Light! At last! As I watched an enthusiastic Alzarri Joseph (AJ) throw down short ball after short ball at Bangladesh’s Taskin Ahmed towards the end of Sunday’s post-tea session in the First Test in Antigua, that hard-to-stomach letter to the Wired868 editor came back to me. “I think this has …
Read More »Best: Close first-person encounters; when real calypsonians tell their own stories…
Shorty would be able to blame any negative feedback from Severe Licking on Baron. Or his informants, Bomber and Cypher. Gypsy’s troubles, however, are of his own making—in more than one sense! In his 1972 For Cane, the Little Black Boy singer complained that Ah really doh know how to …
Read More »Best: Insider women’s calypso stories and a sweet soca tale of a licking
Calypso has given us a handful of unforgettable female figures. There is, for example, Kitchener’s Flag Woman and Scrunter’s Woman on the Base, there is David Rudder’s Bahia Girl and Sparrow’s Winer Girl from Princes Town. Not one of those four has a name. But the women I want to …
Read More »Race and kaiso in the classroom: Kitchener’s ditty on little Black boys
Only a complete ignoramus! Or the kind of blindness that will not see! Tell me, how could even one person in Trinidad and Tobago actually entertain the thought that Aldwyn “Kitchener” Roberts might have been capable of such an abomination? Oh, what a country! In the days when Guy Harewood …
Read More »From Sparrow to Cro Cro to Machel: Best chronicles calypso controversies through the years
Emceeing the Revue Calypso Tent’s show in 1972, night after night, the Mighty Stalin introduced Kelvin Pope in the same way: “So, ladies and gentlemen, here without further ado is that four-king four-cup four car Duke.” Famously, of course, over the four years immediately preceding ’72, the Mighty Duke had …
Read More »RBCPL24: Will Amazon Warriors do double? Wired868 previews T20 tourney
For years, the Guyana Amazon Warriors were the bridesmaids of the Republic Bank Caribbean Premier League, the 12th edition of which bowls off in Antigua today. But after whipping four-time champions Trinbago Knight Riders in an anti-climactic final at home in 2023, Imran Tahir’s side seem poised to repeat in …
Read More »Trapped between ICC and deep blue sea; Lloyd lives to see Rudder’s harder tomorrows
“…a divided world that don’t need islands no more…” Can it be that Sir Clive Lloyd does not know fellow OCC awardee David Rudder’s pithy line from his 1988 Rally? Or is it that he simply wishes to ignore it? Or is the problem that Rudder’s 1996 Legacy prediction has …
Read More »Best: Inside protean heads; how lack of flexibility cost South Africa a T20 World Cup
June 29, the T20 World Cup final. David Miller, the finisher who came in at #6, has just given his hand away. Unnecessarily. Kagiso Rabada can win the coveted trophy for South Africa. True, he’s batting at #10. But cometh the hour, cometh the batsman. Even a #10 can get …
Read More »Best: Six-hitting team? Rutherford and Kohli showed how to bat properly in T20
A cricket match, a wise old scribe has written, is played in the minds of the opposing captains. Even in today’s changed world of T20 cricket? Hmmm…. Let’s see… For a full century after Australia’s 45-run victory over England at Melbourne in the first-ever Test match in 1877, the statement …
Read More »Where T20 cricket is going next; and how Sobers and Viv helped shape its course
At a critical moment in the final Super Eights game, one of the team coaches left the pavilion and came to the boundary’s edge. Bangladesh looked well on course to get the 115 runs they needed to stop Afghanistan in their semifinal-bound tracks. One point is enough to make the …
Read More »Is it time for older WI fans to shelve purity preference in cricket formats?
If, in the Lloyd Best definition, limbo is finding space where there is none, the cultural artform had its best ever day on the international stage in Sydney in January of 1993. No matter how many policemen Aussie captain Allan Border placed in the area between point and wide long-off, …
Read More »Pooran not batting properly? Really?! Start watching T20 cricket with 21st Century eyes
Brian Lara says Nicholas Pooran should be playing Test cricket for the West Indies. Not everyone agrees. But no one doubts that the prolific, talented almost-30-year-old left-hander is the West Indies’ best T20 batsman. By far. Pooran, though, is under attack—directly and indirectly. And whether the criticisms constantly levelled at …
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