Your Eyewitness received a text from a friend in South Africa, who said he was looking at the World Cup and found it surreal there was no West Indian team playing. Not seeing the famous maroon jerseys and hearing some calypso music this year is definitely hard to digest – not just for West Indian fans, but cricket lovers the world over. Ain’t it a shame?? For the first time in Cricket World Cup history, our Caribbean lads will be missing in action. Champions of the first two World Cups in 1975 and 1979 – with bowlers who once sent shivers down the spine of any batsman in the world – West Indies cricket is at its lowest ebb. We’re now ranked below teams like Afghanistan and Bangladesh! From being world beaters, we’ve been defeated by minnows like Zimbabwe, Netherlands and Scotland in the World Cup qualifiers, to shatter the dreams of West Indies long-suffering fans like your Eyewitness.
Now, postmortems have been conducted since the eighties – when we were knocked off the perch on which we sat for decades. Don’t forget that it was in 1987 that Rudder belted out his “Rally round the West Indies”, when the downward slide began. “For ten long years…We ruled the cricket world…Now the rule seems coming to an end…But down here…Just a chink in the armour…Is enough, enough to lose a friend
Some of the old generals have retired and gone…And the runs don’t come by as they did before…But when the Toussaints go the Dessalines come…We’ve lost the battle but yet we will win the war.”
Twelve years later, even though we had Lara and Chanderpaul, they didn’t prove to be no Dessalines, and we were forced to adopt the song as our Anthem to give us cricket tragics in the Caribbean some hope. “Rally, rally round the West Indies…Now and forever…Rally, rally round the West Indies…Never say never
Pretty soon the runs are going to flow like water…Bringing so much joy to every son and daughter…Say we’re going to rise again like a raging fire…As the sun shines, you know we gonna take it higher”!!
For a while, the runs did flow and the ball did hurtle, but the moments of victory were few and far between. Quarter-finalists in 2011 and 2015 was our best. Rudder laid the blame on those up in England who ran the game and changed the rules to crimp our style. “Now they are making restrictions and laws to spoil our beauty…But in the end we shall prevail…This is not just cricket, this thing goes beyond the boundary…It’s up to you and me to make sure that they fail.”
But it ain’t just the rules, is it?? There’s T-20 money!!
…about our Opposition??
Have the Opposition given up on elections to unseat the PPP? They seem to be placing all their energies on “regime change” – by any means necessary. They whined that they didn’t have money to contest the last Local Government Elections – but could find the money to fly a mega-delegation to Washington to woo the Congressional Black Caucus!! Flying out to NY from GT – at that time of year – had to’ve set them back at least US$1400 a pop. So, their 30-person delegation blew some
US$43,000 – which would’ve been supplemented by at least an equal amount for boarding and lodging. And what did they get – apart from the shmoozing??
A Congressional delegation’s gonna be coming down to check out their complaints. But they should know that such delegations would still need data to initiate any kind of action back in the States. So, are they executing the necessary fact-finding to brief the delegation??
Not from where your Eyewitness sits!!
…about the Israelis
Six million Jews were massacred by the Nazis because the latter didn’t see them as equals. Now the Jews are carpet bombing the Gaza Strip ghetto with its two million Palestinians. The abused have become the abusers. Tragic!
