Just when we thought that things could not get any worse in West Indies cricket, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) took the unprecedented step, on Monday, of suspending head coach Phil Simmons.
Before becoming a coach, Mr Simmons was a hard-hitting batsman capable of explosive performances. Despite his modest record as a West Indian cricketer, he enjoyed the reputation of being a thoroughly professional cricketer and very much a team player. His recent unprofessional outburst, in which he publicly criticised the process to select the one-day team for Sri Lanka, complained that he had not got the best squad, revealed how the selectors had voted and alleged “interference from outside” to exclude Dwayne Bravo and Kieron Pollard, therefore comes as something of a surprise.
We can only surmise that Mr Simmons’ utterances were born of the most acute frustration. For many Caribbean cricket fans, accustomed to the shenanigans of the WICB and its serial mismanagement of one of the region’s greatest assets, there is considerable sympathy for his position, especially as it is not clear on whose say-so precisely Mr Simmons was suspended.
But Mr Simmons did break protocol and has himself apologised for “a schoolboy error in a moment of madness.” The latest word from WICB CEO Michael Muirhead, however, is that the coach will have to appear before a WICB committee to “answer breaches of confidentiality and bringing the WICB into disrepute”, with a decision to be reached on his future by early next week.
We fear though that lost in the furore over Mr Simmons’ lapse will be issues such as why the young West Indies captain Jason Holder, in whom so much faith seems to be reposed by the selectors and the WICB, does not have a vote on the selection panel; why the opinion of the captain, the coach and the chairman of selectors, Clive Lloyd, should, in effect, count for naught in the selection process; and, perhaps most worrying of all, what exactly is the “interference from outside” to which Mr Simmons alludes. Indeed, clarification of the latter might well help us all to understand better the morass that passes for the management of West Indies cricket.
The whole matter, of course, speaks to the problems of governance that have been bedevilling West Indies cricket for years, but every cricket fan in the region knows that this latest fiasco is due to what Tony Cozier calls the continuing “fallout” from the aborted India tour last year. It may be recalled that this newspaper had argued last year that the WICB, the West Indies Players Association (WIPA) and the West Indies team bore “the collective responsibility for precipitating the crisis in India and failing to avert it before ignominy and hurt were heaped upon the region” and that, as a first step, WICB president Dave Cameron, WIPA president Wavell Hinds and then ODI captain Dwayne Bravo, “should either voluntarily resign or be forced to resign.”
This was even before the task force appointed by the WICB to assess the contracts dispute involving the players, WIPA, and the Board, which led to the abandonment of the tour, had concluded that all three parties were at fault. Unfortunately, in spite of the WICB giving St Vincent Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves the assurance that no players would be victimised, Mr Bravo lost his job as ODI skipper and he and Mr Pollard continue to be left out of the ODI team, with no reasonable explanation forthcoming from the WICB. And Messrs Cameron and Hinds remain in place, nobody else having been held accountable.
If, however, as many of us fondly like to believe, West Indies cricket belongs to the people, then it is time that the people’s representatives, that is, their governments, find a way to force change in the governance of the game, even though this is anathema to the view that politics and sport do not mix and contrary to the rules of the International Cricket Council that there should be no government intervention in the administration of cricket. There is need for “interference from outside” of another kind.
Otherwise, the WICB will continue to run things without any sort of transparency and accountability and West Indies cricket will continue to lurch from one disaster to another until complete collapse is inevitable; as Mr Cozier puts it, “after two decades of collapse, [it] can hardly withstand any more.”
Of course, this being the West Indies and the subject being cricket, we can be sure of only one thing: there will be no unanimity of views on our opinion or on what to do next.
