Story: From harmless
‘calypso’ cricketers to
champions who mauled their enemy, how did the West Indies become cricket’s giants?
Movie Review: Fire in Babylon (FIB) is a detailed sports documentary – and more. It’s a vibrant, throbbing piece of world history told through the tale of test cricket played by one nation – the West Indies. FIB shows how the West Indies – where cricket, as an elderly Caribbean tells you in that glorious accent of rum and sun, is ‘a daily situation’ – went from being a team of harmless players facing humiliating defeats, to being lean, mean masters of the game. And it shows why this was vital. The West Indies’s rise reflected the fight back against a colonial past, against a mindset of ‘Babylon’ which didn’t treat all as equals, to win equality – and regard – from a grudging world.
Like a calypso number, FIB draws you in gently, its narrative swaying from a 1960s of confusing defeats, to a deadlier 1970s when under Clive Lloyd’s focusing captaincy, the West Indies became the team every cricketing nation feared. FIB uses a host of rich narrative techniques – cricketing legends speaking about those glory days, press reports, black-and-white TV footage of matches, archival political footage of apartheid South Africa – policeman shooting black protestors, letting loose Alsatian dogs on them – all shaken up with West Indian music. It portrays how the West Indies realized they needed to fight humiliation – hard. And win the respect of their former British colonisers, of devastating Australian pace bowlers, of crowds who chanted ‘Go back to the trees, black bastards’. In 1975, the West Indies was battered by Australia. In 1976, after English captain Tony Greig sneered, ‘We’ll make them grovel’, press reports screamed, ‘Look Who’s Grovelling Now!’ (Agencies)