A word on the whys (3 January 1999)

3 January 1998

A word on the whys

By Earl Best

Yuh could make track, the wisdom of the ages tells us, "fuh gouti to run but lappe does make he own track".

Bearing in mind Denis Solomon's warning in last Sunday's Express that poetry can give insights but proverbs can only pretend to do so, let us amend that old saw to suit the circumstances of the West Indies cricket team now struggling to stay afloat in South Africa.

Yuh could make track fuh Cronje to make runs but Lara have to make he own luck.

Luck. How many times have we heard that in the last week especially? Lara bad lucky! And how many of us have tended to take the line of least resistance and concur?

Well, it has to stop somewhere. We are going to have to bite the bullet some day and not in the general terms in which the West Indies Cricket Board column so often does.

So I want to take a somewhat different look at the West Indian captain's dismissals in this series so far, particularly in his last three innings.

In Johannesburg, the battle to find his form did him in. Twice.

But move ahead to the Second Test in Port Elizabeth.

In the first innings, Lara would have done well to get out of the way of a snorter that took the edge on its way to slip. In the second, he was batting beautifully, looking, for the first time in the Tests, something like the Lara of 1994, when something snapped. That momentary lapse in concentration may have cost us the Test and the series.

But it wasn't luck, good or bad; it was a lack of restraint, typical West Indian sloppiness.

Because, say what you like, if you're the best batsman on the team-and the West Indian captain into the bargain-you simply cannot give your hand away. When your team is one down and struggling to keep its head above water in the second innings of the second match, suicide, not a sensible option at the best if times, is simply out of the question. The whole line of leaders from Worrell through Sobers and Lloyd to Richards and Richardson knew that as a matter of instinct.

Lara, for all his talents as batsman and leader, still does not. He proved it with that awful shot in Port Elizabeth. And if more proof were needed of his innocence, it came in the first innings at Kingsmead. Leadership, successful leadership must demonstrate restraint. And when the team of which you are leader has been led to believe, genuinely, that the modern batsman is an entertainer, that the modern batsman can consistently hit across the line with impunity, you have your work cut out for you.

Restraint. Look again at the tape of Lara's 39 at the end of the second innings in Port Elizabeth. Although the knock was liberally sprinkled with boundaries, it was literally only once or twice that the skipper was seen to be lacking in restraint. One might have got the impression, watching it live, that the collapse of the innings around him to the point of hopelessness had somehow liberated him. But a review of the tape showed that it was mere illusion. He remained in full control of himself for most of the time, the aggression that saw him savage Alan Donald being no more premeditated than the assault on the South African bowling for which he and Shivnarine Chanderpaul combined between lunch and tea on Monday at Kingsmead.

Which is why we need, he needs, to stop and think about the meaning of the manner of his second innings dismissal.

You might argue, as he tried to do, that he did nothing wrong, that he played a controlled shot on merit to a ball that was there to be hit. You would be wrong. The sheer professionalism of the South Africans, the willingness to spend long hours practising rarely used skills means they need only half an opening to make a breakthrough. He did not keep the ball along the ground, gave them their half of an opening and paid the price.

It was not luck, not bad, not good. Think back to the two decades of success under Lloyd and Richards. Was the line-up of GC Greenidge and DL Haynes followed by IVA Richards, HA Gomes, CH Lloyd, AL Logie, etc, really more talented than Sobers's array of Conrad Hunte, Easton McMorris, Rohan Kanhai, Basil Butcher, Seymour Nurse and Sobers himself and the rest? Was it not the Packer-inspired loathing of self-immolation, epitomised in the granite solidity of the opening pair, that made the essential difference between consistent victory and brilliance in defeat? How is it that we were not "bad lucky" then?

Think of Sobers nursing his cousin David Holford through an unbeaten 274-run sixth-wicket stand at Lord's in 1966. Or of the great all rounder doing it again with Wesley Hall in an hour and a half long partnership against England at the Queen's Park Oval two years later. Who remembers luck, good or bad? What sticks in the memory is not the attacking shots but the resolute defence, the commitment to occupation, the cast-iron determination not to get out.

Or closer to the present, just look at the highlights of yesterday's play. Hansie Cronje having declared that there would be no compromise, there was none-and no half-chances either!

So Lara needs to look both at the highlights of yesterday and the films of yesteryear. All of us who are hoping to effect a turnaround in West Indian cricketing fortunes do. But Lara needs to see them over and over in his mind's eye. He needs to find within himself once more what Michael Manley calls "the relentless concentration of the true professional".

He needs to re-read Manley's A History of West Indies Cricket where it says that "the recently displayed ability to come back from the brink of defeat is not, in my view, only the calypso spirit yielding to discipline. It is also an uncertainty of identity now replaced by the confidence of self-knowledge. The West Indian teams believe in themselves; they know they can do it; now it is never over until the 'fat lady sings'...."

And he also needs to hear-and never to heed it when he does-all that foolish talk about how "bad lucky" he is.

Source :: The Trinidad Express (https://www.trinidad.net/express/)