Best: Berry wide of mark for praising WI style, yet blasting Lara

History, we West Indians are acutely aware, is written for the most part by the victors. So, although the West Indies have only beaten England seven times in the last 11 series since the end of 2000, in mid-April, British cricket writer Scyld Berry brought the late Tony Cozier to the front of my mind.

Full 20 years after Brian Lara returned to the summit of cricket’s Everest, Berry opted to carp rather than clap. Writing in the Telegraph on the anniversary of the feat, Berry dismisses the unprecedented achievement of reclaiming the world record as the result of selfishness.

“Brian Lara’s 400* was historic,” the headline reads, “but so selfish I left the ground.”

My biggest criticism of the doyen of Caribbean cricket writers is the unfillable hole he left at his passing. Had he not left us mere weeks short of eight years ago, he would have, I feel, eloquently and convincingly demonstrated the self-centeredness of leaving the ground.

But who nowadays leaps to the defence of West Indians who come under unwarranted attack from the outside world?

And there are plenty of outside worlders who share the selfishness view. Two of them are former Australia captain Ricky Ponting and Michael Vaughan, the England captain whose bowlers were put to the sword by Lara in Antigua.

Ponting, who led his team to 48 Test wins in his six years in charge, was not at the ARG during the epic knock. But he has publicly argued that, since Test cricket is about winning matches, captain Lara was wrong to focus on the world record.

“Their whole first innings might have been geared around one individual performance,” Berry quotes him as commenting, “and they could have let a Test match slip because of it. They ran out of time in the game. That’s not the way the Australian team plays.”

Agreed. We can go back to Barbados in 1995 when Steve Waugh controversially claimed a catch off Lara at a critical stage of the match. Replays subsequently showed that the Aussie skipper had grassed the catch.

Australia won that game. And the series. And the decades-long West Indian domination of Test cricket effectively ended with that series loss.

But we really don’t need to go that far back to find out how the Australian team plays. Newlands in 2018 leaves little doubt about the lengths to which they are willing to go to win a Test match.

Vaughan, Berry reminds us, also publicly contends that Lara erred in not pushing for a win.

“He (Lara) had actually done us a favour,” wrote Vaughan, the first England captain in a generation to win an Ashes series, “because if he’d wanted to win the match he would have declared long before he did.”

By the start of the 2003/2004 series, the win/loss record between the two countries read WI 41 versus England 25. Overall, the Caribbean side has won 48 Tests, England 45. If we start the count with John Goddard’s side’s first decisive series win in England in 1950, the record reads WI 43 versus England 37.

So, Lara and his West Indians really had little to prove by winning the match. And everything to gain by returning the world record to its rightful owner.

Besides, Berry knows that winning at all costs is simply not the way we West Indians play. The 2017 list of his top 40 cricketers of the last 40 years shows three West Indians in the top ten.

Number One is Vivian Richards. It is true Sir Viv loves to win cricket matches and does not give a fig about records.

But above all, the Master Blaster is a cricketing entertainer par excellence.

Viv, writes Berry, “averaged 50 in Tests and did much to win the first two World Cups for West Indies—the first with his fielding, the second his batting—but it was the way he did it. Indomitably, superbly, uniquely.”

About Lara, number nine on the list, he begins this way:

“His 375 and 400 against England were exercises in record-breaking, and by batting on so long—especially the second time—he made it harder for his team to win those two Tests.”

Berry’s got, it seems, a big bumblebee in his bonnet!

And is the former Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack editor losing his memory? Has he forgotten “Did I entertain?”—the three words the three-time West Indies captain, who “played more brilliant innings than any other left-hander since Garfield Sobers”—left us as his Parthian shot?

Surely the soon-to-be-70-year-old still remembers the events surrounding Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket? That it was to Clive Lloyd’s Caribbean cavaliers that the media mogul turned in his bid to wrest audiences away from the monopolistic grasp of cricketing officialdom?

Why? Because of, as a well-known West Indian cricket ad says, the way we play. The evidence? Let us today begin a brief chronological walk down memory lane and remind ourselves…

Lord’s, 1950: Those two little friends of mine, Sonny Ramadhin and Alfred Valentine, put England in a spin, condemning them to a 326-run defeat.

Appropriately, the sobriquet of the man who memorialized this famous win in song was Beginner. That first Test victory in England sowed the seeds of something special.

Still to come were Frank Worrell’s 1963 and Sobers’ 1966 3-1 wins in England. And ahead also was the notorious comprehensive 1976 “grovel” cutarse Lloyd’s cavaliers put on Tony Greig’s troops. That marked the start of a run of six series without an England win, including the famous mid-80s Whitewash and Blackwash in consecutive years.

But already in the late 1960s, following in Beginner’s footsteps, Kitchener and Sparrow were presciently singing thus:

“England must understand/we are the champions” and “Australia, yuh lorse, the West Indies is boss…”

There was doubtless already something in the way we play…

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Earl Best

Earl Best taught cricket, French, football and Spanish at QRC for many years and has written consistently for the Tapia and the Trinidad and Tobago Review since the 1970’s.
He is also a former sports editor at the Trinidad Guardian and the Trinidad Express and is now a senior lecturer in Journalism at COSTAATT.