A humbling experience

Perhaps one of the more peculiar things I’ve experienced in two years of covering the domestic cricket scene in America is the number of encounters I’ve had with former Test players from West Indies. For an Associate level country like USA, it’s somewhat remarkable that several former Test players now spend their time living and working here, while playing what has to be an extremely humbling version of cricket on the weekends.

Some of these players still manage to find a way to dig deep and bust their gut to give it everything they have. For the others, it looks like the life has been sucked out of them, now that the training grounds, well-maintained pitches, adoring fans and bountiful talent they used to be surrounded with have disappeared.

Neil McGarrell, who played four Tests for West Indies and captained Guyana before moving to New Jersey, captained the Atlantic Region to a hard-fought second-place finish at November’s USA Cricket Association Senior Nationals in Florida. At the age of 38, he now has a very strong chance of being selected to play for USA for the first time at next month’s ICC World Cricket League division three tournament in Hong Kong. He was the leading run-scorer in the tournament, tallying 147 runs in three innings without being dismissed, while also taking 6 wickets for 44 runs in 20.3 overs of left-arm orthodox spin.

At the other end of the spectrum in the same event in Florida was Adam Sanford, who played 11 Tests for the West Indies. The 35-year-old played two matches for the New York Region on the weekend, taking 1 for 93 in 17 overs of fast-medium before he was left out of the line-up for New York’s last match. On that final day, when his team was in the field against McGarrell’s Atlantic side, Sanford passed the time by sitting under a sapling tree with a cooler full of Coronas by his side, sipping from a bottle at his leisure while chewing on some nuts.

These guys probably have to swallow an awful lot of pride in order to show up and play hard in cricket matches in the USA. At one time in their lives, they were welcomed into a privileged fraternity of men who got to wear the maroon cap, the same fraternity that includes Garfield Sobers, Viv Richards, Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall and Brian Lara. They had access to the best facilities in the Caribbean and played in front of thousands of fans with millions more watching around the world.

Now, most of their weekends are spent playing in front of a handful of people on fields that are shared with soccer and baseball, fields that have a mat laid down for a makeshift artificial pitch, with outfields that have blades of grass three or four inches high.

While Sanford’s stats were never eye-popping, he is notable for the fact that he was the first indigenous Carib player to represent the West Indies and one of only a handful of players to come from Dominica. According to several websites, there are only 3,000 people remaining in the population of the Kalinago (as the Carib people are properly known). Sanford’s status in Dominica is held in such high regard that a stand was named after him in May of this year at Windsor Park Stadium, which will host a Test match for the first time at the end of India’s tour next July.

Sanford is a man who has his name stamped on one part of a 12,000-seat cricket ground in the Caribbean for his unique role in West Indian cricket history. Usually, that’s an honour reserved for someone who is in their 50s or 60s and long retired from the game. So it’s hard to believe that the 35-year-old’s skills have diminished to the point that not only is his West Indian career over, but he can’t even get selected on a regular basis to be in the starting XI for a regional team in America.

Sometimes these kinds of expectations weigh a player down and heap more pressure onto them than they can handle or deserve. He played Test cricket. If he takes a five-for at a match in America, the reaction is, “Big whoop, he’s supposed to. He’s a former Test player.” If he doesn’t, he’s a has-been. Seeing Sanford on the sidelines is a stark reminder why cricket can be a cruel game.

But at the same time, McGarrell is having a ball out in the middle. Seeing him perform makes you want to keep coming back to watch and play the game. The American cricket experience may be humbling to him, but plenty of others are humbled to be on the field with him too.