Enlarge imageBy John Mehaffey
BASSETERRE, St Kitts (Reuters) - Overcoming isolation and size, tiny villages scattered throughout the Caribbean have spawned magnificent cricketers ranking alongside any of their contemporaries from more privileged backgrounds.
One typical outpost is Troumaca in St Vincent, birthplace of Michael Findlay who kept wicket 10 times for the West Indies in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The tale of the second person only from St Vincent to represent the West Indies is a triumph of will and a slice of social history from a time when cricket was the undisputed unifying passion in the English-speaking islands.
At the age of 63 Findlay, the chief executive officer of the St Vincent World Cup local organising committee, is lean, fit and still an active player.
Advertisement starts
Advertisement ends
He speaks of the past with nostalgia but without sentimentality and the less glorious present with clarity and insight.
"Where I came from we played all the time, using everything that was around us," Findlay said in an interview with Reuters. "There was a lime tree and an orange tree. The lime tree would never flourish. We used the lime to bowl.
"We used grapefruit, we couldn’t afford balls. When we did get a real cricket ball, we covered it in soft, white grease. We would then wrap the ball in banana leaves to preserve it.
"We used coconut branches as bats. We would use a cutlass to shape it into a bat. We just used what we could."
Like small boys everywhere, Findlay wanted to be a fast bowler. Instead he followed the example of his father and became a wicketkeeper.
Unlike the four big cricket centres of Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Guyana, which hosted international teams, St Vincent in the late 1950s and early 1960s was on the periphery and the young Findlay had to develop his skills by himself.
FITNESS FANATIC
He read books by the England and Australia wicketkeepers Godfrey Evans and Wally Grout. The school, where his uncle was the games master, posted Marylebone Cricket Club coaching charts on the wall. Above all he practised fanatically.
"It was the kind of commitment that borders on insanity," he said. "I was a fitness fanatic because that was what I wanted to do. We have a kind of commitment and a kind of discipline that is difficult now.
"Cricket was a passion, all the people in our village, even the ones who didn’t play, would encourage us. I practised a lot, I watched a lot. At the age of 11 I was playing for my village, when I was 16 I got in the St Vincent side."
Findlay wanted to be more than the best wicketkeeper in the West Indies. His ambition was to be the best in the world.
To achieve that, he first had to win recognition from national selectors who held an inbuilt bias against the smaller islands.
"We couldn’t get as much attention in the lesser developed countries," he said. "We had a lot to prove to people."
Findlay won over the knowledgeable Barbados crowds when he stood up to the stumps to fast bowler Grayson Shillingford, while playing for the newly combined Windward and Leeward Islands’ side. "People then said I was the best."
He was selected as understudy to Jackie Hendricks for the 1968-9 tour of Australia and New Zealand where he saw his captain Garfield Sobers bat for the first time against Western Australia.
"Tony Lock was bowling. Sobers hit him for four. Lock put in another cover fielder. He bisected them for another four. I sat fascinated by the great man."
Findlay played two tests in England in 1969. His remaining eight were at home and he concluded his international career as second keeper on the triumphant 1976 tour of England where he saw at first hand how much cricket mattered to the Caribbean diaspora.
SLOW DECLINE
"We were tired and slumped in the seats on our bus before travelling to a match. Then a West Indian woman came up to us and said: ’If you people knew how you make us feel. You make us feel 10 feet tall. We can walk down the street in London and face anybody’."
The 1976 tour was the start of a prolonged period of West Indies’ ascendancy. But for the past 15 years, West Indies cricket has been in a state of slow decline with the occasional false dawn.
"Today it’s football, there are so many distractions," Findlay said. "Many villages don’t have cricket pitches. It’s a different generation, we had values, we had discipline, we had families together, we had brotherhood.
"People today want something faster. Cricket was intense, it’s not so any more. That has been our problem.
"But I always tell people that, in a way, we as administrators have to accept some of the blame.
"We thought there was an assembly line of talent. Cricket is much more scientific now, we didn’t have a programme in place, we didn’t have the money.
"We don’t have professional cricket, Trinidad has a semi-professional league but the gap now is very wide. We have to narrow that gap."
