First day excitement at QP Oval

I’M no longer sitting in a hotel room at the Marriott Hotel, Invaders Bay. But I am at the Oval on Day One, waiting for a call from a man who doesn’t trust me, hoping he’ll have answers about a man I don’t trust, which may clear the name of a man no one gives a damn about. To distract myself from this uneasy vigil - and from the phone that never rings, and from the incessant drums, I lit a cigar and opened the horseracing papers and reflected. Most great sportsmen love golf. Why? Because it is seen as a means of escaping from the clutches of their wives and children especially on weekends. Cricketers and Golf have now become commonplace, both sports need proper use of the wrist and some eye co-ordination.

In fact some will argue that one is five days (if his team is good or bad enough), the other plays for four (if he is good enough). No game designed to be played with the aid of personal servants by right-handed men who can’t even bring along their dogs can be entirely good for the soul. Wait. Let me take a glass here (unique in all sports that, a sleazy little conspiracy to subvert from within the scoring honour system of this self-consciously honourable pastime) and start over. Here are the first three lines of the first three books celebrating the game of golf and cricket - and not even Barbra Streisand celebrates herself as tirelessly as golf celebrates itself  - that I happened to flip open while researching this brief: This First day of cricket began the way a round of golf begins - with much excitement, good intentions, and aspirations that were, frankly, grandly delusive.

I managed to find time on the first day amidst all the buzz as to how the four truants (Gayle, Sarwan, Bravo and Lara) would be treated to speak with an elderly gentleman called Ralph in the Jeffrey Stollmeyer Stands who stated he could have been a great cricketer, if he was born in these times, because nobody ever cared enough for him. He never had all the coaching, the training, the video footage, the modern technology, these West Indians now have. But he bemoaned, the defeat, discouragement, disillusion, thy name be sport. And that’s the devout speaking. Another guy who was a golfer called Singh, but believes his swing could have made him a great West Indian player spoke with me. Was he bitter?

Sure, I’m bitter. Golf was thrust upon me as a lad of 11, conscripted by my short-fused, club-flinging old man to drag his rattling bag, heavy as a rolled-up carpet, through long, hot thirsty afternoons and into languid sundowns, waiting, waiting, waiting outside the 10th hole. But something heroic there is in belting long fly balls, not to mention probably sexual as well; somehow I overcame both early trauma and left-handedness and sidled into teaching myself the game ? God knows Dad wouldn’t - as a righty, in my early twenties. Or the sub duffer’s version the game, flailing at scabby old CroFlites with rented tin clubs on the scorched hardpan of bring-your-own-scoring-pencil public courses, alongside my shirt-less, etiquette-challenged peers.

The cricket though was tense on Day one, people came expecting a lot and they were not dismayed. The pressure was to prove too much for some of the West Indies Players making their return to the West Indies Team. Chris Gayle and Ramnarine Sarwan, were guilty of playing hookie yet again, it seem that neither player can control the sudden urge to follow one of the leading Calypso of 2005 If ah hook, say what, that is not yuh business, if ah is a mook, say what, that is not yuh business. Brian Charles Lara in the end class is class this is a batsman that has not played competitive cricket since February, but he was able to turn on the magic on Friday as if he never left the game. Some say the crowds was disappointed and that Shivnarine Chanderpaul would not have received rapturous oblations, by Trinidad and Tobago’s crowd has always had a short memory, anyway I am by the phone still waiting on a call from a man I don’t trust.