SPECTATOR SPORT
Caribbean princes
Frank Keating
THE DAILY reports from the Caribbean are somehow more gruesome than ever because we invested Master Atherton's young guard with such new-leaf and spring- time optimism. As with his predecessor Gooch, the only thing England's cricket seems remotely to get right is a staunch captain standing heroic as he surveys, 22 yards away in the other crease, the sham bolic wreckage of all his trust. And that's only to mention the batting. Even as we waved bon voyage in January, the accepted wisdom was that England sim- ply had to get in their retaliation first because the final two of the five Test matches were going to be no-hopers, in Barbados and Antigua — small seething cockpits, a concrete pitch, blinding light etc. The business had to be done in the first three matches. Such a challenging script has already been shredded with ignominy — to be sure, its updating allows only an English victory in the third Test in Port of Spain to prevent the modern equivalent of Blind Pew's Black Spot: a series 'Black- wash' of 5-0 for the West Indies.
So it is up to Trinidad to give England the rub of its verdant green. The first Caribbean Test match I ever saw was at its Queen's Park Oval and it remains just about my favourite foreign cricketing place now they've destroyed the Hill at Sydney. One evening during that first Test in Trinidad a decade or two ago, a press-box pal, Henry Blofeld, was mugged at gun- point as he strolled back to the city's quirky 'upside-down' Hilton Hotel. Eye-witnesses swear that even as a frightened Blowers hand- ed over the dosh he still could not help him- self saying to the crook, 'My dear old thing.'
A morning or two after that I left the cricket for a saunter, and suddenly there blew up one of Trinidad's glorious Techni- color thunderstorms. I ducked into a bright and welcoming little restaurant called The Tailpot for shelter and a quick lunch. Quick? You bet. The elderly, white-haired Trinidadian manager was zooming round the tables like billy-o, balancing plates and glasses and beaming goodwill. 'Anybody would think,' I remarked to him, 'that you were Macdonald Bailey.' He said, 'I am, as it happens,' and I stayed till tea-time, talking to Britain's fastest Olympic precursor of Linford Christie.
While Jamaica lays claim to a princely line — from Hedley to Holding — Barba- dos has the right to fancy itself most for its gift of cricketers (The Three Ws, Hall, Griffith, Marshall, the incomparable Sobers and a host of others). Sir Neville once said he always raised his hat when he passed a perambulator in Cleckheaton or Heckmond- wicke, for inside might well lie Yorkshire's, England's and the world's next left-hand slow bowler of genius. I make the same obeisance when seeing a pram in Barbados.
But, praise the Lord, it was Trinidad that gave the world Constantine. Oh, to be there this week to pay another pilgrimage to little Maraval and the remains of a shack up steep Morne Coco Lane where Lebrun and Anaise, both children of slaves, reared their boy, Learie, and taught him his cricket, which was so utterly and gloriously and instinctively inspired in its mingled skills and daring — a prophecy of the coming one day of Weekes and Worrell and Wal- cott and Sobers and Kanhai . . .
And Lara and Adams. . . for still they come, all zestful and unconquerable descendants of Learie — himself to become, of course, the first Negro peer in all history to be summoned to sit in the House of Lords of the United Kingdom, as Baron Constantine of Nelson and Maraval.
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