By Raffique Shah
October 10, 2024

There I was, citizen Shah, last week Wednesday night, having secured the best seats money could never buy to watch my team, Trinbago Knight Riders, register a flogging on rivals Barbados Royals in a virtual semi-final of the Caribbean Professional League 2024, when it happened.

Not that an electricity failure was unexpected. I know a thing or three about such mundane matters because I have taken the pain to study it as I wrote many articles on power generation and consumption as Trinidad would go on to become one of the most industrialised countries in this part of the world. I was also a director on the Plipdeco Estate board where the then biggest power generation company, PowerGen, was located.

When we transitioned by commissioning new power plants, we suffered frequent power outages before and during that phase. I remember at the 1977 commissioning of the newest turbine at Pt Lisas, one senior official—it may have been Prof Ken Julien—announced proudly at the ceremony: “Blackouts will be a thing of the past”. Immediately afterwards, there was an outage, and everyone had a laugh at his expense.

But seriously, when the floodlights went out at Providence Stadium, I did not imagine it taking more than five minutes to rectify. But almost two hours later the match had not restarted. It would eventually restart at closer to midnight with a bizarre format that nobody seemed to understand until it was all over. Coming as it did from a system that governs the rules of cricket, that itself is odd (the Duckworth Lewis Stein system), and has seemingly no place in the modern-day formats that CLR James had referred to as being characterised by glorious uncertainties. A blackout may not be seen as glorious, but this one was certainly an inglorious take on the traditional “current-gone” situation.

Before all the “kankatang” interrupted what was promising to be another spectacular show put on by the TKR, Nicholas Pooran was about make another century—and on his birthday, no less—when the overlords declared it a five-over match using the DLS system. What in the “Duckworth” madness is this!

I was saying at the start of this column that my family and I, like the majority of people residing in the Caribbean who have an interest in sports, especially cricket, will have been similarly positioned viewing the match on television. And, when I say I had the best seats, I was sitting in my living room in comfort, protected from the noisemakers at the stadium who seem to be hell-bent on being heard, win or lose. As a bonus, on television, you get close-ups and replays.

I had noticed that as the tournament got under way, large numbers of patrons who attended the matches were nationals of the country they supported and either resided in the Caribbean or North America or Europe, channelling rivalries that went all the way back to One Day Internationals (50 overs).

While they appeared to be fierce supporters of their home team and noisily proclaimed their loyalties for every wicket, six or four, there was no hint of these degenerating into hostilities. The matches also provided opportunities for our cricketers in these small-island states to show off their potential to the world. They will have provided young criminals in countries such as ours visual images of young people just like them who are not carrying guns, but instead, bats and balls in their hands, matching their skills at batting, bowling or fielding with each other. Any young person watching cricketers such as Nicholas Pooran, Shimron Hetmyer or Akeal Hosein, to name a few, perform as good as or maybe even better than their predecessors in the great West Indies teams of yesteryear surely cannot help but see opportunities to earn big and to become law-abiding citizens in the process.

As for the politicians who seek every avenue to exploit their sportsmen when it’s convenient, they should be ashamed of treating with sports generally as if they are beggars come to the table. Regarding Guyana positioning itself to use its new-found oil wealth to hosting more events of this magnitude, a simple floodlight outage which could not be repaired for two hours shows exactly how far you have to go before you meet the standards required for hosting such events. Accidents and incidents happen, but their duration is one thing that can be controlled once the right measures are put in place.

T&T has, for a few years now, reached the standard we see in many developed countries. Our electrical outages are dealt with speedily by the very efficient T&TEC; but more than that, outages are really a thing of the past, since fewer and fewer of them occur, unless planned, in which case customers are notified well beforehand.

Take note, President Irfaan.