Eyes off the ball

Lunchtime Medley spills forth a range of short pieces on West Indian cricket. The editors' choices appear to be governed by a stick-of-the-pin principle - a random selection of poets and peasants alike.

This anthology boasts two Nobel Prize winners: Vidia Naipaul and Derek Walcott. The essay by the former can and will be dismissed as simplistic babble. The latter attempts an appreciation of the best book on cricket, Beyond a Boundary by CLR James, but drifts into romantic space - his eyes well off the ball, like any pedestrian who speaks or writes about cricket.

The editors of Lunchtime Medley, Mervyn Morris, a Professor Emeritus at the University of the West Indies, and Jimmy Carnegie, an archivist par excellence, who died in 2007, choose Eddie Baugh, a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, and Neville Cardus to open the innings. Baugh offers us a toast to a New Zealand cricket team on a visit to the West Indies, but his front and back feet are rooted in the crease as he slashes at every ball that comes his way. A deserved duck.

At the other end Cardus approaches the spirit of the life and times of Learie Constantine, whom he describes as a primitive force with animalistic instincts: "He played like a sort of elemental instinctive force." And he ends with words encompassing a colonial statement about the black savage on his way to civilisation.

Cardus describes an innings of Constantine's for West Indies against Middlesex at Lord's: "From the press box I looked down on this fury of primitive onslaught, beautiful if savage and violently destructive." This was not the black savage in the game of cricket but an advanced citizen on his way to challenging the racial configuration of the Empire.

James had his work cut out to transcend such racial platitudes. An essay or two from him in this book are but a sop to placate our expected hostility to Cardus, one of the great cricket writers of the day.

I invite readers to page 154 to discover a direct and hostile opposite, an article by Tim Hector, a fine Antiguan writer, who holds forth on Viv Richards. Hector links Viv with Bob Marley, a duet wailing in their different disciplines, a revolutionary presence among Caribbean people, and quotes Bob in song, a heaving and articulate expression of Richards at his best in and for West Indian cricket: "Bars could not hold me/Force could not control me/Now they try to put me down/But Jah want I around."

In spite of my sharp criticisms Lunchtime Medley is useful, a point from which West Indian peoples can ascend, or like Haitians move on in a descent into barbarism. Haitians do not play cricket.

Lunchtime Medley - Writings on West Indian Cricket
edited by Mervyn Morris and Jimmy Carnegie
Ian Randle Publishers £13.95