Fear Only Mediocrity, Brave Brian

31, May 2000
We began the May columns with a piece that pleaded with the Caribbean community to stop the conspiracy to "kill" Lara. Circumstances have forced us to return to the subject of Lara once again, so we end the month of May as we began.

Imagine, Lara turns up in Barbados to be among the members of the team engaging Pakistan, and our media buffs begin to question whether his presence is a distraction to the team? Lara indicates he is ready to join the team on its coming tour of England this summer, and is selected to so do. Immediately, Messrs Holding and Becca clinging to their crazy perception of Lara as an incorrigible rogue and notorious underminer of past captains object to his selection.

They demand Lara be forced, all over again, to prove his capabilities and readiness in the upcoming Busta Cup before being selected. Can you imagine the level of pettiness to which these two have sunk? No past or present West Indian cricketer, who took a break from the game for whatever reason, was ever forced to subject himself to re-examination.

Croft, on the other hand, is of the view Lara must be made to understand in no uncertain terms that, during the English tour, he is not the captain and must accept authority. Good Lord! It is not "authority" we must be fearful of Lara not accepting, but "mediocrity".

Mediocre leadership of a mediocre team will never have problems projecting their simple-minded existence. It is when Olympian excellence steps in that all the fears and insecurities of mediocre performers come to the fore and seek to form solid barriers against the instilling of excellence. It has nothing to do with insularity. It is alleged that Lara as captain got as much horrors in bowling from Dillon as he got from Rose.

In the past teams of excellent performers such as Greenidge, Haynes, Lloyd, Richards it was a question of dealing with equal titans, and captaincy found it easier to function. In the time of Frank Worrell, captaincy was by far the easiest historically. It is all about psychology and prevailing culture. One is tempted to quote CLR, "What do you know about cricket, who only cricket know?".

In our November 23, 1998, column titled "Frank Worrell and Caribbean society", we said the following about West Indian cricket leadership: "To be a leader of stature, one must not only possess the capacity to motivate; one must be a change agent that embodies the new demands of the times and the particularities of the vision for the future. A great leader must, through his activities, transform how people see themselves and eventually affect how they behave. A great leader touches people's lives in ways enduring and indelible. Frank Worrell was one whose mere presence seemed to inspire others to attempt Olympian heights...

"How are we then to throw up great leaders today given the objective, vulgar materialism that prevails? The old days of gentlemanly passion and social graces in sport have given way to what appears to be crude and bombastic attitudes.

"Brian Lara himself is the greatest manifest symbol of this uncertainty, this duplicity between sublime cricket values and the hard-nose business ethic, the dichotomy of the Old World and the New. But the cross signals from all over the Caribbean may surely send this young man mad.

"The modern, professional game of cricket is marketed around the projection of key products. The marketing of WI cricket revolves around products such as Ambrose, Walsh, Hooper, Chanderpaul; but mostly around superstar Lara.

"The WICB claims it is no longer about control, or that it seeks to diminish the concept of control. But it places a businessman in charge and immediately he is trapped between the culture of the Board that still prevails... and his own understanding of the demands of the modern business environment.

"When Sir Frank led the team on and off the field there was unison in terms of how the region perceived and envisaged the game. This fact would have provided a nurturing effect on his development as a great leader.

"The progressive tendency has, as its mission, the building of a West Indian team of modern professionals whose trade is playing cricket, whose cutting edge of market competitiveness revolves around its stars and superstar.

"In that context, the nature of this trade will and must serve to define the nature of the Board that administrates and controls its future. Can Lara fulfil the mission? Will he ever be allowed to attempt it as he tries to better his own demons? Or shall we mow him down with our inherent contradictions?"

Since then we were clear that Lara was most of all a victim, caught up between two worlds and that the resulting, bigger, objective contradictions had to be tackled seriously in the course of building a team for tomorrow

We were insisting the Caribbean society had to develop a new sense of purpose and a collective vision of itself in context of the present world if Lara and others were to be ever successful in transforming West Indian cricket.

Even as recent as May 1, we ended our column by insisting "we need a cricket captain who understands the politics and history of West Indian nationhood, who believes and stands for such nationhood in all its integrity, and is prepared to fight anybody, including the board of management, to get all that is necessary technically and otherwise to elevate and bind this sense of nationhood through this glorious game of bat and ball and character."

This is why we must commend Prof Hilary Beckles for the analysis in his piece "Lara and the Caribbean Imagination" delivered last Monday at the Sir Frank Worrell Memorial Lecture in Barbados and reported in the media. Listen to what Beckles was reported to have said:

"Lara is the first major transitional figure that typifies the Caribbean sports person in the new global circumstance... He is tugged, torn, pulled and divided (as all of us are) by these contradictory forces of the present time... No West Indian superstar has ever had such a deeply divisive impact on the public imagination as Lara... It is now global open season on Lara, this genius of our post-independence civilisation... we have to distance ourselves at this time from all... surface issues that relate to personality and focus on the underlying issue: which is primarily the remaking of Caribbean identity under radically changing global circumstances..."

You see, we were already there quite some time now. So our message today to "Bri Bri" is: Fear no authority, fear only mediocrity! Stop vacillating about your function and mission, and Bunty's undying dream! Enjoy your life and your cricket for the two are inseparable!

Youths typical of our classical tradition like Sarwan and Hinds and Joseph are already there awaiting your partnership at the other end of the wicket to help them set the fields of the world on fire. Stop apologising for who you are! Look your detractors straight in the eye, go brave and walk good!