A player revolt, shuttle diplomacy and a letter from Nelson Mandela later, the Windies finally arrive, writes Andy Capostagno
There were many good reasons to believe that it would never happen, but on Wednesday the West Indies walked on to the field at the Soweto Oval and cut the ribbon on their first ever official Test tour of South Africa. Brian Lara and Carl Hooper made a few ironic points by scoring 50s and the heavens were kind enough to open before the fragile batting of the Gauteng Invitation XI could be exposed for the exercise in juggling political correctness and cricketing prowess that it clearly was.
Inevitably it was a fairly surreal encounter, with 13-a-side permitted and a total of 47 overs to be bowled due to a delayed start. The delay stemmed from the fact that the West Indies kit had not arrived from the airport and bets were being taken as to whether the precious cargo had gone missing between London and Johannesburg or Johannesburg International airport and Soweto.
Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose, the two final links to the great West Indies pace bowlers of the 1980s, were absent, having missed the team bus from the Excelsior Hotel to Heathrow airport.
How the bus managed to leave without them is hard to imagine, it being fairly difficult to conceal two men who added together measure nearly 4m. Someone forgot to do a roll-call and when Walsh and Ambrose finally arrived at the airport it was 10 minutes too late to board the flight their team mates were on.
Maybe they knew something about the misfortune due to befall Jimmy Adams. On the flight from England, Adams severed the tendon on the pinky finger of his right hand with a bread knife. Where he got a bread knife and what he was doing with it in mid-air remain mysteries, but if someone is trying to cover something up then it will not be the first piece of disinformation fed to the press about this tour, nor is it likely to be the last.
But if he has achieved nothing else, Adams will at least be able to join the list of cricketers who have found strange ways to injure themselves off the field. On the eve of a Test match in Australia, England medium-pacer Derek Pringle put his back out in the process of writing a letter. Some years earlier New Zealand opening bat Trevor Franklin made it off the plane, but was then run over by a luggage trolley, breaking his leg so badly that he was out of Test cricket for two years. Compared to that, Adams has got away lightly, although that is unlikely to be the opinion of the West Indies selectors who have lost one of their most highly regarded utility players.
Adams is the treasurer of the West Indies Players Association and, as one of the key men around the debating table in London, may, injury notwithstanding, find himself rather busier off the field than he has ever been on it. Pat Rousseau, the president of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), which negotiated successfully with the players (eventually), described the whole sorry pay saga as “a misunderstanding”, which is probably what the spin doctors of 1914 told the political correspondent of the Sarajevo Mercury about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.
So the tour goes on and by the time we reach the first Test at the Wanderers, two weeks from now, it is a remote possibility that the questions fired at Lara will be of a cricketing rather than a fiscal nature. By then we will all be heartily sick of “no comment” about what was really said behind those closed London hotelroom doors and more interested in whether the selectors will choose to play seven batsmen in an attempt to camouflage a brittle lower order, or to pick a balanced attack and hang the consequences.
Of course a balanced attack in the gospel according to Brian is likely to include four fast bowlers and the off-spin of Hooper. Ambrose and Walsh will share the new ball and two of Mervyn Dillon, Franklyn Rose and Nixon McLean will study at the feet of the masters. We will probably have to wait a few Tests before the guile of leg-spinner Dinanath Ramnarine is introduced, and if the pace barrage works we may never see him at the highest level at all.
The tourists have a couple of four-day games with which to get their batsmen ready for the Tests and during the same time period the South African selectors will have ample time to get their knickers in a knot about how and where they may find a pair of opening batsmen capable of reaching the first drinks session against such a potentially fearsome attack. Believe it or not, after all the nonsense of the past week, this could be one hell of a Test series.