Dear Editor,
The new coach of the West Indies team, Stuart Law, has brought attention to the fact that our team is less experienced than the Afghanistan team in fifty over cricket at a time when India, the best cricket country in the world, is selecting its best fifty over team to tour the Caribbean to play a 50 over series.
West Indian cricket people should not pretend that those two circumstances are insignificant. Listen to Indians talk about West Indies cricketers. The last time the great Indian wicket keeper batsman Dhoni talked about them less than two years ago in the context of the shorter forms of the game, he regarded them as dangerous because he had seen them play, played against many of them and knew what they could do. When the WICB chairman offered to send a replacement team to India after the forty thousand dollar fiasco, the Indians, who take their cricket seriously and knew more about West Indian cricket than the chairman, said “steupes” figuratively, because he knew there were not enough good cricketers in the area to replace even one third of such a squad.
West Indian administrators know very little about their cricketers because they do not care about them. A few years ago an Indian reporter knew more precisely what an Antiguan leg spinner named Martin’s occupation was than West Indian broadcasters. I learnt more about Marlon Samuels, one of the most talented modern West Indian batsman from an Indian journalist than I did from Samuels’ compatriots. West Indian cricket people refuse to recognize that there are not enough top class cricketers in the region to have exclusionary selection policies that reduce even more the limited supply of talented and or experienced cricketers in the region. Some so-called fans say it does not matter who is selected because the cricketers are all so poor, but does that make any sense? Whether you examine that argument theoretically or factually it is still a stupid proposition, and therefore not worthy to be described as an argument.
I remember as a youngster playing cricket, a savvy older fellow would blurt out if someone misfielded that “you either for or against’. The West Indies run the risk, indeed are likely, to be excluded from the next World Cup if we do not win more matches. Yet our administrators say the best policy is ‘to teach those so and so cricketers a lesson’ by excluding them. That is ridiculous and it must stop.
Yours faithfully,
Romain Pitt
