midst of all the decline we still had a star. Someone who was recognised the world over and in the cricketing world in particular ensured that no one ever discounted completely the West Indies team. Not as long as we had Lara on it. I am not unbiased in my view of Lara. I don’t know if he made a good captain. I don’t know if he was sufficiently disciplined or a team player. I do know that his retirement has ended without a doubt in my mind that last relic or vestige of hope we used to hang on to that Windies domination wasn’t so very far away again. Not just because he was great, but because when he was 19, when he started, he was playing with the greats, or in the fresh shadow of their departure when we still had that hope. I am not saying we can’t play well and win again. It’s just not going to be that easy to muster up the dream of the old days. The old days are definitely and definitively passed. Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe whoever is in the team now will have to work in the knowledge that the West Indies have no automatic status or respect. We only have the opportunity to work hard, practise and desire the win. To some extent, it doesn’t matter who’s on the team. It doesn’t matter whether we have star power. Look at Ireland and Bangladesh.
Before I get depressed thinking about the fate of our team…back to Lara’s retirement (hmm…any less depressing?). Kensington Oval was packed. 22,500 people came to see Lara’s last match - West Indies vs England in the Super 8s of the CWC. Unfortunately, we didn’t win, but it was a nailbiting end and I can say I was there in the Oval for that historic match (not till the end unfortunately, but Lilandra and I were there among the 22,500 for most of it). There were signs from fans of all countries thanking Lara. When Chris Gayle got out, the entire Oval quickly reacted in unison to chant “We Want Lara”. The England team formed a guard of honour to welcome him onto the batting pitch for the last time. We didn’t get any fantastic display this innings, but as the crowd enthusiastically confirmed when he asked at the end, he certainly entertained us throughout his entire career.
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