No Win Race. Derek A. Bardowell

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СКАЧАТЬ ventures were particularly lucrative, but my father never went without food. He’d also pick mangoes, sweetsop, soursop, paw or custard apples; he’d drink coconut water and eat the white jelly of the coconut with some sugar if he had no money to buy food. If he wanted a hot meal, he’d pick ackees and breadfruit or he’d dig up yams or plantain from the fields to cook in the bushes. He’d also play competitive games of dominoes for a loaf of bread or something to eat. My parents worked hard, living off their wits and imagination.

      Cricket had given my father some conception of a world beyond Galina. He had been one of the best cricketers in the district, nicknamed ‘HH’ after bowler HH Hines Johnson and then ‘Collie’ after batsman O’Neil ‘Collie’ Smith. HH only played three times for the West Indies, all coming against England, when he was 37 years of age. Despite his advanced years, he had taken 13 wickets in those Tests. Collie was nearly as good a batsman as Sir Garfield Sobers. Sobers is universally regarded as the greatest all-round cricketer in the history of the sport. Smith and Sobers were good friends. Sadly, Smith died aged 26 in 1959 when a car driven by Sobers on the A34 near Staffordshire crashed into a 10-ton cattle truck. Jamaica was in shock. They took Smith’s body back to Jamaica where an estimated 30,000 people mourned his death.¹

      Galina had no cricket coaches or scouts fawning over young talent because it was such a small district. Fantasies remained fantasies when you had to worry about what you were going to eat the following day. Cricket represented something much purer. The British elite had the money, the resources and the facilities. My father and his friends could not even afford cricket bats. They would cut a coconut branch and, when it dried, shape it into a bat. They did not have professional cricket balls (made of cork, wound by string and coated with leather) so they used tennis balls. There were no cricket grounds or even-surfaced pitches, so they played in the street, on the sidewalk or on any patch of open land, private or not. It would be those same qualities – enterprise, hard work, toughness, pride, resilience – that would underpin the West Indian cricket team’s success and their determination not to hide. ‘Cricket was a part of you,’ my father would say. ‘We played it every day, rain or shine.’

      When the West Indies’ matches were broadcast on the wireless, all the kids in Galina would gather round at Mr Reuben’s grocery store to listen to the likes of HH, Collie and Sobers play. Those early West Indian teams were pioneers but also children of the colonial era. They played with pride and with passion, but there was little they could do to combat the history, the stereotypes and the infrastructure that governed their every move. The West Indies players were treated more like subjects than peers. They had some respect because of their sporting prowess. Not quite like other blacks. Beyond black. But not equal.

      Cricket had been brought over to the Caribbean in part to demonstrate English dominance. The early West Indian players were pioneers, the first black players to break through internationally. The cricketing authorities admired them. Not only their brilliance and their resilience, but the way in which they conducted themselves. Compliant. Integrative. Rarely did they overtly challenge. This served to appease cricket’s overwhelmingly white-led authorities, as they didn’t perceive the growing presence of blacks in international cricket as a threat to the existing power structures of the game. In Simon Lister’s book Fire in Babylon, he quotes what former England cricket captain Sir Pelham Warner said in 1950: ‘The West Indies are among the oldest of our possessions, and the Caribbean Sea resounds to the exploits of the British Navy. Nowhere in the world is there a greater loyalty to, love of, and admiration for England.’

      As such, those early West Indian teams endured stereotypes with little recourse to counter such views. They were regarded as subservient, ill-disciplined, likeable but a little lazy, jovial, enthusiastic. ‘The erratic quality of West Indian cricket is surely true to racial type. At one moment these players are eager, confident and quite masterful; then as circumstances go against them you can see them losing heart.’² They were known throughout the world as ‘Calypso Cricketers’, a team that played for fun, a team that played to entertain.

      West Indian cricket had also been governed as if a colony. There would not be a black president of the West Indies cricket board until the eighties. Black players were not allowed or indeed trusted to captain the team until 1959, when Sir Frank Worrell, after years of lobbying by writer, activist and historian C L R James, became the first black captain of the West Indies. James had been supported in his efforts by Sir Learie Constantine, a cricketer, lawyer and politician who fought against racial discrimination during his years living in England and a man who would become the UK’s first black peer.

      There had also likely been a quota system in the West Indian team too, which meant that a certain percentage of the side had to be white. It’s unlikely that the white West Indians earned their place on merit. From 1928, when the West Indies played their first Test match to 1960, when Worrell became captain, against the England team, white players only had a minor impact on the team in comparison to their black counterparts. A look at the batting and bowling averages during this period illustrates the point that black Test cricketers outperformed their white peers.³

      These early black and brown West Indian players put the Caribbean on the map long before Bob Marley. And nothing was as sweet as a victory over England. Jamaica did not become ‘independent’ of British rule until 1962. So, every victory had been significant. Defeating the rulers went beyond national pride. It caused mayhem, hysteria. Galina would have a street party. The cricket team were the soldiers; cricket had been the tool to undermine the rulers.

      By the time my father arrived in England in 1960, the West Indian team served another purpose; they incubated him and his peers from the hostile reception of English folks. Caribbean immigrants huddled together, sharing houses, jobs, money and resources to survive. For sure, my father attempted to fit in. Like the many workers from the Caribbean who arrived between 1948, when the SS Empire Windrush docked, through to the sixties, my father had arrived from a country in Jamaica that had been like a little Britain, with brown faces. He learnt more about the Empire than anything else. Black history obsolete. He had no major anxieties about being black in England. This was the mother country. Another country. He would be as much a citizen in England as he had been in Jamaica. He felt a great sense of loyalty before he had arrived on these shores. It was only in cricket where he felt any resentment towards his new homeland. Cricket had been the platform where England flexed its authority, epitomising its supremacy. A platform where, more than any sport, colonial attitudes had been reinforced.

      Against this backdrop, it had been no surprise that my father started a cricket team in Balham on his arrival. It had been no surprise that he put a cricket bat and ball in my hands at such an early age. Couldn’t say I liked cricket that much. But cricket soon became a part of me. The West Indies became a part of me. When I played cricket, I was not pretending to be Ian Botham. I was Michael Holding, Joel Garner or Malcolm Marshall.

      If the West Indian teams that my father grew up listening to in the fifties were more compliant, the seventies’ teams set the tone for the squad that toured England in 1984.

      When Clive Lloyd captained the West Indies on its tour of Australia in 1975, they were humiliated by the pace and aggression of Aussie fast bowlers Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson. The West Indies lost the series 5–1. Soon after that tour, Lloyd realised he needed to change tactics. He started employing four quick bowlers to keep batsmen under constant pressure.

      India toured the West Indies in 1975–76 and Lloyd unleashed four fast bowlers in the final Test, much to the dismay of the visitors. On an uneven Sabina Park surface in Jamaica, Michael Holding, Wayne Daniel, Bernard Julien and Vanburn Holder terrorised India, injuring three batsmen. By the time the Indian team came out to bat for a second time, they were battered and bruised. With five wickets down and only 97 runs on the board, Indian captain Bishan Bedi surrendered and ended the innings, losing the match. Three of his players were still injured from the first innings, two more were suffering from injuries too, so Bedi could not put any more players out. The West Indies won the series СКАЧАТЬ