World Cup Diary
The legacy of Boys' Town
Dileep Premachandran meets Locksley Comrie, a former player and president of the Boys' Town club, an institution that once boasted of West Indies players like Collie Smith and Sir Frank Worrell
Dileep_Premachandran
25-Feb-2013
O'Neil Gordon Smith, Collie to those that knew and loved him, has been dead nearly 50 years yet you wouldn't know it if you listened to Locksley Comrie talk about him. Comrie moved to one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Jamaica when he was six years old, though back then Trenchtown wasn't the byword for gang violence that it has become today. He grew up idolising Collie, and like his idol, he was head boy at the school in Boys' Town. In later years, he headed Jamaica's football association, and was also president of his neighbourhood club, the same institution that once boasted of players like Collie and Sir Frank Worrell.
Comrie doesn't go back to the area as much as he'd like these days. When he does, it's often for the wrong reasons. "A lot of my old friends have been killed in the area," he tells you. "Earlier today, I was watching a football game on TV, and you could see a helicopter circling overhead. There's a fear of violence, and that violence is a fact of life in Trenchtown now. Growing up, it was never like that. Boys’ Town was one of the most successful institutions in the Caribbean, and dare I say it, the most unique in the world."
Full postPutting a face to a voice
In this age of high-speed internet, teleconferences and live streaming, it's not that difficult to put a face to words
Dileep_Premachandran
25-Feb-2013
In this age of high-speed internet, teleconferences and live streaming, it's not that difficult to put a face to words. There are rarely any 'faceless' voices. Yet, when some of us were growing up and being indoctrinated into the faith of our fathers, voices were all we had to follow the cricket in faraway lands like the West Indies and Australia.
The ABC's Jim Maxwell was always distinctive, the harbinger of cheery Ashes news after the nightmares of the mid-1980s, and there was hardly a cricket fan around who didn't recognise the smooth tone and Caribbean lilt that has been Tony Cozier's stock-in-trade for half a century.
Full post<I>Hit for Six</I>
The Barbados film industry is only four years old and it had, till last night, to its credit three feature films, all of which were shot in video format on budgets of less than US$500,000
Andrew McGlashan
25-Feb-2013
Last night, I achieved the dubious distinction of walking the red carpet at the international premiere of a feature film in Bermuda shorts, a situation I tried to explain as an attempt to achieve parity with the superior sex by showing a bit of skin. There was no rush of cameras, though, and I slunk off to the far corner to nurse my pineapple juice.
Truth be told, I made a fool of myself. It is no excuse that I thought it was a media-only preview. I didn’t read the invite.
Full postBarbados breathes cricket
Andrew McGlashan
25-Feb-2013
A flashing glimpse of aqua blue waters from the plane was enough to horrify me about my near folly. West Indies has tugged at my heartstrings ever since I became a cricket fan; England is cricket's place of birth and India is now its financial capital, but for me West Indies remains the game's spiritual home. Despite the misery of the national team, it conjures up of images of cricket played for the right reasons: for enjoyment. I had never been here before, and it's a moment I had waited for all my life.
Yet I very nearly didn't come. Numbed by death, turned off by the lack of atmosphere and spirit and discouraged by the quality of cricket, I contemplated saving my West Indian tryst for a worthier occasion. And two postponements later, I boarded the flight still wondering if it was worth the effort.
Full postRendezvous with a rebel
A Friday night in Barbados, and most people you talk to ask you to head to Oistins
Dileep_Premachandran
25-Feb-2013
A Friday night in Barbados, and most people you talk to ask you to head to Oistins. The seafood stalls there are something of an island institution and you realise that as soon as you get there, with a throng of people waiting for their plates. I settle for the grilled dolphin, and we’re joined at the dinner table by someone who might have been playing in this World Cup had things gone his way.
Gulam Bodi was born in India, but has played all his cricket in South Africa. Most hadn’t heard of him until Kevin Pietersen teed off against the selection policies that forced him out of KwaZulu-Natal, and few would be aware that Bodi too has left Durban, to play for the powerful Titans franchise at Centurion. A left-hand batsman who also bowls a decent chinaman, Bodi is in Barbados just to watch the final stages and cheer his compatriots on. Despite recent evidence to the contrary, he remains confident that South Africa can beat Australia and make the final.
Large fish steaks washed down with the local Banks, we head to De Oval Cricket Entertainment Village for Reggae Explosion. It’s 70 Barbadian dollars to get in and we’re more than a little disappointed at the some of the music, which is definitely closer to the hip-hop genre than anything that Bob Marley or Peter Tosh might have come up with.
Full postThe world's best water massage
Dileep Premachandran visits the Marshall Rapids in Guyana and gets the best water massage the world has to offer
Dileep_Premachandran
25-Feb-2013
Ted Sabat felt the bug first in the jungles of Malaya. A soldier in the British army, he went there four decades ago. A few years later, in 1971, he came to Guyana. "The forests looked so much the same," he says, "though Malaya was more hilly." Having caught Jungle Fever - not the kind that afflicted the protagonists in Spike Lee's brilliant movie about interracial relations - Ted, a Londoner, came back in 1981. He's rarely been away since.
For much of the year, you can find him either in Georgetown or at his camp near the Marshall Rapids, the falls that mark the start of the Amazonian basin. It is well off the beaten track, and getting there involves a long boat ride and a half-hour trek through the rainforest where you can see jaguar paw-marks among other things.
We start from Georgetown early in the morning, guided by Niranjan Pradeep - "Call me Chico" - who's been on this particular beat for 19 years. After a short trip by bus and a speed-boat ride on the massive Essequibo - the third largest river in South America - we stop for breakfast at Shanklands. "Eat well, the jaguars will be hungry," Chico says, not making everyone laugh. Fortified by cups of coffee and tea, we set off across the water to Bartica, a small town sustained by miners who go off for long periods into the interior.
Full postCricket with the legends and cavorting Caribbean style
Everything about the Caribbean cricket experience owes itself to the unique accessibility of the players, men who have stepped off the field and straight back into the bosom of the culture that created them; everything about the ICC cricket
Andrew Miller
25-Feb-2013
What do cricket writers do when there's no cricket to watch? Play cricket of course! For two days in Antigua, as the World Cup merry-go-round paused for breath, that was how the international media contingent passed their time, recharging their batteries by testing their distinctly average skills in a variety of typically Caribbean scenarios. It might be remiss to point out, but it would be far from inaccurate, that more of the region's unique flavour has been on display in these past 48 hours than has been permitted to shine through in a month of ICC-sanctioned shenanigans.
Everything about the Caribbean cricket experience owes itself to the unique accessibility of the players, men who have stepped off the field and straight back into the bosom of the culture that created them; everything about the ICC cricket experience, on the other hand, has been designed to erect barriers between them and us - massive great exclusion zones outside all of the grounds, colour-coded security clearance levels and extensive (excessive) checks at the entrances to the stadia. It wasn't always thus, and maybe it need not be again. Because the men who made the game great in these islands are as aghast at what has unfolded as the rest of us.
Full postFilming a fairy tale run
Rahul Bhattacharya
25-Feb-2013
By now you’ve heard the one about the Irish farmer who had to skip lambing season to open the bowling in the Super Eights of the cricket World Cup. Or, I’m sure, the one about the Irish teacher who needed permission from the education board because he had to roll some offbreaks in the Super Eights of the cricket World Cup. Stop me, though, if you’ve heard the one about the film-maker who, broke, was a few hours away from returning home when an Irish company put up some funds for him to stay another month to continue tracking the team in the Super Eights of the cricket World Cup.
It was in Sydney a year-and-a-half ago that Paul Davey saw Niall O’Brien, one of the heroes of Ireland’s current campaign, jogging in a park. “He had an Irish cricket jersey on. I went up I told him ‘I didn’t know Ireland had a cricket team’. He said, ‘We do, and we’re in the World Cup.’”
Full postThe abandoned home of Antiguan cricket
Andrew Miller
25-Feb-2013
It's been almost ten months since the Antigua Recreation Ground hosted its last Test match. On June 6 last year, Fidel Edwards clung on for a draw against a striving Indian attack, and within hours the strains of Chickie's Disco had echoed for one last time through the streets of St John's, and the gates were padlocked on 25 years of history.
The vibrancy of that final send-off was a testament to the beloved status of "The ARG" - home of Antiguan cricket since time immemorial, and a Test venue since 1981. Perched in the heart of the capital, and wrapped in a higgedly piggedly maze of walls, gates and wooden fencing, it was a venue that, for all its shabbiness, still drew the curious to investigate what lay within.
Full post