Cozier on Cricket: A team of substance (25 April 1999)

25 April 1999

Cozier on Cricket: A team of substance

Tony Cozier

THE Test series strongly suggested it. The One-Day Internationals have confirmed it.

The West Indies have rediscovered the spirit and self-confidence that had been so glaringly and so frequently absent in the recent past.

If anything, the results have been even more encouraging and significant. To have carried opponents who had won 12 of their previous 15 matches and are joint favourites for the World Cup into a deciding final match is an achievement in itself. But there is more to it than that.

While the revival in the Tests was centred almost exclusively around the phenomenal batting of the born-again captain and his two great fast bowlers, the challenge in the limited-overs matches has been led principally by the support players.

The team has been shown, after all, to have some depth and plenty of character - and characters as well.

The main men had hardly featured as the remarkable tour arrived in Barbados for its double-header conclusion.

Lara, troubled by his sore wrist, took his necessary rest after four matches in which he was hardly noticed. Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh played in only three of the first five matches, only once together, and went for more than four runs an over, well over their par.

Carl Hooper's all-round ability has been compromised by his all-round figure and he was not commanding the lead role as he should. Shivnarine Chanderpaul, not one of cricket's most physically robust individuals, was clearly not himself following his long lay-off.

The slack was taken up by the lesser lights, most of them reinstated after earlier rejection, one entirely new.

Sherwin Campbell and Jimmy Adams, whose batting styles and temperaments had been considered unsuited to the needs of the abbreviated game, transformed themselves into hyperactive strokemakers at the top of the order.

Phil Simmons, passionately preparing to make the World Cup a grand finale to a long, if chequered, international career, was the best all-rounder on either side before he twigged his groin muscle at Bourda.

Naturally a massive man, he has trimmed down and moved with the athleticism of someone half his 36 years and the enthusiasm that has always made him such a valued team player.

Ridley Jacobs took to his new assignment as ball-beating opener with the relish he applies to all his cricket.

Merv Dillon returned to embarrass selectors who so mysteriously excluded him from the limited-overs squad in South Africa.

Hendy Bryan vindicated their perception in picking him for two such demanding assignments as Australia and the World Cup without any previous international experience.

Nothing has exemplified the transformation from slackness to sharpness more starkly than the fielding, yesterday's off day notwithstanding. The improvement was evident in the Tests. It has been staggering in the internationals.

Julien Fountain seems to have led his charges to the fountain of youth. Everyone - well, almost everyone - appears to have wings on their heels and plutonium in their arms. Of the seven run-outs, four have been with direct hits, a previously unheard of percentage. There has been little to chose between the teams in this area, a justified compliment.

All of this does not suddenly mean the West Indies will win the World Cup.

England in May and early June is not the Caribbean in April, the middle order is still a worry with Stuart Williams and Keith Arthurton short of confidence, form and, frankly, class; the Australians have been without Glen McGrath, and the tactics have sometimes been baffling.

But they will be going as a confident, closely-knit team capable of beating the best. To have suggested that two months ago would have merited a couple of sessions on Rudi Webster's couch.

THE madness that, yet again, engulfed Bourda on Wednesday was the inevitable consequence of the overcrowding, impotent security and deficient planning that has always been the bane of almost every cricket ground in the Caribbean.

Such scenes have been repeated season after season from Sabina to Bourda, if not at the same critical stage of the match.

Players have been pummelled, umpires upended and television staff set upon in the mayhem.

In the second Test, the West Indies captain even had to seek sanctuary from the marauding masses in the the sanctuary of the dressing room.

It has to stop before a player, or umpire, is seriously injured, even killed.

But, short of erecting barbed wire fences, digging aligator-filled moats, calling in the Israeli Army or banning international cricket, or crowds, altogether, the certainty is that there will be more Bourdas in the future.

Of all the venues, only the Queen's Park Oval is designed to hold more than 20 000 spectators. Nearly that number somehow squeeze themselves into the others, disasters waiting to happen.

Every time I watch cricket at Arnos Vale, with the ground spectators, pressed up against the rails, frightening images of the Hillsborough soccer tragedy in England 10 years ago flash before me.

At Bourda on Wednesday, the flimsy, rusty, corrugated roof of one of the stands stood between hundreds of illegal spectators above and the instant maiming, even death, of hundreds more below.

The answer, of course, is to do what Grenada has done, construct new stadiums, or at least modernise existing facilities, so that spectators can watch in comfort and safety and players are properly protected.

That was the upshot of the Hillsborough soccer catastrophe in England - and we should not have to wait for deaths in our grounds to follow suit.

If fact, had it been international football under the direction of FIFA, and not cricket, West Indians would not be grumbling about having to make do with a tie. The match would have been awarded to the opposition and the ground subject to a lengthy ban.

That, indeed, may be the way to deal with the hooliganism.

Source :: The Barbados Nation (https://www.nationnews.com/)