(Not) Being There

A nice piece from Siddhartha Vaidyanathan's excellent, varied blog.

This must strike a chord with anyone who's ever struggled to follow cricket as they go about the rest of their crowded lives. It certainly did with me.

With all the major cricket events of my lifetime I can instinctively remember where I was. And, while there are many exceptions - The Oval, 12th September 2005, Shane Warne's hat-trick in Melbourne, the Broad-Trott stand, Michael Vaughan's 197 at Trent Bridge - more often than not I wasn't there.

I was often in front of a TV set, which is the next best thing, but I've frequently been in all kinds of other places - exam rooms, weddings (not my own), hospitals, trains, planes and automobiles. For the last twenty years, during which period I've had a full-time job which only occasionally allows me to listen to the radio, I've mostly been at work, at least in body.

Apologies to anyone with whom I've had a work-related discussion while my mind was elsewhere. And equal apologies to my colleagues for the odd disappearing act down the years. As Brian Lara was gaining on 365 at St.John's in April 1994, I retreated to the toilet with a radio and nobody knew where I was for about half an hour.

As you get older it gets harder and harder both to follow the cricket exclusively and to convince people who don't know or care about the game that you have as much interest as they do in what's going outside the Test match bubble.

But I like it that way.

Heart of Darkness

With the West Indies' first World Cup about to begin, there's a very interesting article in TWC by Siddhartha Vaidyanathan about the 1983 West Indian rebel tour to South Africa.

It takes you back to the era in which I grew up as a cricket fan. When any contact with South Africa elicited a range of responses. At times just mistrust, at others open hostility. Nowhere was the latter more true than in the West Indies.

Of course, the decision to tour was chiefly influenced by money, which, along with regular employment outside cricket, was in short supply in the Caribbean at the time.

But, as Vaidyanathan illustrates, that decision had profound consequences for most of the players involved. Only one, Ezra Moseley, ever played Test cricket after the tour, others, shunned in their homelands, drifted abroad. Sometimes, as with Lawrence Rowe, who went to the United States, the primary motivation was to develop business interests outside the game. For others, like Franklyn Stephenson, easily the finest West Indian all-rounder of his generation, who chose to play out his days in Nottingham and back in South Africa, cricket held sway.

Some - Richard Austin, David Murray and Herbert Chang - slid into mental problems, financial insecurity and drug addiction.

In retrospect, with the World Cup almost upon us and South Africa a major player, it can be argued that while sporting isolation unquestionably had a profound influence on the fight with apartheid, the rebel tours were also a worthwhile part of the struggle in that they showed white South Africa what it was missing.

The World Cup is going to raise a lot of questions about the modern West Indies. The tour to South Africa, almost a quarter of a century ago, raised many more.

Maybe I'll manage to answer some of them over the next seven weeks.