Dear Editor,
Since no one with the required information will explain why Bravo and Pollard are pariahs of WI one-day cricket, I will speculate publicly about the reason or reasons, and pose the question, whether they deserve their banishment.
Dwayne Bravo was the captain of the ‘infamous team’ and it is a fair inference that Pollard was one of its leaders. There were twelve other members of the team. It has been reported that the team rejected the advice of, at least, Clive Lloyd, to carry on with the tour. No fair-minded person can deny the seriousness of the consequences of the team decision. The administrators seem to have taken the position that those two players were mainly responsible for the decision to end the infamous tour prematurely.
It seems strange that those two players would be so persuasive as to convince the other twelve players to take such a drastic step. One would have thought that if those two exhibited a degree of bullheadedness that the other twelve did not share, someone like Lloyd and those officials who shared his views would have required Dwayne Bravo and Pollard to return home, and persuaded the other twelve to continue, perhaps with two replacements.
That the administration could not achieve this suggests that many more than those two players were unwilling to continue.
So now we learn that notwithstanding the findings of the commission struck to investigate the fiasco, which divided responsibility between the board, WIPA and the players, and despite Lloyd`s willingness to include those two players in the squad to tour Sri Lanka, some other members of the selection committee and the board see it differently.
They are everywhere. People whose instincts do not extend beyond the desire to punish. They are pigheaded and willing to destroy important institutions in order to have their way. They are usually sanctimonious, selfish, uninteresting and unreasonable. Progress is never achieved under the watch of such people. They must be resisted.
The one-day team for Sri Lanka must include the players wanted by the coach especially, the captain and the chairman of selectors or it should not leave the shores.
Yours faithfully,
Romain Pitt
