Within a short span of time, two documentaries on cricket have emerged. The first is James Erskine’s Botham-dominated From the Ashes; the second, Steven Riley’s Fire in Babylon, an examination of the West Indian cricket story. While the account is colourful, powerful and passionate, more time might have been spent on the Frank Worrell years. The omission of any deep discussion of the 1960s, other than to dismiss it as charmingly defeatist, is a pity, given how critical Worrell’s brief stewardship was for the game.
Riley’s style fuses interviews, narrative and music. Groundsmen, fans, and very heavily dreadlocked Rastafarians keep company with the cricketers. Perhaps the most impressive cricketer interviewed in the film is the bludgeoning opening batsman Gordon Greenidge. Even in retirement, he is gritty, angry, determined. When he took to the field, his bat became something of a club to be borne against his opponents. For the most gifted of all – Sir Vivian Richards – the bat was a sword he put his opponents to.
A rather large target of the documentary is the transformation of the cheerful ‘calypso’ cricketer less prone to winning than entertaining into a ruthless outfit of aggression. The transformation took place after the bruising encounter with Australia in the series of 1975-6. Having pulverised the English tourists the preceding summer, the demon speedsters in the form of Lillee and Thompson repeated the effort against the West Indies. With the cherry flying past faces and caps came the now common practice of sledging. The calypso cricketer was duly given his marching orders.
From that moment on, the pace battery became the weapon of choice (if, indeed, you had the choice). The fearsome power of the West Indian bowling attack banished spinners to the fringes. With the emergence of World Series Cricket, speed and confrontation became the modus operandi of cricketing sides. Batsmen began to fill the casualty wards. As the speedster Andy Roberts claimed: ‘It’s not that we wanted to hit people. It’s that they got hit.’
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