(posted 7216 days ago)Telegraph : Sport
Talking Cricket: Caribbean flavour is missing ingredient from Twenty20
By Simon Hughes
(Filed: 17/07/2004)Thursday night at Lord's was the ultimate vindication of the Twenty20. Elderly members, cricket anoraks, gaggles of city blokes, women in bias-cut dresses, students, couples and families mingled contendedly in the packed stands, sipping drinks and eating crisps and enjoying the pyrotechnics of the players on a balmy summer evening. They hummed along to the amplified strains of MC Hammer's U Can't Touch This, commemorating an extravagant Mark Ramprakash boundary through the lengthening shadows of the 19th century pavilion – ancient and modern juxtaposed.
The best thing about the Twenty20 is that no one says anything negative about it. It's a celebration of all that's good about cricket:drama, speed, skill, athleticism, bonhomie – while removing all that's bad about it: time- wasting, boring play, impenetrability, selfishness. Essentially, championship cricket is for the players, Twenty20 is for the public. "What d'you reckon?" said one wag. "After the success of this they could create a Forty40 brand, maybe even a five-day version."
There was one ingredient missing – Afro-Caribbean players. Middlesex's Paul Weekes and Ramprakash, who is mixed race, were the only players on show of even vaguely West Indian origin. In the equivalent Middlesex v Surrey fixture of the mid- 1980s there would have been eight such players. Surrey had Monte Lynch and two West Indian pace bowlers, and the nucleus of the Middlesex side that I played in through that era was black. Wilf Slack, Roland Butcher, Neil Williams and Norman Cowans were all born in the Caribbean but came to England as youngsters; the Barbadian Wayne Daniel was the county's overseas player. Together they were known affectionately as the Jackson Five, which after Daniel's departure and Slack's tragic death, became the Three Degrees.
Not only were they the fulcrum of the team but they had a significant and vocal Caribbean following in the crowd. Still-warm West Indian rotis went to the dressing room on a regular basis. All but Daniel went on to play for England, who sometimes had five players of West Indian origin in the team. Thursday night was a stark reminder of how that situation has changed. The last cricketer of Afro-Caribbean stock to play Tests for England was Alex Tudor, in the late 1990s regarded as the great black hope, but instead of strutting his stuff for Surrey at Lord's, now languishing in the county's second team and impressing more as a batsman than a bowler. What's more there is no sign anywhere of a successor to Tudor. He could be the last of the lineage.
With the Test series against the West Indies imminent, the current issue of Wisden Cricketer examines this development. It first dawned on me during the winter, when in Grenada with an old England XI featuring Devon Malcolm, Phillip DeFreitas and Syd Lawrence. They were part of a veritable battalion of black fast bowlers that England had at their disposal, including Gladstone Small and Chris Lewis, as well as Cowans and Williams. Lawrence, the charging rhino reduced by chronic knee injuries to a lumbering buffalo, laments the change.
"My father came from Jamaica. Cricket was in the blood. Though I was born here I was brought up with it. In the 1970's the new immigrants from the Caribbean were seeking an identity. When the West Indian team came over here there was an obvious link. Those players were our heroes. I wanted to bowl fast because I saw Michael Holding do it.
"Now things have moved on. The black fathers of the new generation were born in England. Their kids feel hardly any association with the Caribbean or with cricket. Football is the craze, where the money and prestige is. There were hardly any black footballers in the 1970s, now they're everywhere. They're the role models." A fact underlined by the summer predominance of football and total absence of cricket in the playgrounds of Brixton, Camberwell and Kennington, adjacent to The Oval.
"The Voice [Britain's Black newspaper, featuring news and views with a Caribbean slant] is really struggling to get British-born readers. Its being overtaken by The Vibe, an American, hip-hop-based music magazine. Britain's black music scene is huge. Sport is getting marginalised. The thing most black kids want to be now is DJs and producers."
There are other theories for the trend too, such as the Warwickshire keeper Keith Piper's assertion that "cricket still treats you like kids, whereas in football, because you earn millions, you're treated like men".
The downturn in West Indies' own fortunes could also have something to do with it. Ultimately though, it's a cultural thing, exemplified by DeFreitas' experience. As an 11-year-old, he went to the same school as Chris Lewis, Willesden High School, in a north London suburb with a high black contingent. It is the only state school in modern Britain to have produced two England cricketers.
"There was a pitch at the back of the classrooms, and that's where Chris and I first learnt to play,'' said DeFreitas.
Ten years ago, the cricket field was looking unkempt. Now it has gone completely – to be replaced by an synthetic turf football pitch. "Cricket's not on the school's agenda," said the head of PE. "We do athletics, basketball, football but no cricket. We haven't got anywhere to play and there isn't a lot of interest."
A candid summary of the young Black Briton's attitude to cricket, Twenty20 or no Twenty20.