The following column on Dennis ‘Sprangalang’ Hall, who passed away on Friday 2 October 2020, was first published in the Sunday Guardian on 30 January 1994: “Why you want to write about me?” he asks suspiciously on the telephone. “I doh like publicity. I’s just ah ordinary man making mih …

There is something poignant about what Steve Alvarez said as he walked away from politics. He had wanted ‘a new Trinidad and Tobago, one where the races unite under one political organisation to seek that which is best for our nation’. He’d built his Democratic Party of Trinidad and Tobago …

The West Indies has had a phenomenal number of exceptional cricketers in its history. The captains have been mostly middling. I restricted the playbooks to those of Frank Worrell, Richie Benaud and Mike Brearley simply because they were known as thinking men—able in both the technical and ‘man-management’ aspects of …

It was reported that during the 2019 ICC World Cup, the England team pulled up and did some soul searching. They revisited videos of sessions featuring themselves—not at play—but talking about their feelings. Their feelings. It takes a lot of courage to do that; courage and trust. I’m thinking here …

I’m trying to outline the philosophies that shaped the way three outstanding captains approached leadership: Richie Benaud, Michael Brearley and now, Sir Frank Worrell. Born in 1924, dead at 42 in 1967, Sir Frank was an outstanding citizen of the West Indies, whose stature transcended cricket. He began his international …

I had been reading Mike Brearley’s 1985 classic, ‘The Art of Captaincy’, and re-reading ‘Frank Worrell’, by Ernest Eytle. It struck me in both that in a sense, like Richie Benaud, they did not become captains of teams, but rather, they moulded teams out of collections of individuals. In their …

Practically all the tributes that have congregated in memory of Sir Everton Weekes have come from cricketers and sports writers. They list his age, his career statistics and his batting style. Some have recounted an encounter. Cricket reporters tend to give the numbers; cricket writers are more interested in telling …

Cricket, like everything else, goes through troughs and peaks. Teams have floundered and risen. West Indies had malingered in the state of ‘potential’ for a long time, relying on talk without action, but perhaps with the world in one of its states of upheaval and change, it might be that …

“[…] We are at the brink of self-immolation; do we want to continue blithely polluting the space that sustains us? We’ve seen how a few months of reduced human activity has given the Earth some breathing space. “[…] Local debates over the fate of existing monuments have exposed the insidious …