Guyana is one of the few places in the West Indies where fast bowlers are not always in the ascendancy
John Young
One of Guyana’s nicknames is “Mudland”. The pitch at the Bourda Ground in Georgetown, where the Test series begins on Friday, is nearly a metre below sea level. They get a lot of rain in this part of the world and it’s often humid. Sometimes it’s humid when it’s raining.
For a country devoted to politics and cricket, this month of March is a wonderful time. Commonwealth election observers are in place to watch over the election to be held in 10 days’ time and their own Carl Hooper is captain of the West Indies. The last Guyanan to captain the regional team was Clive Lloyd between 1975 and 1984. In that time they lost two matches.
If the West Indies are ever going to get close to that level of achievement again, they have to get their batting right and Bourda is the place to do it. A grey-bearded sage checking out South Africa’s form at practice remembered Englishman Len Hutton flying in to Georgetown in 1954 and scoring a century on the same day. As Hugh Benfield remembers it, Hutton said: “If a batsman cannot make a hundred on this wicket, he can make a hundred nowhere. It is a batsman’s paradise.”
On this pitch two weeks ago, Guyana cruised to a seven-wicket win on the final day of the Busta International Shield semifinal against England A, with Ramnaresh Sarwan hitting a century. He may play today but the West Indies selectors will be reluctant to discard young Marlon Samuels, who did well in Australia.
Two much more experienced local men definitely will play. Hooper’s comeback season has been a long cele-bration. In the Busta final against Jamaica he fell just short of 1 000 runs in the competition and a $50 000 incentive prize. In 80 Test matches Hooper averaged just 33 and it remains to be seen whether his sublime domestic form will translate against Shaun Pollock and company.
One of the stereotypes about West Indian cricketers is that they crumble under pressure. There’s even a calypso that includes the lines:
But I say it once an’ I say it agen’
When things going good, you cahn touch we;
But let murder start an’ you cahn fine a man to hole up de side.
Jimmy Adams used to be the man who held up the side but his form has been so awful (an average of 18 in Australia and a first-ball duck in the Busta final) that the selectors have gratefully turned to the fit-again Shivnarine Chanderpaul after just two games for Guyana. He does, however, have a Test average of 40 and a proven stickability that the West Indies really need.
The Guyana batting tradition is built around stroke players. Two of the best played in South Africa: Rohan Kanhai scored 188 for the Transvaal Board XI in 1974/75 and Alvin Kallicharan played for the Mean Machine a decade later. Lloyd was not only the most successful cricket captain of all time, he also hit the cricket ball a very long way. He often did it at the Bourda.
The swing question is an important one and it will be interesting to see if Pollock and Kallis can get the ball to move in the air. Eldine Baptiste has said that the focus on swing bowling for success in the West Indies is misplaced. Quality seam bowling is what is required, according to the Antiguan. Bourda might be the exception because of the humidity and Gary Kirsten reports that the South Africans were moving the ball about at practice.
If the cooling breeze that comes off the Atlantic is blowing, expect the spinners to have an important role. The West Indies’ last win at Bourda came in 1998 against England. Hooper took five wickets with his offspin and legspinner Dinanath Ramnarine took three. Both will play this weekend.
Nicky Boje is revelling in his new role as a wicket-taking spinner and he wants to have the breeze over his left shoulder to help the ball drift. As Boje points out, most of the wickets to fall in the West Indies domestic competition this season have been to spinners, so the old saws about fast bowling in this area have to be revised.
There have been 14 draws in the 26 Test matches played at Bourda. In one of the draws not a ball was bowled because of three days of tropi-cal rain. If the game does go the distance South Africa are the favourites to win, not least because of selections.
The South African side is now very settled, almost depressingly so for the reserves. West Indies have come through another stormy bout of infighting. Some Guyanese fans threatened boycotts and riots if their men weren’t selected; the choice of venue for the Busta final went to a high court arbitrator which delayed the start of the game by a day; 16 players were invited to a pre-Test camp but only five attended. For three months they’ve been representing their nations against one another. Now they must unite in a Test match. Not easy.
If the West Indies can win in Guyana, this will be a very tough tour indeed for the Proteas. With a win behind them, an incredible home record to inspire them and passionate support, the West Indies will be hard to beat. The Bourda ground, Georgetown, is the best place for the rejuvenation of West Indies cricket to start; they won their first ever Test match at the ground in 1930, a seminal event in the history of the region. Great players like Clifford Roach, George Headley and Learie Constantie were part of that and the West Indies will be looking to that tradition to motivate them.
Somewhere in today’s crowd will be another Guyanese batsman with aspirations to continue that tradition: Aaron Ragoonath was the left-hander who scored 93 not out in the under-15 World Cup last year, and in so doing knocked out South Africa.