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The West Indian cricketers must have been touched by the number of Trinidadians and Tobagonians who came to see them play on the first day of the First Test yesterday at the Queen's Park Oval.

And if they had had the time to examine the crowd, not as a crowd, but as individuals, they might have concluded that a number of them were touched in the head.

It was not just the outlandish headgear that some of the Australians wore, or the bathers in the artificial pool who seemed to have lost their way to Maracas Bay, but also the way some of the Trinidadians seemed to have confused the Test match with a Carnival fete, gyrating with every wicket to rhythms coming from either the Laventille Rhythm Section in the Trini Posse stand or the Tunapuna Music makers making their own mas on the ``Grounds''.

But modern Test cricket, it seems, must have its share of theatre, traditional theatre in the form of ``Blues'' blowing on his horn, even as his entourage bellows that ``is time fuh a wicket'', and New Age theatre in the form of graphic placards raised aloft in the hope that television would ``telegraph'' the attempts at creativity from here to the bottom of the world.

No wonder that, in the beginning, before they knew it was all really in good fun, our police thought it necessary to guard our precious cricketers from those loonies out there and their crazy goings-on.