THE EDITOR, Sir:MANY FACTORS have been attributed to the decline of West Indies cricket. It is also said that we, as Caribbean people, are all individual pundits of the "game of glorious uncertainties".
In my view a major cause, if not the main contributing cause of the decline of the Windies cricket team, is the lack of pride. Now it is said that pride comes before a fall; so what is the pride of which I speak? It is not an individual pride like the pride of place or face but a collective pride like the pride of race.
Back in the 70s when cricket rose to its pinnacle, Black Power was at its zenith. The work and philosophy of Marcus Garvey and his UNIA had been the launching pad for such radically militant movements like The Nation of Islam, The Black Panthers and the Stokely Carmichael-produced Black Power philosophy that fuelled these systems. The black man was 'in effect', to use the very words of KRS-1, a black rap activist.
One could see in men like Holding, Richards, Lloyd, and Marshall a fighting pride that went to the point of radically arrogant. This, with the excepion of, possibly, Lara, is missing from this current bunch of Windies cricketers. With all the 'influx' of foreign coaches and specialists from England and Australia there is stil no change.
Maybe we need to put aside cricket for a while and teach these youngsters the philosophy of men like Carmichael, Garvey, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Maybe then we might see a change in attitude.
I am, etc.,
N. ALEXANDER
nic7lex@hotmail.com
