By Orin Davidson
Frustration in West Indies cricket is at an all-time high.
But, in venting his feelings like any fed-up fan, West Indies Cricket Board chief executive Dr. Ernest Hilaire directed his recent attacks everywhere else except at the real target.
Dr. Hilaire’s criticism of the players for lacking knowledge, for being materialistic and lacking pride, are, for the most part, all factual.
But, Dr. Hilaire merely tapped the crust of the problem.
He failed to get to the core of the problem which has left the region’s game in permanent decline.
The chief executive won points for his gutsy assessment but lost just as much for failing to indentify the organization that he represents (his employers the WICB) as the nemesis of West Indies cricket.
The players might be indifferent to the demands of the professional game and the rich history of regional cricket. For that, they ought to be rightly condemned.
But when the chief executive attributes the shortcomings of the players to a West Indian society now producing ill-equipped young men and women, he is guilty of a flawed analysis.
JAMAICA’S ATHLETICS SUCCESS
If Dr. Hilaire took the time to look around the Caribbean, outside of his cricket world in the region, he would see just how wrong he is.
Jamaican athletes produced their best ever performance at last year’s World Championships when they established the country as the world’s best sprinting nation by bagging 13 medals including seven gold to finish an astounding overall second place to the mighty United States.
Prior to 2007, Jamaica had never won even one gold medal at the world’s premier track and field competition.
Rewind to 2008 at the Beijing Olympics and one will find that Jamaica had unprecedented success at the world’s most prestigious multi-sport event which yielded them 11 medals, six of them gold.
TRINIDAD’S SOCA WARRIORS CREATE HISTORY
Two years earlier, the Trinidad and Tobago football team (known as the Soca Warriors) had created history by racking up enough points to qualify for the World Cup finals in Germany.
No other representative Trinidad team had ever reached that far in the sport’s premier competition after more than four decades of trying.
Now these are all competitors of similar ages and identical West Indian backgrounds as the cricketers who Dr. Hilaire claims are produced by a dysfunctional society.
If the Jamaican athletes and Trinidad footballers are succeeding and the region’s cricketers are failing, then it seems logical that the success or failure has more to do with the people who organize their sport, rather than the competitors themselves.
The WICB is the dysfunctional element in this case.
It has been incapable of developing the infrastructure for cricket development as the Jamaican athletics and Trinidad and football ruling bodies have done to hone the talent of their competitors.
Dr. Hilaire needs to ask himself why, after several decades, the WICB has been unable to establish a full-time academy for its players to develop the discipline, intelligence, knowledge and playing skills, for which he is bellyaching about, until last month.
Dr. Hilaire represents an organization that has allowed itself to be so wracked by insularity; it cannot make merit-based decisions in the appointment of key officials and selection of teams, for the good of the game, as opposed to satisfying territorial politics.
He too is a member of a board that is still scraping the barrel-bottom for money after decades of Test and one-day competitions including a 15-year period when its team stood head and shoulders above the rest of the world while playing unbeaten in Tests and winning two World Cup titles.
If many players cannot read or/and write, as stated by Dr. Hilaire and are unable to comprehend West Indian pride or appreciate the maroon cap, an academy would have been the answer even before West Indies’ world- beating reign ended in 1995.
And, if the WICB was insightful enough many years ago, it would have had a professional or semi-professional league in place in whatever shape, size or form or location, to develop world standard players, when it became clear the professional clubs in the English county championship were closing its doors to West Indian and other foreign players.
Dr. Hilaire must understand too, that money is a bigger priority these days with the current generation of sportsmen.
Whether it is in Europe in the football or athletics leagues, or North America, in the basketball, baseball and American football leagues, today’s young men and women think about money first and everything else after.
But they are good enough to represent their demands.
Which is unlike the West Indian cricketer who is encouraged to be mediocre and earn easy money by an impotent ruling body.
Dr. Hilaire spoke his mind but like many in the WICB before him he might have stuck his foot squarely in his mouth.
