Sir Gary Sobers and our cricket conversation

guyana chronicle editorial, November 3, 2015

SIR Garfield Sobers is regarded as the greatest all-round cricketer to have played the game. His exploits in all departments have been the subject of many books and documentaries. His skills were beyond dispute, but these were complemented by a manner of play that suggested that, for Sir Gary, cricket was more than a game. He was most competitive on the field of play, whether bowling, batting, fielding or captaining.

Perhaps because he was such a sensation, the politics of his game has been somewhat overlooked. While the militancy of a Worrell or a Viv Richards has been acknowledged, Sobers is not spoken about in that light.

That is why his recent comments on the state of West Indies cricket has caused some to take notice. Speaking in Sri Lanka, Sobers made the following observation: “I have never made a run for me. I have always played for the West Indies team, and it was such a pleasure and joy to be able to do what I did. I don`t think we have that kind of person today. We might have them in different countries, but I don’t think we have them in the West Indies. I think we are going to be struggling for a long time.”

At first glance, Sobers’s words and the view therein seem familiar to some, who bother to think about the game as more than bat and ball. Some commentators, notably Professor Hilary Beckles and other students of the game, have made that connection between the West Indies’ decline and the state of the larger society. The problem is that such analysis has not been the dominant one. Many of the cricket journalists and commentators prefer a diagnosis and analysis that explains the decline in purely cricketing terms.

That, in itself, is a reflection of the state of the game in the region. The inability to reach for an intellectual tradition pioneered by the legendary CLR James, which situates cricket in the West Indies beyond the boundary, is a serious indictment of those tasked with articulating a Caribbean liberation praxis.

This is the significance of Sobers’s comments. In his quiet way, he implicitly admonishes the chattering class for not recognising the root of our problems, not only in cricket but in almost every facet of the Caribbean experience. James and the equally astute student of the game, Antiguan Tim Hector, would argue that the crisis in our cricket is a signal that there is crisis in our politics, economics and society.

Sobers points to a rise in individualism in West Indies cricket that has consumed our cricketers. But those cricketers are not an exception to the Caribbean rule; they are recruited from a society that has been brutally assaulted by this phenomenon. For a region whose survival and independence have been grounded in a culture of collective action, this is a serious body blow. For some reason, we have been unable to balance individual success and collective commitment to overcome as a society. Sobers’s comments should shock us into a new realisation of the root cause of the problem.

When an optimistic icon is forced to express such pessimism about the future of a political economy and cultural space that produced his unique genius just a few decades ago, it is time to take stock. So long as we continue to flood the public space with simplistic analyses of the state of cricket in our region, the search for solutions would continue to miss the mark. Sir Gary has given us yet another opportunity to shift the conversation to higher ground.