Nine nations, 16 teams, 51 matches, 49 days, one winner
By Cosmo Hamilton
Guyana Chronicle
February 28, 2007
Lights! Camera! Action! Gentlemen start your engines! Let the games begin! On your mark! Set! Pow!
Or as they say at Cape Canaveral in Florida with such pride and power each time they set off to play their game of Space Invaders - Lift Off! Ladies and Gentlemen! We have Lifted Off! Whatever the trigger that one is prone to use for the start of such a monumental event on planet earth which is rivalled in its universality only by the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, it is now SHOWTIME for the ICC CWC 2007 World Cup.
Some 10 years or so ago when it was evident that the West Indies as one of the foremost international cricket teams under the aegis of the ICC would be given its turn to host a quadrennial World Cup cricket tournament, skeptics all across the region let alone the world would have expressed serious doubts about the West Indies Cricket Board’s (WICB) ability to coordinate such a major event, given the logistics of the region, given the Caribbean nations’ fragile economic base, and given the Board’s apparent perennial state of operation in the red.
And so it was a proud moment for the people of the Caribbean when the ICC awarded the 2007 World Cup to the West Indies.
It was a great day in the morning not just for those who still live there, but for those of us in the Diaspora who now call bustling impersonal metropolitan cities like New York, and London, and Toronto, home.
At the time the West Indian and Guyanese folk abroad in enclaves like Flatbush in Brooklyn, and Wood Green in North London, and Scarborough in Ontario shouted an emphatic ‘YES!’ as the Board said, ‘Bring it on!’
Although without a doubt the sheer magnitude of an ICC World Cup and the logistics of the Caribbean archipelago with sovereign nations separated by such vast expanses of sea posed a monumental challenge, essentially, it also presented the region with an opportunity for a long overdue extreme infrastructural make-over, an instant economic boost estimated at some US$500 million, and in the longer term the development of new avenues of industry, international trade and tourism.
If the WICB accepted the challenge, the ICC World Cup West Indies 2007 Committee headed by Chris Dehring took up the gauntlet, and created an ambitious organisational model ideal for the unique situation that obtained in the Caribbean.
With the daring Dehring group working like a well oiled machine seven days a week, 24 hours a day, for the better part of four years, they have brought together the governments of the region, corporations, non-governmental agencies, and the people of the various territories to achieve what could be considered their holy grail - The Staging of the Cricket World Cup.
It is a difficult journey that has taken them from Bid Book to Play Ball.
From a distance it is heart-warming to view the 2007 Cricket World Cup coming together successfully as a veritable Caribbean community project, which brings to mind the thought so profoundly expressed by the late Prime Minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley, in his book ‘A History of West Indies Cricket’.
In it Manley wrote - ‘At a political level, the University of the West Indies apart, cricket is the most completely regional activity undertaken by the people of the member states of the Caribbean Community, CARICOM. It is also the most successful cooperative endeavour and, as such, is a constant reminder to a people of otherwise wayward insularity of the value of collaboration’. Psychologically, success at this 2007 World Cup tournament could even more deeply cement Caribbean unity and dispel that endemic cavalier image, and usher in a new culture of confidence and an attitude of consistent achievement.
And if after the best 16 cricket teams in the world have traversed nine of the most beautiful nations in the world, having played 51 exciting matches, in 49 glorious days, on April 28, 2007 Brian Lara does not lift the World Cup in triumph as Clive Lloyd did in 1975 and again in 1979, the winner would still be the West Indies for having hosted the best World Cup ever.