Geof BrownOUR INVESTMENT in cricket makes it more than just a favourite game of the nation. Baseball or basketball for the US, ice hockey for Canada, have very different meanings for their countries. For although like cricket those games engage national attention and concomitant passion, they do not engage the collective national psyche. By that I mean that the pride and self-esteem of a nation is not subject to comparison with the proud exploits of other nations.
That may explain why the US makes so much news and national pride out of their achievements in Olympic games. They are pitted against other nations on the world scene in those games. So the collective psyche of the West Indian peoples (at home and in the diaspora) is taking a heck of a beating as our team gets demolished in Australia.
Allowing for a negligible minority who are disinterested or indifferent, our people, with a strong psychic stake in the West Indies cricket team performance, need to know the real story of its failure. And we are not getting the real story. If a usually well-controlled and productive person has a nasty fight at home and then messes up at work that day, we tend to make allowance. Especially when we know that the real story is not the work situation but the problem back at home.
The technical competence of our cricket team and the virtues or lack thereof of the captaincy and the coaching, cannot be the real story. A team that can produce more than a century and a half from its pair of openers as well as a brilliant and almost effortless century plus from its leading batsman is not an incompetent cricket team. Those scores were against the same teams which now reduce our team to shambles. A captain fresh from victory in local test cricket cannot be a total disaster as is apparent in the case of Adams.
What is the real story? Let me illustrate. In the sociological and social-psychological literature on groups and organisations, relationships on groups and organisations, relationships between the formal and informal structures are often explored. A formal organisational chart, for instance, will show a CEO at the top of the pyramid and a junior secretary at the or near the bottom. But if the junior secretary is having a clandestine affair with the CEO, an informal chart would show the junior close to the top of the heap in terms of power and influence in the organisation. Why the junior can get a senior and productive executive fired by the CEO is where the real story lies.
Take a different illustration. When I was a youngster and my father a school principal, he had on his staff a very efficient but obstreporous individual. She managed to foment multiple disharmonies, factions and conflicts. After she was eventually fired for misconduct, the school settled into a place of harmony. I have since seen this type of scenario many times both in the social science literature on group functioning as well as in my own practice while working in and managing organisations.
This brings me to the Brian Lara effect. Undoubtedly Lara is a brilliant performer like the teacher of my boyhood experience. But what is his effect on the team and in the team? On the face of it, we have a player who appeared to sabotage his captain (Walsh) then resigns under a cloud, then turns in a current performance of horrible inconsistency. Is this the kind of person who will enhance harmony in the dressing room? You be the judge.
We need to understand that the real story is not what we are seeing on the cricket ground. The relationship between team members, captain and coaching as well as managerial staff are far more powerful explanations of the West Indian team's failure than their productions on the field. Stories are seeping out about conflicts between top brass in the team, about the indisciplined late-night behaviour of a young, capable but failed team member.
That's not even touching the published story of Brian Lara's reported amours with a girlfriend. Let's stop looking in the wrong place for answers: the symptoms are not the causes. Is there any journalist of skill, courage and honesty to help us get the real story?
FOOTNOTE
In my column of January 12: "Crime: dealing at the surface," I suggested that the Constabulary Communications Network (CCN) could give far more helpful information to alert the citizenry in crime prevention. This week in my area two ladies lost their cars at gun-point, one at 8am and the other at 3pm. Word of mouth now is warning the neighbourhood. CCN, why can't you help to alert the citizenry to what you know better than the rest of us?
Give us behind the scenes crime patterns, not mere skimpy historical accounts. You owe us that much of the real story.
Geof Brown is an HRD consultant and part-time lecturer at the UWI, Mona.
