Читать книгу No Win Race. A Story of Belonging, Britishness and Sport онлайн

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Galina had no cricket coaches or scouts fawning over young talent because it was such a small district. Fantasies remained fantasies when you had to worry about what you were going to eat the following day. Cricket represented something much purer. The British elite had the money, the resources and the facilities. My father and his friends could not even afford cricket bats. They would cut a coconut branch and, when it dried, shape it into a bat. They did not have professional cricket balls (made of cork, wound by string and coated with leather) so they used tennis balls. There were no cricket grounds or even-surfaced pitches, so they played in the street, on the sidewalk or on any patch of open land, private or not. It would be those same qualities – enterprise, hard work, toughness, pride, resilience – that would underpin the West Indian cricket team’s success and their determination not to hide. ‘Cricket was a part of you,’ my father would say. ‘We played it every day, rain or shine.’