“Lions led by donkeys” was the pithy assessment of the tragedy of the hundreds of thousands of British Empire troops sent to their slaughter by incompetent generals on the Western Front in World War I (1914-1918).
Well, the West Indies cricket team may have a “Tiger” in Shivnarine Chanderpaul and their captain, Darren Sammy, has been labelled by some as “lionhearted,” but the general inability of the West Indies to win key moments in recent Test series, particularly in the last one against the weakest Australian side ever to visit the Caribbean when the opposition’s tail repeatedly wagged, was more suggestive of a pussycat being boxed around by a feisty kangaroo than of a leonine approach to finishing off vulnerable prey.
It probably is a tad unfair, however, to focus on the well-known shortcomings of this West Indies team which, whilst competitive for much of the series against Australia, could never be considered to be the best possible combination of players, thanks to the long-running deficiencies of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) in managing the regional game and its relations with the players.
For the past several weeks and even now that the West Indies are already in England, armchair selectors around the Caribbean and in the blogosphere have been picking their ideal team – a fantasy team, in effect, given that many of the players they are selecting are either unavailable for various reasons or deemed to be surplus to requirements for reasons best known to the WICB and its selection committee.
But the armchair selector is engaged in an exercise in futility. One only has to consider the players picked for the President’s XI match against the Australians, preceding the First Test, to form an impression of the selectors’ thinking, if that is not too generous a term. Unfortunately, there are more questions than answers.
Why was a proven failure like Devon Smith picked? Why was the Leeward Islands wicketkeeper, Devon Thomas, with one first class century to his credit and a batting average of just over 20, chosen as a specialist batsman? Why were Adrian Barath and Ravi Rampaul, both affected by injury early in the domestic season, not included to gain match fitness? Why was the talented Darren Bravo, so patently out of sorts in the one-day international (ODI) and T20 series, not afforded the chance to spend some time in the middle to adjust to the rhythm of the longer version of the game? Why was Assad Fudadin, the second highest run-scorer in this year’s regional four-day tournament, with an average of 48 and two centuries, not given the opportunity to press for Test selection?
Then, in the Test series itself, one has to ask why, when it was clear that the top three in the West Indies batting order – Messrs Barath, Kraigg Brathwaite and Kieran Powell – were walking wickets, they were preferred to Mr Fudadin, who was rushed to Dominica, only to carry drinks and watch the preferred ones fail again.
No matter the potential of most of the players chosen to tour England, the team, apart from the outstanding Shiv Chanderpaul and the progress of Kemar Roach and Shane Shillingford, is already marked by a combination of inexperience, technical inadequacies and mental frailty. This, taken with the idiosyncratic tendencies of the WICB’s selectors, does not augur well for the tour.
To add grist to the mill, the opener-in-exile, Chris Gayle, has unequivocally declared himself available to play in the ODI series against England, putting an end to the efforts by the WICB chief executive officer to cast doubt on Mr Gayle’s position – clear to all but the most myopic. The former captain has now driven the ball firmly into the court of the WICB and its selectors.
In light of all this, the armchair cynic might be forgiven for not only considering the shenanigans of the WICB and the policies of its selectors to be injudicious in the extreme, but also for believing in all sorts of conspiracy theories relating to the competence of the selectors and the coach, the ambitions of the Board president and the CEO, and that bane of West Indian unity, insularity.
The WICB was previously called the West Indies Cricket Board of Control, with the “Control” being dropped when the market-oriented Pat Rousseau took over as president in 1998, in an effort to reach out to stakeholders at all levels. The armchair cynic may well conclude that that was merely cosmetic and that an almost neo-colonialist desire to control every aspect of West Indies cricket persists.
