By Aditya Iyer from The Indian Express

From the imposing Vauxhall End, Ravi Rampaul jiggled his way towards the batsman, Dwayne Bravo. The ball reared suddenly from an unexpected length, smashing Bravo’s collarbone, felling him. “Woweeeee!” exclaimed Chris Gayle from the adjacent net, before bursting into a fit of giggles. “Welcome home skippah,” yelled another. “Welcome home.”

Home for Bravo is Trinidad, but the player in maroon and blue knew just what he was talking about. There are two boroughs, not far from each other, in the south of London, where dreadlocks are still natty, where the tongue is not Cockney but Patois, where the red-gold-green flies higher than the Union Jack and where reggae isn’t just music, but a way of life. The first, Brixton, lies about a couple of miles away from the second, the Kennington Oval.

If Brixton is known as Little Jamaica, a place where Usain Bolt’s three Olympic medals last year meant more than GBR’s 29, then the Oval is the Little Caribbean itself. Here, the West Indies are treated like the home side — for good reason. After all, they haven’t lost a single one-dayer here in 40 years when the Oval has been a neutral venue.

Since the beginning of the one-day game, the West Indies — a team that finds immense support from the enormous Caribbean community nearby — haven’t lost to an ‘outsider’ in eight attempts.

It was here that West Indies laid the foundations to their first two World Cup wins, with thumping semifinal victories over New Zealand and Pakistan. It was here that Brian Lara’s men promised resurrection, winning the ICC Champions Trophy in 2004 from an improbable position. And it was here, last Friday, that Dwayne Bravo kept the trend going by denying Pakistan victory by two wickets.

While they crushed India here as well during the group game in the 1983 World Cup (their only meeting here), West Indies lost the match that mattered just 10 days later, a few miles north. And that is just how India, who have lost 70 per cent of their one-dayers played here, will look to go into this semifinal-ticket of a match at the Oval on Tuesday.

PHOTO: M S Dhoni with S Dhavan during a practice session on the eve of their ICC Champions Trophy cricket match against West -Indies in Oval, London. (PTI)

For more on this story go to:

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/a-lot-at-stake-in-little-caribbean/1127481/