Akeal Hosein's great escape
How the West Indies spinner made his way from difficult surroundings to being a top-class T20 talent
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Ian Bishop doesn't do hyperbole. A fine bowler on the pitch, he has since become one of the defining voices of cricket off it. When Bishop talks, people listen.
"For him to have achieved what he has," Bishop pauses and considers his countryman, slow left-armer Akeal Hosein's rise to international cricket. "I don't know if I can articulate how much work that would have taken. I hope that it is a beacon for his area of Laventille. And I am hoping that it sends a message not only to his community but throughout the country that the stereotypes that are attached to guys who are coming from East Port-of-Spain are stereotypes only in the minds of others.
"I spent some time there when I was younger. But living there? It would be a life I could never understand," he says.
"To be honest," Hosein says with a smile, reflecting on his upbringing in Laventille, one of the crime hot spots of Port-of-Spain. "I think it was fine, I enjoyed it. I mean, yeah, there was a lot of madness going around.
"I won't say you become one with it," he says about the gun violence he was surrounded by in his early years. "But it's just there in your face. Everything is right around you.
"I remember one time I was just sitting outside with a couple of my friends. We're all very close. And there was this red light on my friend's T-shirt. We were trying to move it - like, we thought it was something you could dust off, and then when we came to our senses that it was a laser on his shirt, we all ran off.
"It became worrying because gangs would war like 100 feet apart. That's the separation of different turfs. Like, you're here, I'm right down there and we're having a beef. And that's when it became too dangerous because you could be caught up in a stray at any point of time."
It is the contradiction that those from Laventille face when talking about their hometown: there's crime and danger, but it's still home.
And it is one that Hosein is intensely proud of. It's a place that he believes is fundamentally made up of good people, and a strong community that would benefit from assistance rather than prejudice.
Parents from Laventille, when applying for secondary-school places, list their address as outside the area so their child is not rejected straightaway. Adults applying for jobs will do the same. "You get turned away from having a better life just because of where you live," Hosein says.
"I knew I had to aim to be the best I can be in cricket because it was a way to take my family out of poverty. And when I got that West Indies call, I told myself I was going to grab this chance with my hands and feet."
At 13, he enrolled in Fatima College. And on his 16th birthday, he made his debut for Queen's Park Cricket Club. Those are two prestigious institutions with a history that meant that in decades past they were not a place for Afro-Trinidadians like Hosein. In his legendary book Beyond a Boundary, CLR James describes Queen's Park Cricket Club as "the boss of the island's cricket relations". It was for the white and the wealthy.
"A black man in the Queen's Park was rare and usually anonymous," wrote James. "By the time he had acquired status or made enough money to be accepted, he was much too old to play."
"Knowing Akeal came from Laventille," says Bishop, "and went on to Fatima College and then to Queen's Park Cricket Club, that was fascinating to me."
Hosein beat the odds the life presented him with, and he did so in a way that defied the history that had been an obstacle for so many of his countrymen. Queen's Park CC and Fatima College are still wealthy, elite institutions, but increasingly multiracial. Both institutions count Brian Lara among their alumni, and Queen's Park is now captained by Khary Pierre, one of Hosein's oldest friends and a fellow West Indies international, who grew up with him in Laventille, where they attended the same school.
It was also at Queen's Park CC that Hosein met Kieron Pollard and Sunil Narine, both of whom have had a major impact on his life.
Narine let Hosein stay in a flat he owned in the city. That let Hosein move out of Laventille for the first time. He couldn't afford the rent, but Narine wasn't interested and charged him only a peppercorn sum. Pollard set Hosein up with a job that allowed him to continue prioritising his cricket.
"Kieron called me one day and asked if I could do something for Akeal," says Graham Bell, a member at Queen's Park who ran a programme at his company, Office Center, where youngsters could work flexible hours, on one condition.
"Any time that Queen's Park asks you to come to practice - you go. It was to keep them off the streets and so they could keep playing cricket."
Pollard had previously worked for Bell, after turning up unannounced years earlier asking for a job, and the two had since become close.
"There was one occasion where Kieron called me and I mentioned that Akeal was being a little tardy," remembers Bell. "Unbeknownst to me, Kieron called him from wherever he was playing and told him to straighten up at Mr Bell's place or you're going to go."
Hosein was on time from then on.
People looked after him. He was talented, affable and determined - three traits that gave people reason to like and support him. What's more, his countrymen knew the hurdles he had to overcome every day.
On one occasion, Hosein, who at the time was yet to move out of Laventille, sent a voice note to the Trinidad team WhatsApp group saying he wouldn't be able to make it to training that day. He didn't specify a reason; the gunshots ringing out in the background did the work for him.
The area was - and is - proud of him. People there knew he had a chance of representing Laventille in a good light. Bishop references the fact that to this day Hosein - and Pierre - are both considered an "inspiration" at their old school, Success Laventille, and that the community couldn't be prouder of what both have achieved.
Growing up, local people called Hosein "Lara", a nickname that sometimes helped him steer clear of trouble. Among those proud of Hosein were gangsters in the area. After all, just because you carry a gun doesn't mean you can't like cricket.
Hosein recalls one occasion, when walking home from school during a time of "peace", he got held up by a much bigger, older man from a rival area. When Hosein was unable to give him any money, the man promised to kill him when "the war" resumed. Upon hearing this threat, a more senior gangster, also from a rival area to Hosein's, emerged from his house.
"He came out and he told him, 'What's that you just said?'" Hosein says. "'Don't ever effing mess around with Lara.' And he ran him off. Because they knew, everyone knew, I was a cricketer."
The story is a snapshot of Hosein's upbringing that also provides a glimpse of his character. An anecdote about being threatened with death when he was a child that he self-censors as an adult so as not to swear while being recorded.
If an element of luck protected him at home, it also afforded him a place at school. His admission to Fatima College was the result of playing a match against them for Success Laventille. Hosein was around 13, already captain, and performed so well that the principal of Fatima walked across to him after the match, extended his hand and asked whether he'd like to enrol.
"Every weekend we'd read about his accomplishments," says one of his teachers at Fatima, Allison Poon. "One Monday morning I went to school and [a colleague] was saying, 'Oh gosh! Boy, he got 96 and they declared. Why didn't they wait for him to get a hundred!' So he was a well-known figure and because of his ability, we also became a better known school for cricket."
Nevertheless, Hosein decided to leave at 16. Having made his Queen's Park debut by then, he had had a taste of earning money playing cricket for the first time and thought it was time to step up at home. His parents accepted his decision, and while Ms Poon put it on record that she would have liked him to stay, it was only if he wished to do so. For a boy from Laventille to have gone to Fatima College was extraordinary; for a boy from Laventille to choose to leave was unheard of.
"People could say what they want," Hosein says, "but I knew what I had to do."
His gamble paid off, but it took its time doing so. At first, his progress was dramatic. He represented West Indies Under-19 in the 2012 World Cup and less than a year later made his first-class debut for Trinidad.
The following season, he took a ten-wicket haul and scored a century in just his third and fourth matches in first-class cricket. A spell in Bajan club cricket, thanks to an agreement between T&T and Barbados, under which players from each country can play club cricket in the other as locals, saw him break records: he took six five-wicket hauls in a row in the only six innings he bowled. A year later in club cricket back in Trinidad, he took two hat-tricks in the same match.
But then the matches dried up. Before his 23rd birthday, he had played 13 first-class matches; in the next five years he would play just two.
Confused and frustrated, Hosein travelled around the Caribbean in search of game time. He was contracted to Barbados for a year but didn't play, and also had a spell with Leeward Islands in the one-day competition. Eventually, with the time away not fetching him the rewards he'd hoped it would, he came home in 2019, when the chances finally materialised.
A strong first-class season for Trinidad fetched 36 wickets at an average of 20, which was then followed up by a starring role in Trinbago Knight Riders' victory in the CPL. The tide had turned and the international call wasn't far away.
In the first eight years of his career, Hosein played 91 matches. Since his international debut in 2021, he has played over 200.
It is a mystery of West Indian selection that the talent pool can seem so shallow, with players ascending to the international game off the back of a handful of performances, and yet a player like Hosein, of now proven international ability, went several years without being given regular chances even in domestic cricket.
Of those 200-plus matches since his West Indies debut, just one has been a red-ball game. Hosein says he still wants to play Test cricket, but franchises have taken priority. Before, he had the time to play red-ball but wasn't thought to have the ability. And now that he's proved he has the ability, he doesn't have the time.
Luck once again showed its hand when Hosein finally made the West Indies set-up. In total, ten players opted out of the 2021 tour to Bangladesh due to Covid-related concerns or personal fears, meaning a significantly weakened squad went on tour.
"I was sort of knocking on the door," remembers Hosein, "and decided that I would make things very difficult for them if they wanted to leave me out going forward."
Since then, only Alzarri Joseph has taken more white-ball wickets for West Indies than Hosein.
However, while he achieved a dream in 2021, it was also an incredibly difficult time for Hosein, whose father had then only recently died.
He describes his father as "the perfect role model", who worked two jobs and one evening collapsed with exhaustion upon walking through the door. Most of all, Hosein remembers a man who spoke to him with respect and as an equal. There were no threats, no big sticks of discipline hanging over his head if he stepped out of line, just "regular conversations". "That was enough for me," he says.
Hosein's father didn't live to see his son's international debut, but he inspired the values that ultimately allowed Hosein to move his mother and siblings out of Laventille. His brother, Eric, eight years his junior, is also a cricketer.
"The beauty about it," Hosein says, "is that I am his role model and he tries to pattern his life like me, so I don't have to worry."
Luck played its role in both directions in Hosein's life. The bad wasn't dwelled on; the good was seized.
"To see what he has now in terms of playing international cricket," Bishop says, "fulfilling that childhood dream… When other people were talking about football, basketball, crime, or being incorporated into gangs, Akeal chose a different path. And if you read up about Trinidad and Tobago, you'll get a better understanding of how significant that is. That is huge.
"And now," Bishop concludes, "he has a chance to bring his brother and a number of other people [out] and be an inspiration to them and pull them through.
"Because had it not been for cricket? I don't know. Akeal might be able to answer what might have taken place in his life."
Hosein can.
"I always wanted to be a fireman," he says. "I knew I was never going to go to that other side. I guess I would have just worked my butt off to get that stable job. But I was willing to do it."
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