Gallo Images Even the Windies' classy Darren Bravo has opted out of the series in South Africa for personal reasons.The Windies are here! Well, the extras representing the once-proud nation that used to terrorise opposition teams with a combination of swagger, style and a taste for the sensational.
Those days are long gone now, and that is a shame for world cricket.
I remember first seeing the Windies in person, back in the days of Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh and Carl Hooper. And, of course, one Brian Charles Lara.
They were like the Harlem Globetrotters, even if the majority of the cast were in the autumn of their careers. The tourists had a warm-up game in Maritzburg.
Their opener, Philo Wallace, was a supersized hammock of a man, and, as he and Ambrose took a stroll to the nets, excitable youngsters gathered around them like moths to a considerable flame.
Ambrose, who invented menacing cool, long before Chris Gayle started batting with his sunglasses, took one look at the autograph-hunting pack gathered at his ankles, and put up one giant mitt.
“Wan atta time,” he warbled in his Antiguan manner.
And, just like that, an orderly queue formed, just thrilled to be in the presence of one of the eternal greats. Similar anecdotes shared by journalists across the globe have the same thread to them. The Windies had an aura about them, even as they started their decline from their once-invincible days.
There was something that made you pull for them, because they played cricket in a manner that is usually foreign to South Africans.
A natural game without fear of consequence or failure. “See da ball, lash da ball, boy!’’
That mentality was ideal for the emergence of T20 cricket and, more to the point, the Indian Premier League. That accelerated the beginning of the end of the revival of Windies cricket, because the passion of any potential star was lured by the power of the dollar.
No nation has been as badly affected by the shortened but highly lucrative version of the game than the Caribbean islands. Shivnarine Chanderpaul is somehow still standing, the last thread connecting the defiant past to the debatable future.
A gargantuan claim for lost revenue looms large from their Indian masters, the untidy result of an aborted tour there recently. That there was a tour to South Africa hung in the balance for a while but, thankfully, sanity prevailed and players and administrators found some common ground.
But the squad that is here is nowhere near a reflection of the considerable muscle the Windies still have at their disposal. The likes of Chris Gayle, Dwayne Bravo, Kieron Pollard and André Russell, who added a touch of class to the RamSlam T20 Challenge, will not be part of the Test series.
Through a combination of injury, preferences and priorities, those absences have robbed the tourists of a competitive unit.
It may be World Cup season, but Test cricket deserves better than this.
Even the classy Darren Bravo, younger brother of Dwayne, has opted out for personal reasons. We will have to cast a bleary eye to the feisty proceedings between Australia and India to get a dose of proper five-day fare.
For all intents and purposes, we have a Windies lite-side on these shores. Imagine, for a second, if the Proteas had gone into a Test series against Australia without Messrs Duminy, Du Plessis, Philander and De Kock, because they suddenly didn’t feel like putting their bodies through the rigours of T20 cricket and five days of toil.
The show will go on, but it is not the real deal.
Sadly, Windies look like losing their big names to the fistful of easy dollars in the IPL.
Inevitably, they all make their way there, “wan atta time”.
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