Time was when the manner of last Saturday’s nine-wicket defeat suffered by the West Indies at the hands of England would have sent shock waves through the Caribbean; it would have brought forth a collective howl of outrage, a baying for blood, a boisterous, insistent demand that heads roll. Last Saturday’s familiar display of woeful ineptitude by the West Indies passed relatively quietly. Even England did not appear to want to make much of a fuss about it.
These days, those swift reversals of fortune, from positions of comparative strength or – to put it more precisely – relative safety, to inexplicable defeat, have become par for the course for the Caribbean side; so that while some of us still fret over those kinds of outcomes, the once widespread regional preoccupation with issues of winning and losing has been supplanted by a resigned indifference to the outcomes of the team’s encounters. It may be an unflattering thing to say but the truth is that some of us, perhaps even most of us, have now come to expect little from ‘our boys.’ As far as outcomes of encounters are concerned we live in times of always fearing the worst.
Arguably, those of us who have assumed a posture of not caring less about how the team performs do ourselves a favour by ‘turning off’ from its travails. After all, our cricket has taken us on a torturous and seemingly unending journey which, over most of the past two decades or so has been, to say the least, an exercise in frustration. That, perhaps, is what is meant by the saying that here in the Caribbean it is our cricket, largely, that defines us.
There are, unquestionably, those of us who continue to believe, who remain prisoners of the time warp mirrored in those ‘glory, glory’ days, still, it seems, unable to come to terms with the reality that the rest of the cricketing world regards us as ‘has-beens.’ Last weekend’s demolition at the hands of England, serves as a reminder of that reality. What happened in St. George’s last weekend was hardly shocking.
The talking point about the outcome of the Grenada Test reposes in the familiarity of the pattern into which the West Indies’ performances have settled. True enough Caribbean cricket may not be blessed with the abundance of talent to which it had once been accustomed, though careful examination of the team’s performances in recent years points much more to deficiencies in resolve rather than in prowess. All too often the team has failed – when confronted with a challenge – to draw a line in the sand, to stand and fight. Toughness no less than talent is what, these days, is missing.
Accordingly, corrective remedial contemplation is pointless unless remedies take account of this critical fault line in our cricket. Somehow, that key mental attribute that continues to make a difference between losing and a more favourable alternative result must be infused into whatever package of plans we may have to breathe new life into West Indies cricket. Otherwise, we are on a hiding to nowhere.
Other cricketing nations have more or less ‘worked out’ the West Indies. They have discerned that rather than a paucity of talent, it is its predictable propensity for ‘softness,’ for caving in under pressure, that is perhaps the West Indies’ biggest weakness. Our opponents have come to believe that such interludes of ‘quality’ – whether with bat or ball – as the West Indies displays – can be made to melt like butter against the sun under sustained periods. In Grenada, England raised their game and the West Indies melted.
One only has to reflect on the manner of the protracted succession of defeats that has characterised the decline of Caribbean cricket to get the point about what, invariably, has been the lack of stomach for a scrap. In far too many instances outcomes of games are characterized by mind-boggling batting collapses and dispirited bowling performances…sudden, dramatic declines in fortunes that have given rise to the West Indies being labelled a team that ‘can’t tek pressure.’
What the CMC described as our “mediocre batting” in St. George’s in the second innings of the Test illustrates the point about the West Indies’ now familiar lack of intestinal fortitude. England, would have begun the day recognising that a loss was the unlikeliest outcome for them and once they had factored in the ‘roll over’ factor in contemporary West Indies cricket into their game plan they would have taken the field on the final day of the test with a plan to try and win the game. The West Indies, had they done their homework – as much on themselves as on the opponents – would have saved the game.
