WINDIES CRICKET ON DEATH BED

For whatever the reasons, West Indies cricket sucks. The regional team has been stinking the place up now for almost two decades. That never-ending corner is yet to be finally turned. The team is slipping further and further down the international rankings and meantime, we in the Caribbean are busy tearing down much of what’s left of the sport that, certainly from a regional standpoint, seems to be dying.

Notwithstanding the success of the Caribbean Premier League that attracts full stadia and generates lots of excitement and more importantly, money for the territories, regional cricket is in ruins. Unlike the CPL, the regional one day and four-day tournaments, are played before empty seats and had it not been for a few cameras about and photographers sent by their respective media houses, no one would see what has been going on at the matches.

The reasons for the decline of regional cricket are many and there is enough blame to go around – from the International Cricket Council that has ceded all power to the big-three of Australia, England and India – to the WICB that has committed one misstep after the othe,r to the players who these days have very little passion about anything else other than T20 money. But if the sport is to survive regionally a lot has to change, even though I doubt it will.

When the West Indies were winning between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, the success papered over major cracks but at least the players played with pride. Insularity, weak leadership and from a fan perspective, delusion.

We the fans have been guilty of a lot of that. After we lost the Frank Worrell trophy at Sabina Park in 1995, we the fans just figured the team would have rebounded back to the top of the heap in a short while. Afterall, we still had Ambrose and Walsh, Lara, Chanderpaul and there were youngsters like Ramnaresh Sarwan coming through.

However, by then a number of the teams we used to pummel had caught up with us. England, through it’s own efforts of literally banning West Indian players from the domestic leagues that regional players used to hone their considerable talents, eventually leveled the playing field and soon had us by the throat. Meanwhile, Pakistan and India no longer feared us. But to us fans, the West Indies was always going to be great. We hardly even realized that the great team of Greenidge, Haynes, Richards, Richardson, Gomes, Lloyd, Dujon, Holding, Garner, Croft and Marshall, were one by one, being sidelined  either by age, loss of form or falling out of favour with the selectors.

Over time, several other talented players came and went – Jimmy Adams, Sarwan, Hooper, and others who shone individually but hardly ever as a team. Over the past decade the West Indies has hardly ever been able to put a complete performance together no matter who was coaching. When the batsmen performed the bowlers were awful and vice versa. These days, the team doesn’t bat, bowl of field well and is the main reason why its at three or four times the rate than it wins.

While all this is happening, we continue to tear whatever is left apart with the regional squabbling fueled by insularity. Fights between the board and the players association also drove fans and sponsors away. What that has meant is that the West Indies are now near rock bottom. The only teams were seem capable of beating are some of the affiliates and even then those victories are not a given. Evidence of this was seen at the ICC Cricket World Cup when Ireland defeated them by four wickets. Then, they had the audacity to say they didn’t see the win as an upset.

I say all this to suggest that if the players don’t feel it anymore and the administrators seem lost, why should the fans care? Those fans need to wake up and see that there are no more Greenidge, Haynes, Richards, and Lloyd anymore. It has been a couple of generations since those greats have stepped aside, their careers done and dusted. At the rate at which things are going very soon ‘done and dusted’ will also be used to describe West Indies cricket.