#BTColumn – Cricket as a socialising tool

Thirty-five years or so ago, I created a series of radio docudramas on our (Barbados or the Caribbean) relationship to cricket. The underpinning idea I brought out in the series was that cricket as sport and national or regional obsession, was indeed far more. It was in fact, truly a socialising tool with values and norms generationally passed down through the ages…through classes and races, confirming and often consolidating the status quo.

This past Tuesday night, the Frank Worrell Memorial Lecture had as its guest lecturer, our Prime Minister Mia Mottley speaking on Cricket lovely cricket: more than bat and ball. As usual she regaled the audience with humour and story…but there was one of her pronouncements which caught my attention.

She told of a promising cricketer, a young boy whom she had the delight of seeing play. Greeting him she told him that she could get Sir Gary (Right Excellent) to train him or show him a thing or two. The youngster, having the understanding and graces of a pea I imagine, “pooh poohed” the idea in such an unholy way, that our PM was moved to educate him in her many other languages … (The point needing to be made…many of our youth cannot fathom the value of our elders nor of excellence).

This story reverberated in my mind. The child simply did not understand the very tenets of the game…as a socialising machine. It hit home for me: cricket was nothing if not a socialising agent.

The rules of cricket were created by a people who understood its purpose, who thought their social system was best and wanted or needed it to be reproduced. We as a people inculcated that, then turned it upside down, crossways and backwards…earning the title: Caricature Cricketers.

In excavating though, we did not change the rules of the game, nor did we change the inherent nature of the game as a socialising tool of a specific status quo…perhaps that is why there’s a seeming waning interest in our national sport…I don’t know. 

Perhaps we can look at the values perpetuated deep in the psyche of this sport and if I may, its greatest proponents, and ask…can we afford them to be attributes of a past Barbados or Caribbean? Does throwing away many of our ties to the past and many of the instruments which had us tethered to a status quo that did not always serve us, mean we have to throw away the best of us as well?

We as a people have always been one to think deeply before acting. If we align ourselves with this game, let us ensure we reproduce it generationally, marking it with a stamp of excellence…cricket synonymous with Bajan or Caribbean excellence!

This column was submitted as a letter to the editor. ]]>