‘Wimbledon’ at Sabina Park
Sabina Park is nudging 90. It’s wrinkled and withering, the characteristic sky blue paint peeling off the patchy walls, revealing the rusting iron rods and wires underneath. The yellow seats of the George Headley Stand and the 10-feet walls, splashed with advertisements, tremble when heavy trucks and SUVs whizz by. The stands are lined with dust and discarded beer bottles. The grand old stadium, at once the rawest and most romantic in the Caribbean, is a metaphorical mausoleum of West Indies cricket — once grand and glorious, now rumbling and ragged.
Sabina Park once had the reputation
Sabina Park once had the reputation of producing some lightening fast tracks. It wasn’t always the case so. The 1960s churned out batting beauties to suit their batsmen; the 70s produced fast and bouncy tracks; the 80s saw some horrendous wickets with variable bounce, and by the 90s the pitch was defanged. In the subsequent decades, just like West Indies cricket, the Sabina Park track became unpredictable. Sometimes fast and bouncy, often slow and dry.
This time around, the buzz around Sabina Park is about this being a green, bowl-first surface. This is what the team has asked, they say. A few days ago, chief curator Michael Hylton told local newspaper Jamaican Gleaner that he’s grooming a Wimbledon-like grass court. “When everyone gets here on August 30, I want them to believe that they are at Wimbledon on the first morning — green, green, green … . That’s what I want them to see, and the team that executes the two disciplines well will get the desired result,” he had said.
