Sunday’s comprehensive defeat suffered by the West Indies cricket team in the first of four Test matches against a clearly superior Indian outfit provided a poignant reminder that the road back from ignominy to international cricketing respectability in Test cricket will be long and difficult, and that it may well take a generation or more ‒ if indeed those days do return even that quickly.
Contemporary analyses of the state of Caribbean cricket tend mostly to focus on the quality of players that we produce, the limited resources that the region ploughs into the game and the hugely counterproductive gamesmanship that manifests itself at the level of the administration of the game. Those are weaknesses which we talk ceaselessly about changing, but then as Caribbean people we have become overused to the propensity at just about every level of our leadership to seemingly well-intentioned commitments which, in the fullness of time, are reduced to no more than hot air. It is no different with our cricket.
For countries like India, England and Australia, continually raising the cricketing bar has become a matter of national pride. India, these days, is perhaps the best example of a country whose international profile is at least in part attributable to the global attention it has drawn to itself through cricket. By contrast, these days, the cataclysmic decline in Caribbean cricket, notably red ball cricket, when set against a protracted earlier era of unrivalled international supremacy, offers up a comparison that is, to say the least, humiliating in the extreme.
The comparisons are there for all to see. Test players like India’s Virat Kholi and R Ashwin, England’s Joe Root, Australia’s Steve Smith and South Africa’s Ashwin Amla (to name but a handful) bring their A Game to the table with monotonous regularity, reflecting an emergence of playing excellence that reposes in much more than natural talent. These are players whose attitudes to the game are driven by both a contemporary culture of enhanced competitiveness in the outlook of their respective nations as well as by their individual desires to be the best in the business. These national and personal dispositions are buttressed by a single-minded application to all the physical and emotional requisites coupled with the repetitive exercises of refining technique and expanding competencies in the respective departments of the game. To that, of course, must be added the undoubted management skills that are necessary to hone those resources into a winning formula.
Watching India amass almost 600 runs off a patently inadequate West Indies bowling attack in less than two days, then again in less than two days, taking all the West Indies wickets, it was ridiculously easy not only to see the gulf in class, but the reasons for that gulf. India, unquestionably, holds its players up to higher standards and the players themselves are under no illusions as to what is expected of them. In the just concluded Test the West Indies team was reduced mostly to a collection of triers of whom not a great deal appeared to have been expected in the first place.
But with the West Indies, these days, it is not only a matter of insufficient talent. Equally, it is the absence of that national/regional attitude that has brought contemporary cricketing success to other nations. Where talent is patently lacking, the attributes of grit and determination have simultaneously been removed from the regional game. On the field, any really meaningful batting partnership from the opposing side appeared to bring about a loss of both concentration and heart on the part of our bowlers. So it was against India last week. Conversely, against the bowling of Ashwin, for example, our batsmen, notoriously unschooled in the craft of playing spin bowling, simply displayed the now commonplace shortcoming of gifting their wickets through either loss of concentration or injudicious shot-making born of frustration.
Difficult as it may be to swallow, we are, simply unable to field a Test side that can consistently compete – even for a session or two – with the best teams in the game. The most we seem able to do is to show up and to participate – not to compete but to participate – as though we have been reduced to simply going through a ritual for the sake of continuing to belong to a fraternity which we once ruled.
There is another sense in which the writing is on the wall for the Caribbean as a Test-playing ‘nation.’ The elaboration, earlier this year, of the ICC’s proposal for a two-tier international Test regime which, we are told, is necessary to breathe new life into this form of the game, is likely to result in the Caribbean side being the biggest loser, relegated to the second tier of a league system that could well see us competing against the likes of Afghanistan and Nepal rather than against teams like India and Australia. That may be where we belong at this time, but it will still be a bitter pill for regional cricket lovers to swallow.
