DISPATCHING DR HILAIRE’S LONG HOP!

Dr Ernest Hilaire, chief executive officer of the West Indies Cricket Board, has publicly confirmed that the members of the West Indies Cricket team possess less formal education than the members of any other Test team. Why should anybody take offense at this statement? Indeed, what Dr Hilaire is doing, albeit unwittingly, is paying tribute to one of the great strengths of West Indies cricket!

The truth of the matter is that cricket is almost exclusively the game of the social elite in every single Test playing country, with the admirable exception of the West Indies! In England, the original home of cricket, football is the game of the working-class, rugby is the game of middle class, and cricket is the game of the upper-class elite. In such former British colonies as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the highly intellectual game of cricket is the preserve of the wealthy, leisure class. And in South Africa, cricket is the game not just of the elite, but of the still narrower "white" elite.

It is only in the West Indies that the masses of working class people have been able to take hold of the game of cricket and throughly democratise it. As a result, the West Indies Cricket team, since at least the 1950's, has tended to be dominated by young working-class men, who, in spite of their undoubted mental sharpness, were less likely to have access to tertiary level education than their wealthy, elite counterparts in England, New Zealand, India and Pakistan.

Cricket is one of the most intellectual of games, and requires of its practitioners a capacity for sustained deep, sophisticated thought and calculation. And from the early 1960's right through to the 1990's, the elementary and secondary school educated black and Indian working-class young men of the West Indies demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were the intellectual superiors of the wealthy, university trained cricketers of all of the other Test playing nations.

If therefore we ever come to a stage in which the West Indies Cricket team is dominated by university graduates, let such a development not be a function of social elitism, but rather, the ineluctable consequence of having established a socialist society in which all the sons and daughters of the working-class are guaranteed access to tertiary education.

Dr Hilaire also made the very noteworthy disclosure that almost half of the cricketers on the West Indies under 19 team could barely read or write!

But what seems to have escaped Dr Hilaire is the very obvious fact that these illiterate young men would have competed against and bested thousands of highly literate and well educated young cricketers in order to make it onto the West Indies under 19 team! Furthermore, these semi-literate West Indian youth cricketers recently competed against the cream of the youth cricketing world and acquitted themselves extremely well. It is clear therefore that these illiterate young cricketers possess substantial innate mental and intellectual capacities, and are therefore not incapable of being taught to read and write!

The question we should therefore be asking ourselves is - why do we remain so content with a deeply flawed educational system that is persistently failing tens of thousands of innately talented working-class boys and girls?

The culprits in all of this are not the young cricketers - not even the underachieving ones who currently play for the senior West Indies Test team. Rather, the real culprits are to be found in a self-centred, decrepit, visionless leadership class, that populates virtually every institution of "official society" in the Caribbean, inclusive of the West Indies Cricket Board.