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Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Cricket in calypso

by

20110604

In­di­an Ar­rival Day cel­e­bra­tions took place last week and in the fol­low­ing weeks, be­gin­ning here in Trinidad and To­ba­go at the Queen's Park Oval yes­ter­day, In­dia's crick­et team is once again here to do bat­tle with our re­gion­al team.It was at the Queen's Park Oval back in March and April of 1971, af­ter his se­ries-win­ning scores of 65, 67 not out, 124 and 220 in these two match­es that prompt­ed the Lord Re­la­tor (Willard Har­ris) to pen what has be­come an im­mor­tal ca­lyp­so clas­sic, al­beit at the ex­pense of the los­ing West In­dies team, a trib­ute to In­dia's bat­ting mas­ter Sunil Gavaskar:

A love­ly day for crick­et

Blue skies and gen­tle breeze

The In­di­ans are await­ing now

To play the West In­dies

A sig­nal from the um­pire

Play is about to start

The crick­eters come on the field

They all look very smart ...

It was Gavaskar

We re­al mas­ter

Just like a wall

We couldn't out Gavaskar at all, not at all

You know the West In­dies couldn't out Gavaskar at all

As with many of the over 140 doc­u­ment­ed crick­et-themed ca­lyp­soes dat­ing back to 1928, his­to­ry jumps out at the lis­ten­er as events of the day are brought to life in mu­sic and song, where most of them trum­pet the vic­to­ries and he­roes of our Caribbean crick­eters. Prob­a­bly the most fa­mous of those in the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry is the Lord Be­gin­ner's (Eg­bert Moore) Vic­to­ry Test Match alias Crick­et Love­ly Crick­et...at Lord's where I saw it, which her­ald­ed the West In­dies his­toric de­feat of the Eng­lish team at Lord's in 1950.Then there was Crazy's (Ed­win Ay­oung) 1975 hu­mourous ca­lyp­so where he con­jured up im­ages of 'googlee', which re­mind­ed him of his Chi­nese her­itage, and third­man, leg break, long leg, short leg, fine leg etc. Su­perBlue's (Austin Lyons) Sig­nal to Lara even won the road march ti­tle in 1995.

Ca­lyp­so and crick­et go hand in hand with West In­di­an cul­ture and can be con­sid­ered as two of the strongest ties that bind us to­geth­er (and some­times di­vide us) as a re­gion. In fact our crick­eters were dubbed from ear­ly on as 'CA­LYP­SO CRICK­ETERS' re­flec­tive of our rhyth­mic ex­u­ber­ance and our flashy brand of play. To the world, the re­gion's na­tion­al an­them is David Rud­der's Ral­ly Round the West In­dies which is played be­fore the start of in­ter­na­tion­al games.To di­gress, it is sad that to date there is no cen­tral ca­lyp­so archive in Trinidad and To­ba­go where, like no book can, our his­to­ry can be heard through the lyri­cal con­tent of count­less ca­lyp­soes of the day. We prob­a­bly will lament the not-too-far-off day when an­oth­er coun­try might lay claim to such an archive.


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