If you have tears for the Windies, shed them now

The shocking decline of the West Indies in cricket is not just another sporting fall. It is, in essence, the demise of an empire, the decline and decay of a great sporting culture, writes NIRMAL SHEKAR.

DECEMBER 2000, Chennai: In the drawing room of a typical upper middle class apartment in a quiet suburb, a 13-year old boy is watching CNN's coverage of the U.S. election imbroglio as his father walks in.

``Son, will you switch channels and check the scores at the Perth Test? Half an hour ago, when I last saw, West Indies were one down for 12,'' says the father.

``You don't even have to check Dad. Half an hour, is it? Then they must have lost five wickets by now,'' says the son. ``They should stop playing cricket. They are the worst team in the world.''

JUNE 1983, Chennai: It's the greatest night in the history of Indian cricket, and one of the finest in Indian sport itself. You could have heard cries of unconcealed delight in thousands of drawing rooms in every city in the country. But if you were not particularly given to running away with your emotions and if you hadn't drowned yourself in the revelry triggered by India's defeat of West Indies in the World Cup final, you would perhaps have noticed that there were a few mourners in every other drawing room in your neighbourhood even as Kapil Dev appeared on the Lord's balcony with a broad smile.

``Now there can be no question,'' says a teenager who idolises Kapil Dev. ``India is the greatest team in the world.''

``Greatest? You must be kidding! West Indies will beat us nine out of ten times, maybe even 24 out of 25 times. They were plain unlucky tonight,'' says his brother, one of the ``mourners''.

AH, MOURNING for the Windies...as Indians, as cricket lovers, many of us may be familiar with those emotions. Successive generations of Indian cricket fans have shed tears, once in a while, when their favourite team - sentimental favourite, at that - had a bad day at the office.

As a pre-teen schoolboy watching his first ever Test match, at Chepauk in 1966, the most disappointing moment in the match, to this writer, came when Gary Sobers was dismissed for 95. And, since then, one has seen many a cricket lover in this country sulk when the Windies, or a Windies icon such as Sobers or Viv Richards, failed.

Yet, that was periodic sulking, infrequent mourning, triggered by events that were exceptions, that went to prove that even the greatest were vulnerable, even the seemingly invincible were human, all too human.

The difference is, today, the mourning is the rule. And the unadulterated glee with which we greeted successive West Indies triumphs may seem the exceptions, except that there haven't been any exceptions to this new rule so far as the Windies under Jimmy Adams have plumbed depths few might have imagined existed.

Oh, what a fall! And, to be sure, this is not just another sporting crash of the sort we see time and again in a capricious world where even giants are not spared of cruelty. For, this is not merely the fall of a great sports team.

It is, in essence, the demise of an empire, the decline and decay of a magnificent sporting culture diagnosed of an illness that seems terminal.

Should the same thing happen in a truly international sport such as football or boxing - rather than in a sport played at the top level by only 10 nations - obituaries would have appeared on front pages of newspapers.

Can you imagine Brazil getting beaten 6-0 time and again in international football? Yes, they were routed by France in the last World Cup final. But that was a purely one-off situation, something like Clive Lloyd's Windies losing to India in the 1983 World Cup final.

The point is, it is impossible to imagine the Brazilian footballers looking as inept and out-of-sorts day after day as the West Indian cricketers have appeared in Australia in the recent weeks.

Ever since a few cricket fans parted with a week's wages to put a young black man on a boat to England long years ago, the mystique of West Indian cricket has been one of the most glorious chapters in the game's history. And, West Indies has been to cricket what Brazil has been to football - the very name has spelt pure joy.

Patriotism. Reason. Logic. By itself, each is a powerful force, swaying men one way or the other. But there is something called magic: it sways men only one way - its way. And West Indies cricket, like Brazilian football, has been nothing if it was not magical.

The young man who took a boat to England to play cricket, L.S.Constantine (father of the legendary Learie), hit the first West Indian century against England at Lord's. And right through the 20th century, the special allure, that rare magic, that unique charm that the game is invested with when played by the West Indians continued to defy time and description too, as Frank Worrell, Gary Sobers, Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards led teams that were outstandingly brilliant.

In the last 50 years, some of the greatest natural geniuses (mark my words, not merely greatest players, but greatest natural geniuses) in the game have come from a scattered chain of islands in the Gulf of Mexico. And to think that the more accomplished among them, including the peerless Sobers, came from an island 21 miles long and 14 miles across - Barbados - with a population of just over a quarter of a million!

The very identity of every single nation that constitutes the West Indies in cricket would seem to depend on their pedigree as cricketing bounty islands. And it is this very identity that has come under threat now after two successive innings defeats in under three days Down Under.

But how? How can a multi-ethnic, multi-national entity that gave us the likes of Gary Sobers, Viv Richards, Joel Garner and Curtly Ambrose look as pedestrian as the side that's doing duty in Australia right now, with even Brian Lara contributing his very worst to complete the picture of misery.

You might say all you want about the new attitudes of West Indian youngsters, about how they lack the discipline and commitment of earlier generations. You may say all you want about how these young men no longer think of cricket as a religion but turn to basketball and baseball instead to make their way to the big land of big dreams - the United States.

Yet, when you come down to the middle, to a 22-yard strip on which the great game is played, it becomes obvious that while this side may lack the genius and collective skills of its great predecessors, why it fails as badly as it does is not only because of this.

For, what was on ``Test'' at Brisbane and Perth was the West Indian character. And, shockingly enough, the failure came here. More than a failure on the talent-front, this was a failure of character. Nobody, it appeared, had the will to fight, to save face, to battle for the pride and glory of the Caribbean.

To be sure, Steve Waugh's is a very good Australian team, the ``winningest'' in Test history, thoroughly professional and wonderfully resourceful and resilient. Yet, it has looked as good as it has the past few weeks because the West Indies have allowed things to drift and let the Aussies appear invincible.

Not even India - a side that has always had a poor away record - looked anywhere as bad last Antipodean summer as does Adams's team now. It is almost as if every member of this West Indian side has, secretly, to himself, admitted defeat and prepared himself for the inevitable - a 5-0 whitewash.

Another day, another time, Brian Lara's forefathers never once admitted defeat. To see how the cricket ethic shaped life as a whole for the young black men in the West Indies, you have to go back a long way to another, and certainly darker, era, an era of masters and subjects, an era of ruler and the ruled.

The popular romantic image of West Indian cricket is of sandy pitches refreshed every few seconds by tides, of tropical trees and superb mountain ridges forming a backcloth of exotic attraction to the boys playing the game.

It is a picture postcard image that sends the spirit soaring. But realities of life often don't get seen on picture postcards. And the black West Indian's path to success in cricket, as much as in life itself, had been full of hurdles.

More than a century after slavery was abolished in the islands there was still the constant, shameless manipulation of cricket teams, the careful discrimination against black players.

Even after the colour-line was broken, there was segregation on a positional level. A black man can be in the team, but he can never lead the team. So you had half-bit white cricketers leading black men ten times as talented as they were.

In the event, to succeed at cricket, with his physical and mental gifts, became something of a challenge for the young black man as much as it was an effort to validate a dream. A gauntlet as much as a style of life. Like his boxing brethren in the inner-city ghettos in the United States, the black West Indian cricketer was part dreamer. And the dream lay somewhere in the process of perfecting his skills and somewhere in the process of trying to extricate himself from economic deprivation and social discrimination.

The rise of the great generation of West Indian cricketers after the second war, symbolised not the least by Sir Frank Worrell's unforgettable side which created history Down Under 40 years ago, was a leading factor in the patch-quilt racial revolution of those times in the island nations.

Since then, every West Indian side, good and great, was fuelled principally by two things: pride and self-belief.

Alas, the team playing - surely, you cannot say performing - Down Under right now seems to lack both.

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