As it's the obvious thing, let's talk turnaround shall we?
So, what's your opinion given that, by all accounts, our defenders in the national under-23 team were not just turned around, but also turned inside-out by their Mexican counterparts on the way to a 7-1 thrashing on Friday night in the opening fixture of the final round of CONCACAF Olympic football qualifying?
Ah ketch yuh! And don't try to backpedal and claim you were thinking along the same lines.
From the time the West Indies start to have a few encouraging results, most cricket fans in the Caribbean waste no time in switching on the ignition and mashing the accelerator to board on that roundabout journey. It's almost as if we all look forward to speeding around the Queen's Park Savannah and getting right back to where we started.
Look, it's ridiculously easy to get sucked into the vortex of euphoria when the mood is as festive and celebratory as yesterday afternoon at the Beausejour Cricket Ground. A full house, noise and cheering aplenty, explosions of joy at the fall of every Australian wicket and a simmering sense of satisfaction that the home side, guaranteed at least a share of the series, had pulled the visitors back to a final total of 281 for nine when it appeared for most of their innings that they would have raced well beyond the 300-run mark.
And yes, there is cause for encouragement. There may be all sorts of references now to the top-ranked Aussies not being as strong as they usually are, that most of them would be drained after a long summer of cricket Down Under, and that the pitches so far, especially in St Vincent, represented too much of an adjustment from conditions at home, given that there was only a one-week turnaround (that word again!) from victory over Sri Lanka in Adelaide to clinch the tri-nation limited-over series and the first fixture of the five-match ODI series against the West Indies at Arnos Vale.
But let's be honest. None of that was being said with any regularity or confidence ahead of the first ball two Fridays ago. Seventeen years — yes, the first week of May will make it 17 years since that ground-breaking Test series loss to the Australians — of struggle has conditioned our considered reactions to an upward spike in what has generally been an era of depression.
Identifying only "considered" reactions is deliberate because that eliminates those who get high like a kite in the aftermath of those infrequent victories, only to sink into the pit of distress and bewilderment when the contemporary status quo is re-established. There have been so many false dawns in West Indies cricket since 1995 that surely it is not being negative, or pessimistic or overly cautious to suggest that determining whether the mythical corner has been well and truly turned will only be known in the fullness of time.
I suppose that's why Ian Bishop was so guarded when being prodded by an interviewer for ESPN television over the weekend to assess whether the performances against the Australians so far represented the resurgence that has been awaited for so long. You could almost hear the former Trinidad and Tobago and West Indies fast bowler groaning quietly to himself when all the battered clichés were being offered. From "turnaround" to "turning the corner" to "winds of change" blowing through West Indies cricket, the only thing left out by the Australian interviewer Anthony Howard was whether "happy days are here again!"
Bish tried his best to steer the discussion along a more temperate line (you can hear and see it for yourself on espncricinfo.com) and if he appeared to pour cold water on all the enthusiasm, you can fully understand why. Haven't we been here before so many, many times?
Didn't the West Indies lift the Champions Trophy in dramatic fashion in near darkness at The Oval in London in 2004? Didn't they reach the final as defending champions two years later in India? That's just two of at least half-a-dozen examples of encouraging performances that could not be sustained, and that's only in the one-day game. And have the regional side been able to rise above the lower reaches of the One-Day International rankings at any time over the past decade?
That much of the hype over yesterday's fixture surrounded the prospect of the West Indies winning an ODI series against a team ranked higher than themselves for the first time in four years should itself be a testament to the failure to build on an encouraging platform time after time after time. Indeed, it can be argued that fans have become so desperate for success that it is now routine to go overboard in midst of a few good times, because the unspoken fear is that a return to regular programming of defeat and bitter recrimination is never too far away.
Yes, we have every right to delight in the blistering power of Kieron Pollard and the thrilling athleticism of Andre Russell. Yet beyond the spontaneity of the celebrations of their entertaining exploits, the enduring hope must be that these are more than occasional flashes of brilliance in an otherwise gloomy landscape.
And we can't come to any definitive conclusions based on what transpired yesterday, or how things will go in the T20s, or how the Test series will unfold.
Maybe we want to, but really we can't. So don't start gunning it round the Savannah just yet.
-Fazeer Mohammed
Source: www.trinidadexpress.com