The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Knocked for six by Sir Viv’s island home
Simon Hughes – aka ‘The Analyst’ of cricket – heads to the boyhood haunts of one of the sport’s all-time greats
It was like the old days last weekend. An England cricket team annihilated by the West Indies in Barbados with a day to spare, the players looking a little shell-shocked, the thousands of English fans with an extra day to down their sorrows at Mullins Bar on Gibbes beach or on the Jolly Roger cruising up and down the west coast, the “pirates” forcing selected landlubbers who spilt their rum punch on deck to walk the plank...
And just as it used to in the Eighties, the tour has moved on to Antigua. Every Caribbean island has a different feel. If Barbados is the most glitzy and posturing with its fancy hotels and celebrity-owned homes and people claiming to be related to Rihanna, Trinidad is edgier (until you escape to Tobago anyway) and Grenada more chilled. The style of play on the field was roughly in keeping.
Back then, Antigua was unique on the cricket circuit. It was the party island. It looked unprepossessing as you flew in to land between abandoned quarries on the rather unkempt north coast. But you’d soon pass a rustic-looking rum shack with a few locals sitting outside playing dominoes. They’d slap the pieces down on the rickety wooden table with extravagant vigour, drain their drink and order another. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. They’d be still there when you passed by again at dusk, joined by a few others, gassing about the prospects for the Test match. “Richards’ gonna give you some licks!” they’d say when they heard your accent.
In Antigua you could party all day at the cricket match, and continue all night. The old Test match ground in St Johns thrummed to the sounds of Chickie’s famous disco, blasting out calypso tunes between overs as Gravy, the cross-dressing cricket fan, adopted all manner of hilarious poses on a raised platform. There was also the “iron band” parading around the ground playing all manner of “instruments” – metal pipes, cymbals, cow bells, drums, whistles, even car hub caps – in syncopated rhythm. It created a fantastic atmosphere and the players bought into it, swaying aying or jigging to the beat. It seemed med to energise their game, too. It was a real celebration of cricket, which hich often went on long into the night ht at the ground itself or at various s bars and night spots nearby. The he major drawback was it was as all so much fun you barely ever ver saw a boat or a beach – except cept on a skinny-dip dare late at night – and you needed another holiday to recover from it all.
The island has changed. It has grown up, leaving its teenage self behind. It is not a place to get plastered on rum punch after the cricket and soak it all up with a swordfish burger and chips, before staggering back to your modest hotel – glorified boarding house would actually be more accurate e
– feeling bloated and ill. Now there is still the fun side, but there are more restorative pursuits available too.
The drive to the south coast from the new Sir Vivian Richards Stadium in a Seventies Chevrolet (Antiguan taxis are a Hawaii Five-O throwback) took me along a narrow, winding road through sleepy Swetes village. I passed the house outside which the great fast bowler Sir Curtly Ambrose’s mother Millie used to ring a bell every time her son took a wicket for the West Indies (she had to ring it 630 times). I was hoping to find an impromptu match on one of the slightly unkempt club grounds, but no luck. Instead I hopped along the undulating Old Road, where the vegetation becomes noticeably lusher and dwellings more rudimentary.
I stopped at the Antigua Rainforest, a slightly elaborate nam name for a copse of tropical trees in a gorge. gorge Nevertheless it’s a lively two-hour distraction, dis taking six zip wires and two suspension bridges, wit with spectacular glimpses of the coast from the wires stretched across the canopy.
Then I went to C Carlisle Bay hotel for lunch and beach cricket. Carlisle Bay is lik like a chic holiday village villag built in homestead homestea style, spaciously spacious laid out around a secluded cove. It’s It a world away from the t bling of Barbados Barba establishments establ or the ol old Antiguan tat. The beach b is quiet, just a solitary Hobie Cat bobbing b on the water. wat But the sand is t too soft for cricket cri (you need the th hard stuff covered co with the gossamer gos of a receding wave to skim the ball across.) Instead I found a grassy area behind the Indigo restaurant to play on, the wicket a mature palm tree. A couple of gardeners on lunch break joined in and it was quite a focus of interest until the ball was accidentally hit under a table of guests lunching on octopus ceviche.
I took my new team-mates next door to the exclusive Curtain Bluff resort, where I was staying. It boasts beaches on two sides – one for surfing, one for swimming – as the hotel straddles a small peninsula. There’s a small sunbathing platform 98ft (30m) out to sea and we used that as a springboard for a display of diving catches (with an explosive wet finish)