Morning all. Those of us who follow cricket closely are part of an international fraternity, whose bonds of friendship cross borders and eras. Never are those bonds more keenly felt than when one of our own passes away. The very sad news this week of the death of Tony Cozier, the great Caribbean journalist and avowedly amateur follower of the game, induced a collective mourning in us.
It was very interesting to observe the same sentiment in various of the pieces written about Cozier – that is, the feeling that, one by one, the voices of our childhood are passing away. First Christopher Martin-Jenkins, the brilliant Telegraph and Times hack, whose match reports I devoured as a child, ascended to the great commentary box in the sky. Then Richie Benaud, the great leg-spinner who personified the game in the eyes of so many, also died. And this week Cozier, a brilliant Bajan to go with CMJ’s Englishman and Benaud’s Australian, breathed his last.
Many of you will have been familiar with his byline because for many years he wrote for The Independent and Independent on Sunday. Like Mike Atherton, the former England captain who had a place a few doors down from Cozier in Barbados, I assumed he was black for a very long time, and only years after first hearing his gorgeous voice did I realise its owner was as white as the beaches of his native island. Like CMJ, he had the glorious humility and decency of the amateur, zealously committed to the game but not so arrogant as to think he could do better than those whose actions he analysed for listeners at home.
In an age of sporting commentary that is dominated by former players, who charge fortunes for their alleged expertise, the cult of the amateur is more necessary than ever. Being an amateur, Cozier was always first and foremost on the side of the fans, which is why he was ostracised by the bureaucrats and idiots who have reduced cricket in the West Indies to a permanent state of embarrassment. I always feel it is wrong to be excessively wistful and nostalgic when people pass away, because it is often the last thing they would have wanted; and yet I’m afraid it’s impossible to resist the feeling that the death of Tony Cozier is a kind of celestial judgement on the sad, though not necessarily terminal, decline of the once great West Indies side.
