Fire in Babylon
Tom Ryan
September 18, 2011 - 12:01AM
Recent documentaries have placed music at the heart of cultural change in the Caribbean. Films such as Stascha Bader's excellent Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae and Luciano Blotta's Rise Up: Stories from Jamaica's Music Underground (both 2009) are concerned not only with soulful rhythms but also with the social forces that drive them. Now, British director Stevan Riley's Fire in Babylon persuasively moves cricket to centre stage. And just as you don't have to care about formula one to appreciate Senna, you don't have to be a cricket aficionado to be excited by Riley's probing of the rise of West Indies cricket during the 1970s.
For the film and for West Indian author and broadcaster Frank I, that transformation had an anti-colonial struggle as its driving force and the Black Power movement in the US as its inspiration. ''Their fight was our fight, too,'' he says, even if it took a while for it to find its way to cricket grounds around the nation.
Although the West Indies had been playing Test cricket since the 1920s, it wasn't until Frank Worrell was made captain in 1960 that the team had a black leader. In Riley's film, the members of the successful sides of the 1970s and '80s look on this period with mixed feelings. Change was clearly in the air but, in their view, the team lacked the professionalism needed to succeed. ''We were entertainers, not winners,'' fast bowler Andy Roberts laments, rejecting the label of ''Calypso cricketers''.
The memorable West Indies tour of Australia in the summer of 1960-61, which included a tied Test and was narrowly lost 1-2 by the Windies, is regarded as a failure by the cricketers who came on the scene a decade or so later. Of the motorcade that moved through the streets of Melbourne at the conclusion of the tour to the cheers of a 100,000-plus crowd, Roberts observes they were being celebrated for ''being losers''.
It's a harsh assessment. One could equally assess the public's excitement as an endorsement of the Windies' refreshing, free-wheeling approach to a game that had become stodgy. However, the film takes Roberts' comments as a given and endorses the killer instinct he brought with him to the field. He became known as ''the Hit Man'', although it's a nickname he rejects. ''I didn't go out to hit people,'' he explains. ''It was just that a lot of people got hit.''
The turning point was an Australian tour 15 years later, one that Viv Richards describes as ''a nasty series'', which resulted in the team returning home badly beaten, bruised and racially abused on and off the field. Opening batsman Desmond Haynes also recalls that the Australian opening attack of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thompson was ''terrifying''. So the search began in the Caribbean for fast bowlers and tougher mindsets to combat the foe.
Fire in Babylon becomes the story of how Roberts, Michael Holding, Colin Croft, Joel Garner and Malcolm Marshall battered their opponents into submission. The players are unanimous in their recollection of how cricket became their form of revenge against their oppressors in England and Australia.
For Holding (aka ''Whispering Death'' for his silent approach to the crease and his thunderbolt deliveries rising directly from the pitch at the batsman's throat), Clive Lloyd, captain from 1974-1985, was ''the father''. But the film casts the charismatic, articulate Richards (aka ''the Master Blaster'') as the hero, not only a courageous champion but a noble warrior for the cause on and off the field.
Riley's film offers lots of juicy cricket footage but the off-field battles are equally compelling: the Windies players' ongoing struggle with their mainly white cricket board for appropriate remuneration; the rise of World Series Cricket (including Clyde Packer's spirited defence of those who joined the touring circus); the British press crying foul at the ''terror'' created by the Windies' battalion of fast bowlers; and the betrayal by the ''rebel'' players who toured South Africa after it had been banned from the cricket circuit due to its apartheid policies. Riveting stuff.
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/movies/fire-in-babylon-20110916-1kdot.html
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