World Cup Diary

On Sunday, Basseterre was a veritable ghost town. The streets were deserted and the shops were barred. The banners and beat-boxes of Independence Square had been packed away, leaving behind only the detritus of the cultural fair that has been running for the past ten days. Even the taxi stand by the town clocktower had been stripped of its jostling drivers. The entire island appeared to have gone back to sleep.

This in itself was not in fact unusual; the same happens in these parts every Sunday, as trading ceases and everyone heads home to their families. But the suddenness of the silence was unnerving. On Saturday the carnival had finally reached full steam, with a decent (if not packed) crowd turning out to watch the marquee event, Australia v South Africa, and the same number and more tumbling down to the beach bars of Frigate Bay soon afterwards. Now, they had packed up and gone home. The legacy of St Kitts' World Cup experience starts now.

And yet, there were signs of life amid the silence. As I roamed the streets in search of a bakery, I passed two teenage boys in the old churchyard by Warner Park, playing cricket with a tennis ball, using a tombstone as the stump. It was, with the exception of a glimpsed knockabout in a field by a school, the very first time I had witnessed an impromptu game on this island. The boys, one named Andreas and the other too shy to respond, had apparently attended all three of the matches. Their actions weren't much to write home about, but they could certainly biff a ball a fair distance. It was encouraging. A start.

I leave Kingston at dawn on March 25, a hugely important day in the nation’s history. Exactly 200 years earlier, the British parliament in London had passed a law abolishing slave trade in the empire. Those who have watched Amistad and read books on the slavers will perhaps be aware that over 20 million were transported from Africa to the Americas, often in harrowing conditions. Though it would be another three decades before the slaves in Jamaica were granted their freedom, it’s nevertheless a red-letter day for a small island that gave the world icons of black consciousness like Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh.

On one of the four flights that I take to get to Guyana, the in-flight magazine has an interesting article on Olaudah Equiano, the first “slave novelist”. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings was published in London in 1789, and was for two centuries regarded as one of the definitive works on the slave trade. It traced Olaudah’s life from his birth in Nigeria to his transformation as an English gentleman, via the Caribbean, Virginia and even participation in the Seven Years War.

It will forever be a source of embarrassment to me that I didn't recognise him. We were sitting in the lobby at the Jamaica Pegasus, typing in the details of Inzamam-ul-Haq's retirement press conference, when someone came and sat down on the leather chair across from me. Still lean and with a face that hadn't been ravaged by time, there was something about him that caught my attention. As I turned back to my work, my friend spoke to him: "Such a shame about Bob, isn't it?" The man shook his head ruefully. "We played together, you know. When I was at Derbyshire."

I perked up when I heard that, but still couldn't identify him. When he got up to speak to someone else, I quickly leaned over and asked my friend who it was. "Lawrence Rowe" was the answer. I swore quietly, but my friend assuaged the sense of shame somewhat when he said: "I didn't recognise him either at first. Someone told me."

Lawrence Rowe. Viv Richards' hero. My hero's hero, and too good an opportunity to miss. When he came back to his seat, I got up and went over. I asked him if he would be prepared to chat sometime, fully expecting a demand for dollars or a snub of some sort. Too many years on the beat and too many idols with feet of clay does that to you. Rowe only smiled. "I'd love to," he said. "Maybe sometime during the game tomorrow? I'll be at the ground doing some analysis for a local station."

Chris Dehring, the tournament's chief organiser, recently admitted he was still uncertain of the legacy that the World Cup was going to leave in the West Indies. "It could be the very best thing that happens to the Caribbean," he said, "or the very worst." Over the past week in St Kitts and Nevis, the benefits of a bold economic gamble are beginning to come into ever sharper focus. It may not be the same for every one of the nine diverse nations that has bought into this project, but in this, the tiniest of the islands involved, backs are beginning to be slapped with pleasing regularity.

"St Kitts is probably the jewel in the crown of the Cricket World Cup," said Dehring. "Everything works, it is a beautiful place and everything is within walking distance." And no-one has been at greater pains to demonstrate this fact than the Prime Minister himself, Dr Denzil Douglas who, warming to his opportunity to play the statesman on the world stage, has become the very model of ubiquity over the course of this week.

Short and affable, and built like a bantamweight boxer, Dr Douglas has been anywhere and everywhere this week, singing the praises of an event that, if truth be told, has not yet burst into life in this particular group, but is smouldering away happily on a nice long fuse. On Monday, after hanging out with Sir Garry Sobers in the Nevis Room of the Marriott Hotel, he and his cabinet colleagues strolled down to join a media gathering in a beach bar in Bird Rock. There they sipped rum cocktails while listening to a reggae band, their very visibility a testament to their self-satisfaction.

If you’re not paying attention, you might just miss it, so unusual is the location. Opposite the National Stadium, it catches the eye as you turn left on to Roosevelt Avenue. I ask Spencer, my driver, to slow down, and then ask him what it is. “It da Jamaica wall of honour, man,” he says solemnly. When we get out of the car, I see that a drainage canal runs alongside the wall that stretches over 30 feet, and is an artistic tribute to the sporting legends that have brought such glory to a tiny island.

Some of the paintings are crude, especially the unflattering portrait of Michael Holding from his Whispering Death Afro days, but others are beautifully executed. The one of Lawrence Rowe – Yagga to those that adored him – playing a shot off the back-foot grabs your attention, as does that of Courtney Walsh poised to bowl with that languid action.

Scotland, famously, have never qualified from the group stages of any of their innumerable football World Cup campaigns, and if their first day of action in cricket's big fandango is anything to go by, a similar pattern is set to be repeated in the coming fortnight. Massive yet heroic failure is the nation's stock-in-trade in any given sporting event - and their fans are contentedly resigned to their fate.

"Scotland don't go to many World Cups in any sport these days, but a trip to the Caribbean for two weeks … it's a tough choice." Martin Brown, an investment manager from Edinburgh, puts the dilemma in a nutshell as he stands beneath the scoreboard at midwicket, watching the inevitable unfold before his eyes.

On many levels, the story of St Kitts is the most uplifting of a myriad of tales to have emerged from the chaotic preparations for this World Cup. It is the story of how a land the size of an English county town rose above its humble status to claim a share of the biggest prize of all. While the big dogs squabbled and were left floundering to be finished on time, St Kitts merely enlisted the help of another of the world's underdogs, Taiwan, and delivered a delightful 8000-seater stadium from scratch, on time and on budget.

It's a tale with all the ingredients for a classic feelgood movie, although the happy ending will have to remain on hold for a little while longer. On Wednesday, the World Champions, Australia, take on Scotland in opening match of Group A, and only then will we see quite what this remarkable little island has to offer. The initial impressions are encouraging if a touch confusing, for cricket is not a game inscribed on this nation's soul.

Not once in the history of West Indian cricket has a native of St Kitts represented the Test team (though Joey Benjamin, born in Christ Church in 1961, did turn out for England in 1994). Nevis, the island's twin that rises high through the mist, 6km to the south, has had a fractionally better return with a total of five - including Keith Arthurton, Stuart Williams and Runako Morton, whose exploits in a losing cause in New Zealand last year earned him a plot of land from the government and the misplaced assumption that he had arrived as an international cricketer. He did not make this World Cup party.

The flight from St Maarten in the Netherlands Antilles to Antigua was among the shortest I’ve ever taken, and the azure blue waters that wash the island with a beach for every day of the year came into view within half an hour of taking off. With Air France having managed to leave one of my bags behind in Paris, the first few minutes on the island that spawned one of cricket’s most iconic heroes weren’t pleasant ones.

“First time in Antigua?” asked the woman at immigration. I said yes, adding that it meant a lot to me to finally be on his island. Growing up a brown boy in the UK of the early 1980s, that swagger, the success and those red-yellow-and-green wristbands meant everything to me. There were others too, like the magnificent Michael Holding and Liverpool legend John Barnes (with roots in Jamaica), but if you ever needed one good reason to not be ashamed of your colour, it was him.