I TALKING ’BOUT CRICKET, HEAR?
Still . . .
I can hear people like Latoya (not you – one of the others) and Andre (one of your several namesakes, of course) complaining after seeing the headline, “Cheese on bread! Sherwyn Walters like ’e want to kill me wid big words!”
(Yuh know, as I pointed out last week, not a few Barbadians these days have a newly arrived, aggrieved, un-Bajan aversion to unfamiliar words!)
But even the turned-off might come to some enjoyment when they hear this: a recent study suggests that opening a dictionary might be as pleasurable as eating chocolate or winning a game or (yes!) having sex.
According to the study, Pleasure Of Learning New Words, published in the journal Current Biology, researchers found that expanding your vocabulary activates a reward-processing part of the brain involved in pleasurable activities such as sex, gambling, doing drugs or eating good food.
So, she got “a headache”? He “out wid de boys”? Look for some new words and get out a dictionary and pleasure yourself! Oh God! (Heavenly Father, between me and You, I don’t think Your name is being called in vain in that situation – peak, yes; Your pique, no. You know the difference.)
From that word exercise, fellow earthlings, you might even come upon some choice words to describe the present predicament of West Indies cricket – and the seeming perennial antagonists.
Now, it is very hard to get accurate information in the Caribbean. Because of that, nearly three weeks after the it hit the fan, we still aren’t sure about all the facts.
But at least we can say this: What was supposed to be a nine-match cricket tour of India was abandoned by the West Indies after the fourth match.
Tours have been abandoned before – some would say the contributing circumstances had elements that, if only metaphorically, have characterised the interactions between the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and the West Indies Players’ Association (WIPA): the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 ended the series between the West Indies and England in England; rioting during the final Test terminated that Test and that series between England and Pakistan in Karachi in 1969.
Also, the assassination of India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 put an end to India’s tour of Pakistan; in 2009 a terrorist attack on the Sri Lankans’ team bus on its way to their second Test match in Lahore, Pakistan, caused the abandonment of that tour.
But this October introduced a completely new scenario: an abandonment of a tour in a foreign land, where the ravages were inflicted by the visiting “side” (the players and the board).
And now the Indian cricket board wants the indigent WICB to cough up – what is it? US$41.9 million/$47 million/
$65 million? – as a result of its losses.
It is easy to attack the WICB. So much management in the Caribbean – from private business to Government – is inefficient. And the WICB seems constantly to draw from the worst wells in our culture.
Still, I would warn against lopsidedly pillorying the board now for what it has so frequently been. Yuh know like hanging a dog because he got a bad name?
Now, I feel the WICB bungled. Yuh cahn fail to show a compromising attitude when the workers that you have sent on a job express extreme dissatisfaction with their pay, even though a contract had been signed on their behalf.
But on the other side, the players, yuh can’t just look at things from your own desires or even your own intense dissatisfaction. There is almost always a bigger picture.
For us, the offended/embarrassed Caribbean people, there is also a bigger picture. Will we once again fail to mine the lessons, not just for cricket but for the society as a whole?
Over and over we fail to analyse our cricket as a reflection of ourselves. We just want to point fingers at the board and the players.
What standards, in regard to what would be representative of our best character, have we seriously pursued, both with the board and with the players?
Accountability
Re the board: how have we moved it towards better human resource management and more accountability? We have complained loudly and long, but what meaningful activism have we used to accomplish better WICB management?
Re our players: what have we, again in terms of what would signal our best character, imbued the cricketers with?
How much do we really care if those who represent us exhibit high values? Haven’t we realised that the West Indies cricket team is our main marker on the international scene – and judged more broadly than their cricket as representative of us?
I think we have just let them swim with the tide: more money, more flash, more narrow-minded talk about “I got my family to support” (everybody saying that these days – and it look like all a lot of family members getting is financial support while becoming boorish, thoughtless, lacking in self-control, without profound charity, unneighbourly, inconsiderate, minimally productive and more from the negative side). Less commitment to country/region and our best values.
So this is also about us. About attitudes, about accountability, about thinking beyond our noses.
In too many cases in which we think we have been given a raw deal, we become narrow-minded and unrestrainedly ego-driven, with a prime interest in rights and looking strong – with little thought about the treatment of others, about consequences and obligations, and with zero appetite for an approach that reaches for our own highest humanity and for positivity beyond us.
Is this how we want to be? That you must know now, now, now (not after we seriously try to work through it) that you cahn onfair me! I will put yuh in yuh place, I will curse yuh, I will stab yuh, I will wildcat strike yuh.
Both sides were apparently “thinking” only “Nuhbody en pushing me around. I en stanning for it.”
Standing up only for ourselves – while making other critical things fall.
Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor.
