While walking around the Aranjuez Savannah track on my way home one afternoon, I watched bemusedly a group of men playing an entertaining game of windball cricket on the pitch.Suddenly with a Dwayne Bravo-style stroke the batsman hit the ball out of the boundary and it landed near my feet. I picked up the ball and threw it back to the bowler.The muscle memory of tossing the ball took me through flashbacks to the time when my friends and I were engaged in some fierce epic cricket wars of our own.We worked for different business houses throughout the country and the friendly rivalry among us in the business world spilled over into the sporting arena.We started off playing football in the Queen's Park Savannah. When the score line went into double digits against our opponents, I was accused of using semi-professional football players on our team and it was alleged that some of them played for a league side because of their overly-developed thigh muscles and stamina.
Then they decided on cricket. We won our first cricket game because of our attire. The field of battle was at the Bend, Guave Road, near Williams Bay, Chaguaramas. While most of our opponents wore short pants, we had on track-pants.The field was bounded by vegetation bristling with thorns, sharp spines and pickers and our match was played on loose gravel which worked to our advantage.When a ball was struck into a picker patch our opponents would proceed with extreme caution gingerly through the thorny thicket to retrieve the ball for fear of ripping exposed flesh.Their running speed was also reduced on the loose gravel because they didn't want to skin their knees. After a match we would usually have to pick green, spiny balls that stuck to our track-pants and shoes.For psychological warfare we began playing a special music compilation before our matches guaranteed to annoy our opponents.It began innocuously with the Mighty Duke singing the refrain Are you ready? ad nauseam, then launching into hard driving rock music like Queen's We Are the Champions, Pat Benatar's Hit me With Your Best Shot, Twisted Sister's lyrics If that's your best, your best won't do and the screaming guitars of Blue Oyster Cult's Veteran of A Thousand Psychic Wars.
There were some hilarious moments when we fought our pitched battles for cricket supremacy.I experimented with using some baseball pitches such as sinkers, change-ups, curveballs and sliders when it was my turn to bowl. I even tried drinking pacro water from Tobago before a game on one occasion.The person who brought it for me asked if I knew what it was used for. I told him I was using it to withstand the intense heat during the game, and maybe it was psychological, I didn't wilt under the blazing sun at all.We tailored our tactics to suit our opponents. One of our opponents was huge, built like a sumo wrestler. After hitting the ball and running a few times he would be blowing hard and sucking wind and we would be chuckling making remarks like "Bring the oxygen tank!"Our bowlers would deliberately bowl a slow ball to him and let him hit it and eventually run him out when he began puffing between wickets.When wickets were falling too fast on our side, I was brought in to slow down the pace. I wore knee-pads under my track-pants and also a groin-cup to go down on one knee, block the wicket with my body and voop. Everyone could feel our opponents' aggravation at my batting technique.
There was a natural athlete on our side who was so frustrated at being bowled out by a clever delivery that he destroyed his bat smashing it into the wicket only to realise it wasn't his.We even learned some physics in the process like what happens when a smaller mass collides with a much larger mass.A team-mate was at the crease in the Queen's Park Savannah and he hit the ball hard skying it very high in the air. Two fielders ran pell-mell to catch the ball. The smaller of the two probably weighed 130 lbs and the other fielder was a heavyweight at 215 lbs.Their eyes were glued to the rapidly descending ball and they did not call out who was to catch it. When they collided the smaller fielder was sent sprawling on the grass with a look of indignation on his face. His partner apologised profusely to him while we were splitting our sides with laughter.
The same "big-breed" player almost performed a professional wrestling "clothesline" technique on himself in the same match.He had a panel van and left the rear door open facing the field. He was running full-throttle to intercept a ball speeding towards the boundary near his van.He was so focused on chasing down the ball that he barely saw his panel van's open door ducking under it just in the nick of time avoiding the throat slam.Later in the game when it wasn't going in favour of our opponents, we heard some loud thudding sounds on metal. It was coming from the heavyweight player banging his panel van's door with his fists.A friend joked maybe we should forfeit the game and leave early, those fellars were taking the game too seriously.We lost some and won some matches. We savoured our victories over our opponents because they were much sweeter.To lose to a kicks side like ours that didn't practice or take the game too seriously drove our opponents crazy. Some friends from the rival team told us ruefully that their captain who was related to them, wanted to win so badly that he dropped them from the team and replaced them with players who played in windball cricket tournaments. They complained that the captain was the worst player on the side and why he didn't drop himself.With that ball toss the wonderful cricket memories came rushing back.Maybe I could chook fire and stir up a hornet's nest, get the competitive juices flowing again and go issue a cricket challenge to our rivals like in those classic kung-fu movies: "So! I hear your cricket kung-fu is good! Right! Let's see how good it is against my cricket kung-fu! Let's get it on!"
