Dear Editor,
There are few, if any, people qualified to make pronouncements about national characteristics, and Mark Nicholas, an ICC official, is certainly not one of them. In any event, such pronouncements tend generally to be on the borders of racism and must not continue. I heard Nicholas on television say, in speaking of West Indians, “Twenty Twenty suits their character.” That is an asinine statement.
In the handful of Twenty Twenty championships held, England beat Australia in one final and lost to the West Indies in the final over of another. Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka won one each and the West Indies two. Kohli, de Villiers, McCullum, Lind, Butler, Guptil, Malinga, Raina, Watson, Warner, Afridi, Miller and Amla are just a few of the magnificent non-West Indian Twenty Twenty cricketers. The under-nineteen Fifty-over World Championship was won this year by West Indians, a group of people who were a dominant force in Test cricket for the entire second half of the twentieth century.
West Indians are just very good cricketers who suffer from tremendous administrative and financial issues. Gayle and Bravo and Pollard and Narine, to name a few, are simply fantastic cricketers. Nicholas does not know anything about their character.
Not long ago Mark Nicholas characterized the West Indies team as lacking brains. Only Sammy responded to him, and at that, only after the team had won the championship and presumably proved they had brains.
West Indian people should not have to accept this sort of character assassination from people like Nicholas, who is likely one of the architects of their demotion to the second tier of Test cricket, even as not long ago there could not have been two tiers as they would have been the only one in tier one.
Yours faithfully,
Romain Pitt
