WHAT CAN we say except "WOW!". For our team at IGL, the 2004 Curry Goat Cricket season has been truly amazing. This has been our first venture into an event of this nature, and we have enjoyed every single minute in every town everywhere in Jamaica. We never expected the level of response we have been blessed with. Our partners at the local level who organised the invitational teams were very involved and their positive energy has been contagious.
The players and the workers at the games, the phone calls we got from people we knew or didn't know, the people we have met who came to the matches or just heard about them have all contributed to what has been a happy and rewarding experience.
ENTHUSIASM
Although Hurricane Ivan blew away one of our matches, so that we wound up having five instead of six for the year, it in no way dampened our enthusiasm on the IGL Curry Goat Cricket Series. The 2004 train started in May Pen and has taken us through Mandeville, Brown's Town, Bog Walk and now Kensington in Kingston. January 2005 will see us starting up in St. Elizabeth and moving through six other parishes throughout the year. Despite the IGL Blue Flames team not managing to win any of the matches to date, we have enjoyed the spirit that came with the mouthing about "big breeze batting", butter fingered fielding and the fours that were nearly sixes.
GRATEFUL
The traditional curry goat and 'whites', or for those who preferred fish or chicken or coconut water were all enjoyed by the communities. We are grateful for our partners at Nestlé, Tapioca Village, Cocoa Industry Board, Jamaica Agricultural Society and those in the media who all contributed to making these events a landmark in Jamaican culture. We would like especially to thank Errol Sinclair, Maurice Foster and H.G. Helps for their suggestions and invaluable assistance.
It would not have been the same without you. We hope that our partners will stay with us. We believe that in years to come people will talk and laugh as they remember who could only bat and make big breeze and how many fours they thought they hit. We hope that our impact on Jamaican communities all across the island will make a difference and that the IGL Curry Goat Cricket Series will help to bring back that old time sense of community and camaraderie that used to be such an integral part of Jamaican life.
