Also last week, I heard an interview that made me cringe with disbelief. On Sports-Max, the television station based in Jamaica, Clive Lloyd, the revered former West Indies captain, suggested that “Chris Gayle should apologise to WICB!” As Gayle himself asks; “Apologise for what?” The following words have been indelibly inked into my cricket psyche until the day I die: “We are not beating the rest of the world because of West Indies Cricket Board, but despite WICB!” They were said to us and to anyone who asked about West Indies cricket back then, by none other than Lloyd! Did he have to apologise for that? Should he have? Not to my mind. What he said was exactly fact! Those words rebounded to that all-conquering WI cricket team from Lloyd, Deryck Murray and Viv Richards too. “Forget the Board,” Viv would also say, filling the dressing rooms, “We are here to play and win. Let’s do those!” We almost always did. When I started Central High School in 1966, I remember hearing my grandfather, a Wapishana Indian, who had survived the real, tough Guyana bush, living to 92 years old, also saying something that I would never forget as long as I live; “People do not change. They adapt to what is going on around them like chameleons!” If this is not the case here, then I must be crazy!
West Indians have very short memories. There is even the suggestion in T&T that we all have a “calypso mentality.” We eat, drink, are merry and party hearty. Those are all that really matter. Like most everywhere, I too have great respect for Lloyd. Like most players of that time, he also aided me much, including helping me play cricket for Lancashire County Cricket Club thus enhancing my cricketing education, both cranially and physically. However, he is just plainly wrong here! It was Lloyd, who captained most of that same world-beating team, except only Alvin Kallicharran and Larry Gomes when we defected to Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket (WSC). WSC offered us much more money than WICB could have. For more than a year, early 1978 to early 1979, we were all banned too! Note should be made that, that all-conquering West Indies team (1970’s/1980’s) only came back together as a unit in 1979, successfully too, to defend ICC World Cup Championship won in 1975. I never heard that Lloyd had apologised for that either. Like now, no apology was necessary back then. Like Gayle now, all that Lloyd and the rest of us were doing back then was firstly saying to WICB that we were not getting the working conditions, remunerations and respect that we also deserved. Read Full Story
