Cricket: West Indies must restore their image

BEATEN IN all three Tests, the series already lost, Brian Lara's assertion that his West Indies team is playing for pride in the fourth Test starting at Newlands today is more than a simple cliche.

Its abject performances in what was, for social and political as much as cricketing reasons, a tour of great expectations, have earned it widespread derision in South Africa as well as back home.

One of the jibes making the rounds at its expense is that it has introduced a new form of cricket to follow the day-night game, the Eights, Super- Max and other modern variations. Now we have the West Indies Test - it last three days, South Africa having won each of the last two in less than 270 overs.

A newspaper cartoon following the Durban defeat last Tuesday depicted a stoop-shouldered West Indies heading off the field with a white steelband player singing: "Day-o, day-o, third Test gone and they wanna go home."

The effect of the demise has been most felt among South Africa's emerging black cricketers, now being encouraged under various United Cricket Board schemes in the townships. "What's been happening has had a negative effect on our development programmes," said Khaya Majola, one of the best black players during the apartheid years and now one of the key administrators of the development programme. "The black kids look up to the West Indians as role models."

Prospects for a belated West Indies revival are not encouraging. They must start without Courtney Walsh, whose torn left hamstring means that he will miss a Test through injury for only the second time in his 15 years of international cricket.

The leading bowler on either side in the series with 16 wickets, his loss will be immense. It is compounded by the uncertain fitness of Curtly Ambrose, who is expected to play in spite of a nagging knee injury.

They will definitely have to do without Franklyn Rose whose fast out- swingers earned him figures of 7 for 84 in the first innings at Durban but who has complained of soreness in his bowling shoulder.

Ottis Gibson, the Barbados and former Glamorgan fast bowler, joined the team late yesterday from his season with the provincial team, Border, and will play his second Test as one of the four fast bowlers alongside Ambrose, Nixon McLean and Merv Dillon. Gibson's hard-hitting late-order batting should be a boost to a team with a fragile tail.

The West Indies have already used 16 players in the three Tests. South Africa will make their first change here, left-arm spinner Paul Adams replacing the 38-year-old off-spinner Pat Symcox. Adams joins Herschelle Gibbs as the two non-white players in the XI, but it is not a ratio that has placated the Sports Minister Steve Tshwete and others in the African National Congress government pressing for affirmative action.

A day of continuous heavy rain yesterday placed the start of the Test in doubt, prompting another dig at the West Indies from one of their 200 supporters who have flown out from the Caribbean. "So it might even go five days this time," he quipped.

WEST INDIES (from): B C Lara (capt), C B Lambert, P A Wallace, J R Murray, S Chanderpaul, D Ganga, C L Hooper, R D Jacobs (wkt), C E L Ambrose, O D Gibson, S C Williams, N A M McLean.

SOUTH AFRICA: W J Cronje (capt), G Kirsten, H H Gibbs, J H Kallis, D J Cullinan, J N Rhodes, S M Pollock, M V Boucher (wkt), L Klusener, A A Donald, D J Terbrugge, P R Adams.