Laughter is the best medicine

Imagine this: you are a little boy or girl and you absolutely adore cricket. You always get to watch on TV because games aren’t played close to you that often. But England are in town and you will finally get to go to your first live cricket game. You get up early, get dressed and you are at the stadium before the gates even open. When you finally get inside and as the Windies trot onto the field, you are dying with excitement to see one of your favourite players, Fidel Edwards, have a bowl. But something is not quite right, every time Fiddy E runs up, he kicks up dust. There’s lots of commotion as the outfield looks like a beach and the match is eventually abandoned after just ten balls.

Fast forward just over a year and this same stadium is back open for business with a better looking outfield but a pitch reminiscent of that one in the subcontinent where players were playing duck the short stuff instead of cricket. I don’t blame anyone for yesterday’s farce, playing so soon after the World T20 after both side’s dismal performance and the cracking final must suck. Both sides conspired to make the game more entertaining to watch and, with hardly anyone in the crowd, why should either side be bothered to perform? So then, the perfect plan emerged: umpires and players came together for what is possibly the most ludicrous and embarrassing games of cricket in recent history once again proving that T20 is not cricket. It’s entertainment. And while yesterday might not have been all that entertaining, it certainly was laughable.

Long gone are the glamour days where the West Indies cricket side inspired a collective feeling of hope. The ghosts of heroes past now linger only as stadium names while the supporters continue to loyally follow their team in the hope that their hero Gayle or a new found prodigy will come and lead them to unlikely glory.

While the players strike because of wage disputes and sponsorship issues, parents tell their children about the great Sir Vivian Richards or the more recent hero Brian Lara and dreams are ignited in that little boy’s mind of one day emulating the players he never got to see.

The sad reality is that the governing body in the West Indies have got it wrong just like every other cricket governing body in the world. We can complain all we want but that’s just the way things work, absolute power corrupts absolutely and despite the select few trying their utmost to resurrect the glory days, there’s no romance left in the so-called gentleman’s game.

Tagged as: joke, sir viv richards stadium, south african cricket, West Indies cricket