It was a typically balmy August night in Chennai. I was slouched on a bean-bag, with my mobile phone, a water bottle, and a hand-towel for company, watching India play - or bully, if I’m being perfectly honest - West Indies in a Test match at Antigua. The only light in the room came from the TV screen.
I don’t even know why I was watching the game. It had been just about a month since India’s heartbreaking exit from the ODI World Cup, and the wounds hadn’t healed yet. All cricket in its aftermath felt a little dreary, a little cumbersome. No boundary or wicket would pass me by without invoking flashbacks from that wretched afternoon in Manchester. I started looking for ways to stay away from cricket. Matches in the Caribbean start at odd hours, because of the time difference, but a chaotic sleep cycle took that excuse away too.
This game wasn’t inspiring much interest either. India’s batting was good, bowling exceptional, and West Indies just looked all at sea, ill-equipped to handle anything coming their way.
A few seconds after Jasprit Bumrah made a mockery of their best batsman’s stumps, my phone rang. I don’t usually receive calls at 2 a.m. The phone number showed a prefix of +1, tracing the call to US. I picked up, and was greeted by an uncle who I hadn’t spoken to in a few months. “Knew you’d be up, watching the game.”
I found the timing of his call funny, because this man had introduced West Indies cricket to me when I was a kid beginning to fall in love with the game. Any conversation about cricket was an excuse for him to talk about Viv Richards and Michael Holding; about Greenidge’s 214 at London or Roberts’ 7-for at Chennai. He is a generally convivial man, but never more so than in a discussion about cricket.
That night, his voice didn’t quite have the usual crackling timbre. I checked if everything was alright and received a simple, but curt, response. “Watch that last dismissal again.” The despair was palpable over thousands of kilometres of optical fibre cables and radio-waves. A few minutes later, while we were still talking and doing that fan thing of dissecting techniques of international cricketers, Bumrah sent another set of stumps flying. He sighed, said “Okay, I can’t watch this. I’ll talk to you later,” and left.
West Indies were shot out for 100 before long. He probably watched it till the end, but either way, I could partly feel his pain. It was great to see India play well, but it wasn’t all that fun watching West Indies get bulldozed like this. Even in the middle of a frankly exhilarating spell of fast bowling by Bumrah and Mohammed Shami, we wanted West Indies to show some resistance.
Last Wednesday, as Kemar Roach stood at the top of his run-up, waiting to bowl the first ball of cricket’s staggered resumption, I was reminded of that conversation. I texted him, checking if he bothered to wake up early to catch the game. The response was prompt and in all-caps. Both of us were as excited for the return of international cricket as for watching a young, talented West Indies team take on a far stronger England team. But we weren’t alone, not by a long shot. Like us, many others - some in front of their televisions, some in the commentary box holding a microphone - were rooting for the men in maroon.
There is a reason why. The 70’s and 80’s generation watched West Indies battle all kinds of discrimination and administrative roadblocks to emerge as the most dominant and admired team this sport had seen. My generation, in turn, was brought up on stories from that time, told with equal amounts awe and jealousy, about this band of people from faraway islands who frequently reduced opponents to blobs of gooey mess. The post-lunch hour at extended family gatherings was often reserved for elders to share their favourite memories from stadium trips to watch that West Indies team live.
By the time I started watching cricket, Viv Richards had retired, but there was a new king in town. On the centrefolds of the Sportstar magazine, Brian Lara was giving serious competition to darling of the country Sachin Tendulkar. I remember coming across numbers like 375 and 501 on those pages, but was too young to truly understand their absurdity. Fun fact: many years later, I downloaded EA Sports Cricket 07 on my computer and tried to score 501 on amateur-level difficulty. I couldn’t even get close.
I was in early primary school when India toured West Indies for a Test series. Tendulkar was the captain and fast becoming our generation’s first sporting hero. My memory from that time is predictably faint, but I remember watching a few games with my uncle and the rest of the family. One such night, India were on the cusp of a win, left to chase a ridiculously low score in the last innings. And yet, everyone in the room sat tense as India began their chase, not quite sure whether even 120 could be scored on a bouncy pitch against Walsh, Bishop, and some newcomer with a funny-sounding name. Through the television, the crowd at Barbados seemed boisterous too, evidently sharing the belief of my family in Delhi.
India lost, and that match is now famous as the lowest point of Sachin Tendulkar’s captaincy career. But the only vivid memory I carry from that night, 23 years ago, was the sheer confidence with which everyone around me believed West Indies would successfully defend 120.
Since the millennium turned, and especially after their last batch of great fast bowlers retired, that confidence has been hard to come by, even for their most ardent fans. They have had good players, and Brian Lara played like only Brian Lara could until he retired, but the air of invincibility they carried was gone. Briefly even, they were the whipping boys of Test cricket. Sachin Tendulkar’s final Test is, and should be, remembered for all warm and emotional reasons, but my lasting memory from that entire series is how easily West Indies seemed to fold up and allow BCCI to stage their grand, spotless farewell party. It disgusted me to see the Windies give Tendulkar a guard of honour in the first innings of his last Test. For God’s sake, at least pretend that you want to make him bat twice!
There are many reasons why West Indies have suffered in Test cricket over the last two decades, and it won’t be fair to reduce such a complex topic to a couple of lines here, but in all that turmoil, they most important thing they have lost is the grit which once made them special and near unbeatable.
It’s great to see them vibrant and successful in T20 cricket, but Test cricket is where the party’s at for insufferable romantics like me and my uncle. We live to see the red ball rising from the pitch, going past a batsman’s helmet at 90 miles per hour, instilling a temporary fear of leather. We clap from our rooms when batsmen succeed under hostile conditions. West Indies’ record in Test cricket, especially in the last 15 years, has been abysmal, and that’s putting it kindly. Their good days are rare, and on their bad days, they often look so hopeless that it’s difficult to even watch.
That night in Antigua, they crumbled in an all-too-familiar manner. That it came just five months after a resounding series victory against England made it even worse, because we were now hoping for a resurgence. For perspective, that win against England was only West Indies’ third Test series win, since 2003, against a team not called Zimbabwe or Bangladesh.
When such a remarkable event happens, a natural effect is to get carried away with the draft. But for some, there is an equal sense of foreboding, a fear of darkness lurking behind the sunshine. When Bumrah and Shami made the Windies batsmen dance about on the crease, some of us suspected the worst.
Test cricket needs West Indies to bring the party home. When they play good, competitive cricket, it is almost always edge-of-the-seat stuff. It’s what makes them box office, the most fun team to watch. The revolution must start with their bowling attack, and after ages, they seem to have one that can challenge good batting lineups consistently.
Even the prospect of a contest is exciting enough to make a 58-year-old Indian man from Dallas wake up at 5 a.m. Imagine the scenes if they can get their act together. Just take a deep breath and imagine the scenes if West Indies have a good day today and win the first Test of international cricket’s return after a painfully long break.