In the backwaters of Baracara, Guyanese cricketer Shamar Joseph Joseph grew up bowling lemons and limes

Last Updated on Saturday, 20 January 2024, 8:53 by Denis Chabrol

Reproduced from the Sydney Morning Herald
by Emma Kemp

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Shamar Joseph celebrates after dismissing Steve Smith in his maiden Test cricket delivery. CREDIT:AP

The only way to get to Baracara is by very small boat. From Guyana’s port town of New Amsterdam, the trip up the Canje River is about 225km but can apparently take up to two days, so thick and tangled is the grass that grows along the banks of the narrow waterway. Sometimes the vegetation stretches all the way to the opposite bank, stopping whatever boat is transporting produce or lumber dead in its tracks until it can be cut by locals in surrounding communities.

Baracara is, for all intents and purposes, in the middle of nowhere. And it is from the middle of nowhere where West Indies’ revelatory new quick hails.

Part of the reason Shamar Joseph’s story is so striking is that the prospect of a young man from a tiny community, isolated from anything resembling competitive cricket by its lack of telephone and internet access – and all that overgrown grass – making an international Test debut in Adelaide seems even less likely than West Indies threatening to upset Australia. The prospect of him dismissing Steve Smith off the first ball of that Test debut adds another layer of awesome implausibility.

Joseph is 24 years old. About five years ago he was still living in Baracara, a maroon village (a settlement formed by African slave trade escapees) of 350 people with a small health centre and primary school but no secondary education.

The cricket pedigree in this Caribbean backwater, which survived off subsistence farming and logging, is non-existent. But that did not stop Joseph, who has five brothers and three sisters, from playing tape-ball games to avoid doing chores and carrying around a ubiquitous piece of wood which was his “bat”. He also bowled using local fruits such as lemons, limes and guavas, impersonating his idols Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh.

Even now, standing at 172cm, he is a fair whack shorter than both of those two-metre monoliths and has a height disadvantage on most fast bowlers. Not that he would have known that, given all the contact Baracara had with the outside world was black-and-white TV and a handful of trips with family members down the Canje to New Amsterdam, where they would sell the chopped pieces of wood they had transported.

By the time Baracara finally got internet and mobile coverage in 2018, Smith had already long been named the world’s best Test batter. And by the time a near-death experience with a falling tree had prompted Joseph to move with his pregnant partner to New Amsterdam, he knew of and admired the Australian. But he still had no real thoughts of playing cricket himself, only to support his family. He and his partner Trishana now have two young children, Amari and Amali.

“I started off in a construction company,” Joseph told Cricbuzz in Adelaide three days before this week’s Test debut. “But I wasn’t very good at my job. I am scared of heights and this job involved working at great heights, so I just ended up becoming a labourer there.” After that, he got a job as a security guard, working 12-hour shifts.

It was in New Amsterdam that he encountered his first “moving staircase” (an escalator). It was also there that he observed almost everybody using touchscreen mobile phones and felt “anxious to make some money to go buy a touchscreen phone and to understand what the internet is”.

And, eventually, it was where he reportedly found himself living next door to Romario Shepherd, the Guyana and West Indies white-ball specialist who introduced him to Guyana national head coach Esuan Crandon.

He trained with the team for a short time and attended a fast-bowling clinic run by Ambrose, who told him he had what it took to play international cricket. After making 6-13 on Division 1 debut, he took eight wickets in a trial game and earned himself a first call-up, making his first-class debut in the regional four-day competition and then a contract in the Caribbean Premier League T20 tournament.

This all happened last year. At the end of 2023, he was named in the West Indies A squad that toured South Africa and claimed 12 wickets in two games against South Africa A.

On Wednesday, he was handed his cap and not long after that took Smith’s outside edge and then his wicket. By the end of Australia’s first innings, he was 5-94. “Getting Steve Smith, I’ll remember this for the rest of my life,” an elated Joseph said in a press conference on Wednesday. “I’ll take a picture with him and post it in my house.”

Smith might be his “favourite player”, but the close-to-perfect maiden ball that dismissed him was for Joseph’s family.

“I always have a ball in my hand, and I sleep with a ball next to me in bed,” he told Cricbuzz. “Every time I look at this ball I’m holding, I think that it’s for Amari and Amali and Trishana – the three people that I care about. Every time I get on to the field, I might be nervous. But when I see the ball and I am reminded of them, I know what I’m doing.”