I wish to reg­is­ter my feel­ing of re­vul­sion at the ac­tion of West In­dies wick­et­keep­er/bats­man De­nesh Ramdin up­on reach­ing his cen­tu­ry on Sun­day in the third Test in Eng­land. While I ap­plaud his reach­ing the mile­stone, the note he held up, which read "Yeah Viv talk nah," di­rect­ed at for­mer great Vi­vian Richards, was ut­ter­ly crass. One is left to ques­tion Ramdin's state of mind since the note was clear­ly pre­med­i­tat­ed.

When he made his de­but in Sri Lan­ka in 2005, none oth­er than Richards picked him as a fu­ture West In­dies cap­tain. Such was the tremen­dous promise Ramdin dis­played in his for­ma­tive years. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, his bat­ting av­er­ages of 23.84 from 45 Tests and 20.51 from 89 ODIs bear tes­ti­mo­ny to his con­tin­ued fail­ure to de­liv­er on that promise. So one can un­der­stand Richards' frus­tra­tion.

His dis­mis­sive re­sponse to Ram-din's con­tu­me­ly was rem­i­nis­cent of the way he dealt with bowlers dur­ing his il­lus­tri­ous ca­reer. He put Ramdin's ef­fort in­to per­spec­tive by re­mind­ing him that it came in an in­con­se­quen­tial match, say­ing sim­ply: "I set my stan­dards a lit­tle high­er."

Ramdin has now, through his own wit­less note, put him­self un­der more pres­sure to turn in con­sis­tent­ly good per­for­mances for the rest of the Eng­lish tour. Should he fail, his note should say: "Viv, you had a point."

Arif Rah­man

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