Holder wriggles free from the heavy hand of history

The West Indies captain ignores outsiders’ wider questions and focuses on winning the series

You can be a cricketer for West Indies, but that is rarely all you can be. When you don the maroon cap, whether you like it or not, you are not simply a batsman or a bowler. You become a code and a cipher, an ambassador and a messenger, a custodian of tradition and a vessel for hope.

Partly this reflects the unique status of Caribbean cricket over a century and a quarter. It is a wagon to which many more are invariably hitched: cultural cachet, social symbolism, racial pride. But partly, it is a status imposed from the outside, and not without a certain intellectual laziness.

People have always imposed onto this team their own agendas, their own prejudices, their own narratives.

A West Indies defeat is never simply a defeat, but a “surrender”. A lean spell is never simply a lean spell, but the “sad decline” of a “once-proud” cricketing entity. The hand of history, the might of memory, weigh heavier upon this team than any other. Whether for nostalgia, poetry or politics, people want – nay, need – West Indies to mean something more, in a way that simply does not apply to New Zealand or Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe.

We are served with fresh examples of this phenomenon every time they visit these shores. For some reason, West Indies are perennially brandished as a barometer for the sport’s health as a whole: just as their crushing loss at Edgbaston was seen as a worrying portent of Test cricket’s future, so their stirring fightback at Headingley was held as evidence of its enduring vitality.

Now, on the eve of the third Test, Jason Holder faced the media once again.

Thoughtful and softly-spoken, the West Indies captain is a man as impressive as he is tall, and when you get him talking about the game, he is intelligent and engaging company.

But as ever, there was some other stuff to get through first.

Had Holder seen or heard Brian Lara delivering the Cowdrey Lecture earlier this week, in which he took aim at the current West Indies board? He had not.

How did he feel about the chance to make history and lead West Indies to their first win in England since 1988, their first away win in a series of more than two Tests since 1992-93? “It would be great to win the series in England,” he admitted, “but there’s a process towards going about that. We can’t focus on the end result. Our focus is our process.”

Someone asked Holder about Hurricane Irma, the fearful tropical cyclone currently barrelling its way through the Caribbean. “We think about what is going on back home,” Holder replied. “Many of us have family back there. There’s not much we can do here but pray.”

But the interviewer persisted. Surely, he suggested, there was one thing Holder’s team could do: win, and restore a little joy to an ailing region? Holder simply sighed, shrugged and offered up a variation on the same response.