Nicolas Pooran, Hetmyer and the moderns of the West Indies T20 professional game have a long history going back to the late 1920s. Then, Learie Constantine of Trinidad, went to Nelson, a club team in the Lancashire League in England, as its professional. The league consisted of Saturday afternoons single-innings matches with each of the amateur teams having one professional whose job it was to win the game.
The big-hitting, spectacular fielding and lightning-fast bowling of Constantine adorned and transformed the league’s appeal: sounds familiar?
Constantine was followed in the league by many of the greats of generations of West Indian cricketers. George Francis, Headley and those of the 1950s-1960s, including Worrell, Weekes, Gilchrist, Hall, and Sobers.
In the 1960s-1970s, Roy Marshall, Sobers, Gibbs, Lloyd, Kanhai, Murray later on Holding and Roberts, Marshall, Garner, Richards, Bryan Davis, Fredericks, Gomes, John Shepherd, Boyce, Franklin Stephens and several others trekked to professionalism and decent wages.
Tony Cozier noted the absence of these players deprived the regional tournament of the best WI pros and the young players of learning from the best. But even before this stream of West Indian exports, the amazing Charles Augustus Ollivierre from St Vincent, who toured England with the WI team of 1900, was recruited by Derbyshire and played for that county’s first team between 1903-1907.
His highest score was an astounding 229 against Essex. Sydney Smith, a white Trinidadian remained in England after the West Indian unofficial tour of 1906 and played for Northamptonshire.
Australia’s Sheffield Shield also attracted great West Indian players, Sobers, Kanhai, Hall and later on the likes of Garner and Richards. Ignominiously, because of the racist policies of apartheid, a group of West Indian “rebel” players not able to resist the lure of big money played in South Africa: Rowe, Julien, Kallicharran, Croft and others sold their skills to the highest bidder.
The decisive turn to professionalism by West Indian players occurred when the West Indian captain, Clive Lloyd, took the bulk of the world champion Test team into the Kerry Packer World Series Cricket.
The West Indian board sought to protect what it considered the best interest of WI cricket by going along with its ICC partners to ban its “Packer Players”–“Everything Under the Sun”.
Sparrow was unforgiving so too were the majority of WI cricket supporters: “They want money like me (Stollmeyer) and Gerry (Gomez) so they won’t play again in this country,” was Sparrow’s heavily supported response. “If they get money we can’t control them, a West Indian cricketer must always be broke is then they does bowl fast and make pretty stroke …”
The moderns of the T20 franchise tournaments led by Gayle, Bravo, Pollard, Narine, and Russell, followed by the generation of today amongst whom are Pooran and Hetmyer, roam the cricket-playing franchise competitions in the WI, India, Australia, Pakistan, now the USA.
The bald facts are: the world is a different place; what massive numbers of fans want out of cricket today is very different from yesterday; what the players require are significant shares of the hard dollars they see circulating; their appreciation of the value of nationalism in aspects of 21st-century life is way down the line of importance in making the best decisions for themselves and family.
In the previous eras, the franchise-like tournaments were restricted to a short period of the year; today they are constant, not yielding to Test and representative cricket schedules. West Indian Test cricketers earn paltry sums compared to those of their counterparts in India, England and Australia.
The distribution by the ICC to the boards of those countries exceeds by many multiples that were received by Cricket West Indies making CWI unable to compete against the franchise holders to keep their best players in the traditional format. Stollmeyer regretted his inability as chairman of the WICBC to perceive and to utilise the power of the great West Indian teams to demand a larger slice of the purse and to make maximum commercial use of the West Indian glory of the period; he did not appreciate what Prof Rex Nettleford called the “West Indian Cultural Genius” as being of commercial value.
With the vast majority of the West Indian players coming from backgrounds of low income and with their best options to secure their financial future within the franchise leagues, their selection of the professional T20 option over Test cricket is an easy choice, whether you or this writer, whose navel string is buried in Test cricket, likes it. Examined at another level, the West Indian franchise players are doing what the governments, the business entrepreneurs and corporations have failed to do in significant measure over decades, that is to develop their skills and appeal which are viable and profitable in the international marketplace.
Into the future, while Test cricket will remain an option for Australia, England, India, Pakistan and possibly South Africa and New Zealand playing against each other with more than triumph within the boundary at stake; Cricket West Indies is challenged to keep the traditional game viable for young West Indians.
Tony Rakhal-Fraser is a freelance journalist, former reporter/current affairs programme host and news director at TTT, programme producer/current affairs director at Radio Trinidad, correspondent for the BBC Caribbean Service and the Associated Press, graduate of UWI, CARIMAC, Mona and St Augustine–Institute of International Relations.