No reason for celebration

Brian Lara has made intermittent appearances for T&T, but when he has, it has counted © Getty Images

No one can party with more uninhibited exuberance than Trinidadians - or, to be strictly and politically correct, Trinbogonians. They have made it an art form and called it Carnival.

There were no more than a few dozen of them at Carlton Club last Sunday but the celebrations were in their best bacchanalian tradition. The cricket team had just secured the first-class West Indies' championship, appropriately under the sponsorship title of the beer of Trinidad, after a lapse of 21 years, a compelling reason to spread joy. There was even more cause since Daren Ganga, the T&T captain, and his team did so by coming to Barbados and not only beating their arch-rivals, as they had to, but thrashing them as they had never before thrashed them.

There was no one better to stress what that meant than Brian Lara, whose phenomenal achievements for the West Indies had sustained the cricketing fervour of his countrymen through the lean years but who had never before been able to savour such a moment himself. "To beat Barbados in Barbados, to literally take the Cup off their shelf is an amazing feeling," he said in the thrill of the victory. "On the international circuit, playing Australia and beating Australia is real cricket to me. On the regional scene, playing Barbados in Barbados and beating them is what it's all about."

For one reason or another, Lara has not been around much to endure the disappointments of the past couple of decades for he has made only intermittent appearances for T&T. For Ganga, revitalised bowlers Merv Dillon and Dave Mohammed and the up and coming youngsters under them, the triumph would have been even sweeter. There have been hints-in the successes of their age-group teams, in their upset victory in the regional one-day tournament two seasons ago, and in the emergence of quality young players-that the trophy famine would soon end. T&T's real test now is whether they can sustain the momentum, whether more prizes will follow as a matter of course.

Inconsistency is presently the curse of West Indies cricket, for teams, players and administration, and this overdue achievement won't mean much if it turns out to be just a flash in the pan. The Trinidadians must remember, full well, that the euphoria at capturing the one-day President's Cup in 2004-without Lara, Dillon and a few other stalwarts-utterly evaporated when they lost every match in last year's competition. They should be forewarned by the experience in the last three years of first Barbados and now Jamaica, who plunged from Carib Beer Cup and Challenge champions one season to wooden-spooners the next. And, even on the way to this success, T&T were themselves almost undermined by wide fluctuations of form from one match to the next.

Bowled out for 162 and 88, they were humbled by 86 runs by the Windward Islands in Tobago only three days before they arrived to dramatically turn things around against Barbados, who had a similar reversal in form after beating the Leewards by 173 runs one weekend to losing by 264 the next. Nor, this championship aside, can Trinidad and Tobago, or West Indies, cricket be satisfied with what has been a most unsatisfactory season.

Administrative gaffes, so typical of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), resulted in a seriously disjointed programme. The first four matches were contested in late November and early December and the remainder of the round-robin Cup suspended for another month. Now the semi-finals and final have been postponed for another two months. Only in the West Indies.

Last weekend's decisive match between Barbados and T&T was originally scheduled for the first weekend in December but was deferred because of the weather. Yet when, six weeks later, not a ball was bowled between the Windwards and Leewards at Mindoo Philip Park in St Lucia, a ground notorious for its swamp-like character, the fixture was simply abandoned. The two so-called "small islands" combinations have always perceived themselves as the cinderellas of West Indies cricket. This simply reinforced their opinion. Captains, managers and players were not only put out by such disruption. The annual complaints about the facilities at some venues were commonplace.

Clearly, the staging of Cup matches on inadequate club grounds contribute to club-standard cricket of which, by every reliable report, there was an abundance, most blatantly in the fielding where it was not unusual to read of ten dropped catches an innings. The most worrying aspect of the tournament for the long term was revealed in the list of those atop the batting and bowling tables. They were, almost exclusively, the usual, well-known suspects with barely a fresh, new name among them.

The leading 15 scorers were, in order, Ryan Hinds, Daren Ganga, Narsingh Deonarine, Dale Richards, Travis Dowlin, Ramnaresh Sarwan, Shivarine Chanderpaul, Shane Jeffers, Krishna Arjune, Alcindo Holder, Denesh Ramdin, Brian Lara, Carlton Baugh, Wavell Hinds and Marlon Samuels. Only Richards and Dowlin, both nearing 30, Jeffers, Arjune and Holder of that lot have not played Test cricket. None seem likely to. The bowlers with more than 15 wickets were, in order, Dave Mohammed, Rawl Lewis, Ryan Austin, Ian Bradshaw, Gareth Breese, Mahendra Nagamootoo, Omari Banks and Fidel Edwards. Same story. Austin is the only odd man out.

And what of those returning from the tour of Australia in October and November, needing to either dominate at this level or reestablish their credentials? Dwayne Bravo, the most exciting young cricketer the West Indies have produced in years and the standout in Australia, found himself in such a batting slump he averaged ten, in spite of his 50 in his last innings. An old habit of aiming almost every shot to leg seems to have resurfaced. Marlon Samuels and Devon Smith, two highly talented and promising batsmen as teenagers, are now mired among the also-rans. Dwayne Smith continued to smite run-a-ball, chance-filled innings of no lasting substance. Tino Best and Jermaine Lawson, two recent Test bowlers of genuine pace, if limited success, were actually dropped by their territorial selectors.

It was, indeed, an historic tournament for T&T but it did nothing to advance West Indies cricket.