For West Indies cricket, the Twenty20 format may offer salvation

Osman Samiuddin interviews Carl Hooper and examines whether the short format is tailor-made to reversing the game's decline in the Caribbean.

Chris Gayle's average in 242 innings of Twenty20 cricket – combined international and domestic – is 41.02. Ross Setford / AP

Stereotypes are dangerous tools, as much in sport as in life. But, in so much as they serve any purpose, they can often touch at a useful, very general truth.

So to argue that cricket’s shortest format is, by nature, attuned best to the Caribbean style of play is both as incomplete as a stereotype, but also not the most ridiculous assertion to make.

There is no single way to play Twenty20, nor is there one homogenous Caribbean style. Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Kieron Pollard are both, for instance, West Indian cricketers. Long time ago, Larry Gomes and Viv Richards represented one team.

If the asserting is being done by Carl Hooper, however, it is maybe worth pondering. Hooper evokes a certain kind of misty-eyed nostalgia. It is not quite right to say of a player who captained his country, who played over 100 Tests and 200 ODIs, that he did not fulfil the potential with which he arrived.

But Hooper will forever be branded by the impression that he was much more than what he ended as. To an extent, the easy wristiness of his batting ensured the love. But put together his very modern off-spin and his electric fielding and sure, he should go down as an undisputed legend, or at least a bigger one than his averages suggest.

He batted better when he was captain, which is perhaps a useful hint, as is the fact that Wasim Akram finds space for him in his greatest XI.

Maybe Hooper played 20 years too early. Had he been around now, Twenty20 seems like an ideal platform on which to burnish his legend. A short, sharp intervention with the bat, some constrictive overs of full off-spin and athleticism all over the field; it is difficult to argue he would not have been a success.

“Of course you think, I should’ve been 10-15 years younger,” he said. “It’s exciting stuff, yes there’s a lot of carnage but you take that as a challenge. It’s compact, intense, exciting and if you’re a cricket lover it’s hard not to be excited by it, to not want to be a part of it.”

Hooper has found a home in the format, though only as a coach. This year he will be guide the Guyana Amazon Warriors in the Caribbean Premier League (CPL). Twenty20 cricket, he says, has become the “perfect vehicle” for Caribbean cricket.

It is a seductive point, especially when you contrast the feats of their players in the format against a general decline in the longer formats. West Indian cricketers loom large in the Indian Premier League (IPL), and other leagues around the world, none larger than Chris Gayle.

As a team, they may be seventh on their win/loss ratio in the format, but they won the World Twenty20 in 2012 and will remain among the favourites at the next.

“Given the brand of cricket we play, a very dynamic kind of cricket, where lots of boundaries are hit, and the fielding is athletic, it’s not by coincidence we have some of the biggest hitters of the cricket ball in Kieron Pollard, Dwayne Smith or Andre Russell,” said Hooper. “It’s not by chance.”

It is not by chance either that the CPL has done so well. Looked at one way this kind of league, which will play out its third season this summer, was always meant to land up in the region some day.

TV broadcasts of the league confirm unmistakably that cricket is capable of creating the kind of snazzy scenes associated with most other, popular spectator sports and that in the Caribbean, with its long history of great cricket crowds, the sport remains in workable health.

“We love cricket here, regardless of whether we’re doing well or not,” said Hooper. “And regardless of whatever you’re hearing cricket remains the number one sport in the Caribbean.”

Whether or not it will ultimately achieve what such leagues are meant to in locations where either cricket’s popularity is fading, or its infrastructure is not healthy enough to support the game, will take time to reveal.

The recent Test win over England, the sudden burst of some fine young talent, emboldened by the CPL, a new, young captain; these all appear ingredients for hope. But equally, this is an established pattern of the last two decades, littered with several one-off triumphs, an entire wasteland of promising but curtailed careers, all leading, ultimately, to nothing.

Tensions between administration and players continues, the financial fallout of abandoning the tour to India last year; these are serious, critical issues that the CPL can do little about.

But that, and the format, has given renewed prominence to West Indian cricket and substance to its cricketers which, given how the last couple of decades have gone for them, is no bad thing.

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