Andy Capostagno Cricket
Whatever the outcome of the ongoing talks between the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and its players association, the squad preparing for a five Test tour of South Africa will not be representative of the best the islands can muster. At the time of writing the captain, Brian Lara, and the vice-captain, Carl Hooper, will definitely not be here. Depending on negotiations, there is a likelihood that the senior new ball attack of Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh will also be absent. Imagine sending South Africa to the West Indies without Hansie Cronje, Gary Kirsten, Shaun Pollock and Allan Donald, and you’ll get some idea of the problem.
The dispute is about money – disputes always are. The WICB has apparently recently opened an offshore bank account in the British Virgin Islands, which the players may be entitled to feel is not the action of a body that cannot afford to meet its players’ demands. Clearly the players, and particularly the senior players, want a larger slice of the cake, and if the way to get that is to hold the tour to ransom, then omelettes don’t get made without breaking eggs.
The West Indies team has been relatively well rewarded for nearly two decades now. The WICB says that it has budgeted $555 000 for the tour with the likes of Lara and Walsh set to earn around $60 000. That compares very favourably with most nations and some say that only Australia’s players receive more. It will not have been lost on anybody that the Australian Players Association has also been very bullish of late.
The unique problem that the West Indies has always had is that they do not make money by hosting tours. The principal reasons for that are the small island grounds and the necessity of keeping entrance fees low to allow the poorly paid populace to attend. The way for the WICB to earn money is to keep its players on the road, playing one- day tournaments in Australia, Sharjah, Bangladesh, what have you, accepting potentially crippling tour itineraries and generally making sure that the closest most Trinidadians get to seeing Lara is watching him on the television.
It is an economic fact of life in the West Indies that to make a decent living you have to leave the island that you were born on. A whole new TV generation is looking for lucrative deals in the United States via the National Basketball Association.
Basketball was Ambrose’s first love and 10 years down the line he could probably not have been persuaded to remain a cricketer.
Even outside the sporting mainstream, the grass is greener abroad. At the International Cricket Council trophy in Kenya five years ago I met a fast bowler called Hopeton Barrett who was opening the bowling for the US. He was clearly a man amongst boys in the tournament organised for the non-Test playing nations and could quite easily have taken the new ball for his home island of Barbados. He left to find work and in 1993 was a computer software designer in Los Angeles.
There may be a few Hopeton Barretts at home at the moment who feel their chance to play Test cricket has arrived. Between 1978 and 1980 the West Indies fielded under-strength teams because the cream of the crop was playing World Series Cricket for Kerry Packer’s Channel Nine. Players like Basil “Shotgun” Williams and Faoud Bacchus got to play Test matches because Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes were in Australia.
It took a few years for the cricketing establishment to come to terms with Packer’s circus, but what it did was to raise the level of pay for top cricketers across the board. When Tony Greig led the English players to Packer, those who remained were supported by a new sponsor, Cornhill Insurance. That sponsorship remains in place to this day and without the push of World Series may never have arrived.
The West Indies team which played for Packer was led by Clive Lloyd, now the manager of the current squad. Lloyd was the second West Indies captain, after Sir Frank Worrell, with the leadership ability to harmonise the disparate island groups in the dressing room. His appointment as manager was an attempt by the WICB to do the same again after a three-year downward spiral of indiscipline had threatened to destroy all the things that Lloyd and a squad of all-time greats had achieved in the 1980s.
He may yet have the strength and bargaining power to bring the rebels to heel, but if nothing else he will now understand a little of how Alvin Kallicharan felt during the Packer years, when the little left- hander was asked by the WICB to captain those who remained, a squad of misfits, might have beens and maybes. That is the scenario that presents itself today. It could be the end of an era that 10 years ago seemed as immutable as the Roman empire.