The recent tepid performance by the West Indies cricket team touring India has triggered yet another barrage of media outcries about our place in the sport that leaves us far removed from the world champions we once were. Inevitably, part of the outrage contains expert speculation on the reasons for the decline and some suggestions, as well, for a possible fix.
This is now an old debate. It has been coming before us for what seems like ages so that what is being said in the current India incarnation of it has been said before – often in almost identical wording – but before we admit to being “at our wits’ end” on the matter, as one local editorial put it, it might help to consider some of the aspects involved in the West Indies cricket story.
One factor is that the makeup of the very West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) running our cricket is a conglomerate of nations, cobbled together from colonial times, to create a sports entity. It is an anomaly in international sport. The WICB is not one nation – it is many – and in keeping with our region’s post-independence history, where all of these federationist approaches have been undertaken, it is an organization constantly being pulled this way and that by internal provincial positions.
This tension is a taboo subject, because of the political implications involved, and therefore rarely openly discussed, but it exists. Confidential sources in our regional cricket administration will admit that the tensions are constantly in play, and Michael Holding has referred to them openly in his writings and, occasionally, in his commentary. The effect of these strains on the operation of the WICB has rarely been publicly declared, but the impact must be significant as the organization sets about doing its business. One recalls clearly the manoeuverings in Allen Stanford’s scheme to create regional cricket competition where he met with diverse positions from the various cricket countries he was courting; it resulted in his recruiting some Caribbean former WI greats (Gibbs, Bishop, Roberts, etc) and criss-crossing the Caribbean with them to help combat the insular positions. Moreover, as with all such regional efforts, the history is that those arms-folded provincial positions will remain; to hope for them to change is to hope in vain.
In a recent informal cricket chat at Moray House, former WI cricket captain Clive Lloyd identified another aspect in the current siphoning off of athletic talent to other sports (basketball, soccer, track-and-field, American football) that has begun to occur in recent years. Our emergence as the cricket power was in a time when, for almost the entire region, the greatest opportunities for a sporting career were almost exclusively in cricket. It may not have paid millions then (as T20 does today) but it was literally the only career sport possibility for the gifted athlete. Now, in a different world economy, sports of all kinds are beckoning to the superior Caribbean athletes, offering them scholarships, world-class training, high earnings, and fame, that the region cannot begin to match, and the cricket pool is thereby diminished. Furthermore, even in those young athletes who commit to cricket today, their focus is naturally on the shorter forms of the game, very popular now. This is fundamentally a career or business decision, made by most athletes purely for the financial possibilities involved; that is another aspect that cricket administrators, in our small nations, cannot change.
There are some areas, however, where action can and should take place.
One, for example, mentioned in the recent hand-wringing, is the apparent incompetencies in WICB personnel. From the time of WICB President Pat Rousseau to the current President Dave Cameron, the organisation has been consistently criticized on this basis. Concern has been expressed for the lack of professional qualifications or inexperience in Board personnel, and the list of foul-ups in recent years has become comedic fodder at social gatherings in our region. (I wrote about them in a satirical WICB song called ‘Take A Rest.’) Questions have been raised as well regarding the performances of our various selection committees, and we have even been made aware of the victimization of certain players. Sense alone would tell you, as Guyanese would put it, that this is an area where change is possible. Individuals employed by the WICB, as people running our cricket, have to be rigorously screened for experience and suitability; that should be the standard. That’s something we can fix.
Also, over the past couple of years we have also begun to hear instances of West Indian players at international level who are absent the fundamentals. During a televised Test, Maurice Bishop showed one of our fast bowlers delivering the ball, at full stretch, with a bent wrist. At Moray House Clive Lloyd referred to one of our players making a critical mistake simply from not understanding the Duckworth/Lewis rules, and he cited violations of fundamental bowling choice and of field placing. Making sure our cricketers are well-schooled in technique and in the rules and traditions of the game could also be effected. We can’t change insular attitudes, but we can school our own cricketers.
Overall, as we fret about the state of our cricket, we should understand the insolubles (individual nation priorities; athletes drawn to other sports and potential careers; financial restraints) but concentrate our pushes in the areas where change is possible such as WICB personnel; player training and education, and selection committees.
At base, however, it has repeatedly been suggested, by respected cricket minds in our region that, for any significant change to happen, the fundamental structure of the WICB must be revamped to create an organisation that is accountable to some regional body other than itself. Tony Cozier has written repeatedly about this. A report, commissioned by the WICB itself, and produced by former Jamaican Prime Minister PJ Patterson, Sir Alister McIntyre, and our own Ian McDonald, proposed such a restructuring. That was in 2007. Nothing has happened. The state of our cricket indicates such a restructuring is a must. In a more responsive operation we would at least be able to effect change and to change course as events indicate. The “rot in our cricket” that the editorial referred to will not stop until that fundamental change comes to the WICB. Without that, all we will continue to get is more of the present same.
