Caribbean Beat — January/February 2017 (#143)

THE GAME
Beyond
another
boundary
Come January 2017, the West Indies cricket team
will head off to India to contest the T20 World
Cup, alongside players from around the globe.
Wait, you haven’t heard about this tournament?
Maybe it’s time you started following blind
cricket. Nazma Muller learns more
Illustration by Shalini Seereeram
For blind (or visually
impaired) cricket lovers in
the Caribbean, the idea of
representing the West Indies
team was for many years
just a fantasy, a whimsical
daydream they indulged in whenever they
listened to matches on the radio. As for
wearing the famous maroon kit in a World
Cup for blind players — well, few dared to
even imagine such a thing could one day
exist. You see, before 2003, blind cricket
wasn’t even played in the Caribbean.
The sport offers camaraderie and a
chance to compete on equal terms for
blind and partially sighted people. It
not only boosts the self-confidence of
players, but in countries such as England,
where it receives the financial support
and technical expertise of the England
and Wales Cricket Board, batsmen
like Hassan Khan are stars — as much
as Nasser Hussein, former captain of
the main England team, once was. In
Pakistan, the national blind cricket team
is paid monthly, like professionals.
But in the fourteen years since two
England blind players came to Barbados
to introduce the West Indies to the game,
and encourage them to become part of
the global blind cricket community, it
has caught on quickly, and a regional
tournament now attracts players from
across the Caribbean. By 2005, national
teams were formed in Barbados, Jamaica,
Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and the
Windward Islands, and the following year
the first regional blind cricket competition
was organised. It has since been held
annually, except in 2012, when the teams
decided to focus their time and resources
on taking part in the first T20 blind
cricket World Cup in India. They ended
up placing fifth.
India will once again be the host
country for the second T20 World
Cup for the blind, which runs from
28 January to 12 February, 2017. And
seventeen (very happy) young men have
been selected to “rep” the Windies this
time around. The tournament, of which
former India captain Rahul Dravid is the
brand ambassador, will see eight other
Test-playing countries taking part —
Australia, Bangladesh, England, India,
New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, and
Sri Lanka — along with Nepal.
Blind cricket was first played in 1922
in Melbourne, Australia, when two
factory workers put rocks in a tin can
and began to play a crude version of what
has evolved into a sport with its own
rules and equipment. The game took
hold so quickly and deeply in the state of
Victoria that the Victorian Blind Cricket
Association was founded the same year.
The world’s first sports ground and
clubhouse for blind people were built at
Kooyong, Melbourne, in 1928, and are
still used today as the home of the VBCA.
The game was then introduced to other
states in Australia, where it was played
during lunchtime at workshops where
vision-impaired people were employed.
It soon spread across the globe to other
cricket-playing countries. It has been
played in England and Wales since the
1940s, when it was started mainly to
cater for injured servicemen coming
home from the Second World War. The
founding members of British Blind Sport
(BBS) were cricketers.
All players must be registered as blind
or partially sighted. Of the eleven players
in the team, at least four must be totally
blind. Various rules have been adapted to
allow blind and partially sighted people to
compete on equal terms — for example,
the wicket is larger, so partially sighted
players can see it clearly. The pitch is
made of concrete, and measures the same
38 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM