27
What Do They Know Of
“
Cricket…?
udyard Kipling dubbed cricketers ‘flannelled fools’. I take
my hat off to him for his restraint, I have called them worse,
much worse in my time. While I never truthfully expect to be
faced with the choice between hacking off my own arm with a dull
bread knife and sitting through an entire test-match, I would not
advise any would-be gamblers to put money on the outcome. It
would be a close-run thing.” Jon Hill recalls childhood days of
cricket with Dad.
R
Cricket has always been a presence in
my life. My dad is from Guyana - the
country that has produced great West Indies
players such as Sir Clive Lloyd and Shrivnarine
Chanderpaul - and has an obsession with the game
that borders on the pathological. Childhood
summer holidays were spent vainly battling sleep as
the ‘action’ from the latest-test match unfolded on
the TV before my weary eyes, before being dragged
down to the local nets to spend an hour cowering,
bat-in-hand, as my old man sent one delivery after
another fizzing towards me.
But this was nothing compared to the harrowing
ordeal of having to watch his village team play on
a Saturday. It was here that my hatred for the game
was truly forged. I could not reconcile my Dad’s
evangelical zeal with the spectacle tortuously
unfolding before me, a turgid, incomprehensible
non-sport that could drag on for hours and still
end in a draw. To him this was the sport of kings,
an art form. To my (admittedly untrained) eye,
it looked suspiciously like a dozen or so paunchy,
red-faced men standing still for a long time, while
women in floral skirts burst sporadically and
inexplicably into applause.
It wasn’t just the mechanics of the game that turned
me off. It was the sheer uptight, dreary Englishness
of it. Where is the passion, where is the joy in this
infuriatingly polite little ‘game’?
Where’s the passion, where’s
the joy in this infuriatingly
polite little ‘game’?
“Boy,” says Dad, “heathen! One day I’m taking you
to Georgetown so you can see my boys in action
…Pass the bread knife…You’ll never understand
cricket – our cricket – until you’ve sat in the Bourda
Cricket Ground Stadium in Georgetown with a
sandwich and a case of Red Stripe watching Lara,
watching Ricardo Powell…” »