Spreading…

… Caribbean Cricket
For reasons not quite plausible to this Eyewitness, Florida isn’t technically IN the Caribbean even though it juts almost all the way to Cuba, which is. Go figure. But Thursday night Florida was dragged all the way into the British Caribbean via the latter’s most distinctive signifier – cricket, glorious cricket!
And glorious it was indeed. Now this wasn’t the first time Cricket was played in Florida. There’d been several one-off matches over the years that brought a taste of the old life to countless thousands of West Indians in the US. They could enjoy the best of both worlds – the comforts of the US with the uninhibited joy of West Indian cricket!
But this time it was different. The match between our own Guyana Amazon Warriors and the Barbados Tridents is the first of six scheduled by the Caribbean Premier League (CPL) that’re intended to be the beachhead for establishing cricket as a permanent game in the US. Now some old heads might be wondering if the US was once a colony of England, how come it doesn’t have “indigenous” cricket, like say, Australia. Well… there WAS cricket played against Australia and Britain even after the 1776 breakaway. But most folks figure the five-day leisurely pace of Test Cricket was just too drawn out for a new nation in a hurry to become a super power!
Americans then and Americans now don’t have the patience or the time for Test cricket. So enter T20 cricket. However you cut it, slice it or dice its origin – this format of the game’s tailor made for the US. And it’s probably the reason that vagabond, Texan con-man Sandford beamed some of the games of his short-lived tournaments into that country. The hitting, fielding, uniforms, dugouts, and more to the point – the length of a T20 – game isn’t much different from that most American of sports – baseball.
Be as it may, the first game was an absolute delight – especially for all the fans of Guyanese origin that showed up at the ground. And the pitch was just the thing the doctor ordered – it didn’t inhibit either fine cricket batting or power hitting. Their Warriors won in fine style and the fans celebrated in even finer West Indian style. The bowling of the Warriors just overwhelmed the Tridents and they were restricted to a still respectable 142 runs. The Warriors made short work of that though! Sixes and fours were hammered at regular intervals,
The game hadn’t even been finished when the Indian Cricket Board indicated it wanted to schedule a T20 series with the WI.
Cricket’s beachhead is secured!

…fear
Seems the Opposition Leader’s having everything – including the kitchen sink – thrown at him for saying, “democracy, Indo Guyanese and rural Guyanese are under attack in Guyana by the Government”. And imagine he’s head of a party that’s composed of primarily of Indo-Guyanese – just as APNU in Government has mostly African Guyanese members. He’s been accused of “race baiting”.
To the virulent critics coming out of the woodwork, the Government wasn’t “race baiting” when it accused the PPP Government of being complicit in “killing 400 Afro Guyanese youths” with no evidence. Head of the TUC wasn’t “race baiting when he claimed “Economic genocide against African Guyanese” with no evidence.
But the PPP’s Gail Teixeira HAS produced evidence: On a dozen State Boards – including GuySuCo’s – Indians, 40% of the country, comprise an average of just 17% of Board Members! And none of the dozens of Presidential Advisors are Indian Guyanese.
So is it a case of “goat bite Indians” or they’re not qualified?!

…ignorance
Sherod Duncan admitted he wasn’t too bright in school. He just showed nothing’s changed. He obviously just crammed for his exams and never learnt critical thinking.
Imagine him saying “race has no relevance”. Say that to African-Americans being shot by “their policemen”!
Or Guyanese Indians who can’t sit on the aforementioned Boards.