Tony BeccaTHE poor standard of batting during the recently concluded Red Stripe Bowl tournament continues to be the topic of discussion among cricket fans and quite rightly so. It was so poor, it was embarrassing.
There was, however, one other disappointment - certainly in Jamaica where the Zone A matches, the semi-finals and the final were played.
But for the opening match at Kaiser where the crowd was still not what it used to be, the spectators stayed away. It was almost empty stands everywhere - including for the matches involving the home team.
In a country in which cricket was once the king of sports in every respect, a country in which the game is still close to the people and a country in which the success of both the national team and the West Indies team is important to the people, the poor attendance was embarrassing. It was, however, not surprising.
In recent years, but for when the West Indies team is in action, spectator support for the game has been dwindling and apart from the rise in popularity of football, the consensus is that the game is suffering from the influence of American sports.
That, to an extent, is true and as some of them said recently, it must be difficult for the players, surrounded by empty stands, to motivate themselves to perform. According to those players, the board should do something about it.
The board and the territorial boards should really make a greater effort to attract spectators. The main reason for the decline in spectator support, however, is the poor cricket being played, more importantly, the poor standard of batting on display and in the final analysis, it is the players who must be blamed.
Batting, to many, is the heart of cricket, fans are attracted to the game, not so much to see great bowlers in action, but to see great batsmen parade their skill - to see, be it cover-drives, square-cuts, hooks or pulls, strokes of class. That is why when a day's play is over, or even during a day's play, fans talk not so much about a good delivery or a brilliant catch but about strokes - classic and exciting strokes.
Unfortunately, not only is there no great batsmen in this country today, not only is the region also suffering, but when it comes to strokeplay, to building an innings, there are hardly any good ones around. Today's batsmen either push and block or swing recklessly.
Without going back to the days of batsmen like George Headley and Kenneth "Bam Bam" Weekes when cricket was the big entertainment on a Saturday, fans used to flock to club matches up to a few years ago when there were batsmen like Easton McMorris, Renford Pinnock, Maurice Foster, Lawrence Rowe and Jeffrey Dujon around; and it was the same story at the regional level when the likes of Gary Sobers, Conrad Hunte and Seymour Nurse of Barbados, Rohan Kanhai, Basil Butcher, Clive Lloyd, Roy Fredericks and Alvin Kallicharran of Guyana and Viv Richards, Luther Kelly and company from the Leeward Islands were around.
In those days batsmen used to stroke the ball and score runs, and despite the rise of football and the influence of television, in spite of the many forms of entertainment now available, fans would turn up again if they were being entertained - if batsmen were stroking the ball and scoring runs.
Jamaicans still love the game of cricket, it is still dear to them, they still suffer whenever their team loses, and they have not abandoned the game. It is just that they no longer enjoy watching the batsmen.
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