No, The Buggles weren’t in town, but strange things were happening
on Guyana’s airwaves as I drove to the stadium. Stephen, my driver who was
in his early 20s, had switched on the radio almost as soon as I got in,
and much of our conversation centred about what West Indies needed to do
to stay alive in the competition. Even as Colin Croft and friends nattered
on about the conditions, Stephen fretted about the toss. The sky above was
slate-grey and the sun couldn’t be glimpsed. “You don’t want to be facing
dat Malinga in dem conditions, man,” he told me, tapping on the steering
wheel with his knuckles as the commentary team built up to the toss.
His anxiety was palpable. “Dat Daren Powell be de only man bowlin’ well,”
he told me. “He got good pace. We have a guy like Malinga … Fidel Edwards,
but he no have the accuracy.” I recalled the press conference on Saturday
and the searching questions that Croft had asked Brian Lara about the
tactics and team composition against New Zealand, criticism that had been
echoed by Michael Holding. What did Stephen think of Lara, and the former
greats slating him?
Caught between two stools, Stephen chose to do the splits. “Croft from
here [Guyana], man,” he said quietly, “but Lara great player. If he mek
runs, we win.” As we talked, the expert voices floating through the car
speakers engaged in analysis of their own. Croft isn’t an easy man to
silence, but a few seconds later, the station announcer managed to do just
that.
With a serious-sounding voice, he spoke of how the cricket talk was
“light-hearted chat” before the game began in half an hour. He then went
on to say that they were going back to the original programming, the
Mahakali religious group and their chants. The toss? Clearly not as
important as some bhajans about Hanuman.
Stephen swore out loud, and I felt like accompanying him. The stadium was
in sight, but now I wouldn’t know what had happened at the toss till I’d
walked through the security checks and into the media enclosure. As for my
driver, he’d have to fret and fume for half an hour before the religious
chants that he didn’t know or care for gave way to the highpoint of his
day. Karl Marx spoke of religion being the masses’ opium at a time when
organised sport was a distant dream. Had he been alive today, with a
once-great cricketing entity’s pride at stake, he might have revised his
views.