From Alan Ross’ epic “Through The Caribbean” (published 1960) covering England’s 1959-60 tour in the era when print was king.
Throughout the British Caribbean, it is impossible not to be made aware, in back streets and beaches, on the vast savannahs or in rough village squares, of the West Indians’ surging affection for cricket and their astonishing natural skill. Stop the car anywhere at a haphazard pick-up game and you will see boys of all shapes and sizes hitting through the covers with joyous lack of inhibition and surprising correctness of technique. ‘They can pick them off the trees,’ it is said, and one begins to suspect that if a monkey from Cherry Tree Hill came upon a cricket bat, he too would drive off the back foot as a matter of course.
West Indians at net practice apply themselves to the business with an enchanting, gleefulness that never masks the essential seriousness of their preoccupation. When the first act on returning home of a player like Garfield Sobers is to get out in the street with his brothers and get them to hurl the ball down at him with an ashcan for a wicket, to accustom himself to the greater bounce and harsher glare, there can be no mistaking the gravity of the art. No torero devoted himself with a greater sense of responsibility to the perfecting of a technique on which his life depends.
Moreover, the background to the West Indian cricketer may be waving cabbage palms and the hypnotic beat of steel bands; his normally irrepressible and bubbling good humor may suddenly collapse in adversity into total dejection, but what remains consistent is that, on any and every level, cricket is his natural means of expression.
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