Our West Indies team performance throughout the qualifying series for the T20 World Cup was disgraceful, to say the least. It will be exceedingly difficult to put the shattered pieces together to start the painful process of rebuilding, rethinking, strategising, apologising.
Consider this. In the beginning when we first put a fledgeling team together at the start of the 21st century, we were regarded as the minnows in a field dominated by Australia and England.
The superpowers lorded it over the string of colony teams until 1928 when we made a cap-in-hand entry into official Test cricket.
We were given a trouncing in our first encounter against England in 1928, but made it a much closer affair the following year when we drew with them one-all in the Caribbean.
West Indies finally came to the front in 1950-51 when we whipped England 3-1, including that historic defeat at Lords.
We could now match any team with a batting and bowling line-up which included Worrell, Weekes and Walcott, bowlers Ramadhin and Valentine, and later the tempestuous fast bowler Roy Gilchrist.
The 1960-61 tour in Australia was a series to remember, as skipper Worrell, ably assisted by his counterpart Richie Benaud, breathed new life into the game.
In the mid-’60s the team led by Garfield Sobers and later Rohan Kanhai had mixed fortunes leading up to 1975 when they again returned to Australia. The lights were dimmed for a while by the pace of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson (Australia beat us 5-1), but then came those great days of Lloyd, Richards, Roberts, Holding, Fredericks, Greenidge, Kallicharan, and the host of others who made the late 1970s into the early 1990s years of dominance by the West Indies.
But then came the downward slide which commenced during the early 1990s.
The changing of the guard can be said to have taken place when Australia defeated a weak West Indies 2–1 in 1994–95 to become the unofficial world champions of Test cricket.
It ushered in the death knell for West Indian supremacy, pushing us back to the level of minnows on the cricket field, right back to where we had started in 1928.
For instance, the West Indies made their first-ever official tour to South Africa in 1998-99, ending in a 5-0 defeat. The next year, England won a series for the first time in 31 years.
This was followed by a 2-0 defeat by New Zealand in 1999, a 3-1 loss to England, and a 5-0 whitewash from Australia.
West Indies then suffered series losses to South Africa, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, New Zealand, India. We had rapidly become the world’s beating stick. The team fell to eighth place in the world rankings. Talk about a slippery slope!
The point of this brief history is to show that we have been there before. But never like on Friday night October 21, a date that will stick in the minds of angry cricket fans for years to come.
And while Cricket West Indies’ president Ricky Skerritt speaks of the region’s disappointment and utter frustration, he himself apparently may not understand that there is anger, real anger, across the Caribbean and directed at him and his board, his selectors, his coaches, and at our players. Because we do not understand what goes wrong so often.
Talk of “going back to the drawing board and taking a look at our structure” does not hit it. It’s more than anger, Mr. President, and its more than frustration.
A serious element of fear has now crept into the equation as the reality hits us of a possibility of a cricket future without the West Indies, or a West Indies team with no invitations, and a West Indies team with nowhere to go.
We must have seen it coming. Today’s names do not light up the imagination when you enter the ground with hopes of things that can be. No sure century-makers, no spin twins, no invincibles.
The Gleaner editorial on Monday, October 24 was frank and outspoken in its call for a complete dissolution to the West Indies structure.
An interim board, as suggested, would have their work cut out for them, for now it’s not just the game of cricket that needs attending to, but a whole new psychological outlook to correct behaviour, attitudes, realign objectives, and understand what cricket means to nationhood in the Caribbean. They should start by reading C.L.R. James’ Beyond the Boundary, because that’s how far cricket reaches, and cricket board decisions extend.
We can look, too, for a role model of the likes of George Headley to set before our present crop of cricketers as an inspiration, motivator, and teacher.
Michel Manley, in his History of West Indies Cricket, takes time out to reflect on Headley’s teaching moments to be used as an example for today’ s players.
“C.L.R. James provides an astonishing insight into Headley’s mind in his book Beyond the Boundary. He describes how the master spends much of the night before he had to bat. He rehearsed every ball which the bowlers he knew he had to face could bowl to him. In his mind, he practised the shots he would employ.
“In a real sense, Headley answered the summons implicit in Marcus Garvey’s call to black excellence. He did so by harnessing the talent to the purpose at hand; by having the intelligence and the discipline to adapt; by having the energy to work; and by having the courage to persevere”.
We were woefully short of that on October 21.
- Lance Neita is a writer and public relations strategist. Send feedback to lanceneita@hotmail or columns@gleanerjm.com [2]