Special Interests / Caribbean Cricket

Cricket in the Caribbean is in the blood...

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Caribbean

Professional West Indies Cricket has been at a low ebb for fifteen years with the demise of the once all powerful regional side, but there is still an underlying passion for the game bordering on religious zeal around most of the islands.

The game is still played by youths in dusty city backstreets, on country roads, and stroll down beaches anywhere and you’ll more as likely see lads wielding bits of broken palm branches as makeshift bats. Cricket is in the blood, though it may not course as feverishly as former years.

Hosting the Cricket World Cup jamboree in 2007 was hardly a success either (through no fault of the local authorities it should be said) but at least there’s a strong infrastructural legacy of impressive new stadia now in place. They just need a successful team to fill them.

During Test matches at home or overseas, you’ll hear radio commentary in the most unlikely places, such is the game’s influence on people - from farmers glued to their old transistors on remote mountaintops to ladies interrupting their treatments in downtown beauty salons. A West Indian ground in full spate with their team in the ascendancy is an intoxicating spectacle, if somewhat rarer these days - what the game actually means to the people of the islands and the diaspora, its cultural and historical context, is brilliantly portrayed in the film Fire in Babylon, released in early 2011 in the Caribbean and the UK and already attracting global attention. If nothing else, it seems destined to become an inspirational piece of work for a new generation of cricket lovers.