St John's-Team man­ag­er Richie Richard­son said the West In­dies' win­ning of the ICC World Twen­ty20 ti­tle in Sri Lan­ka is tes­ti­mo­ny to what uni­ty can achieve.

West In­dies made a poor start to the tour­na­ment by los­ing to Aus­tralia and Sri Lan­ka in the pre­lim­i­nary stage, but re­bound­ed to crush the Aussies by 74 runs in the se­mi-fi­nals and beat the hosts by 36 runs in the fi­nal to win their first ever World T20 ti­tle.

Richard­son, a for­mer Windies skip­per, said every­one needs to stop the bick­er­ing and fight­ing and should in­stead come to­geth­er and make their con­tri­bu­tion to­wards the de­vel­op­ment of West In­dies crick­et.

"I was so ex­cit­ed. We have been through a lot and we have been work­ing ex­treme­ly hard. The play­ers are com­mit­ted to our pro­gramme and have bought in­to our pro­gramme.

"To see the way we went out there and played; we didn't start so well, but we came good at the right time, and to see how the guys gelled to­geth­er and played was ab­solute­ly re­mark­able," Richard­son said.

"That's what West In­dies crick­et is all about; peo­ple com­ing to­geth­er and work­ing hard and show­ing the world that we can per­form.

"I think that is lack­ing in our crick­et to­day. There is too much pulling and fight­ing and bick­er­ing. We all need to have one goal and that is to have a very strong West In­dies crick­et.

"We all have got to sup­port West In­dies crick­et re­gard­less to whether you have pref­er­ences or not. The team rep­re­sents the en­tire Caribbean so we need to re­alise that every­body has a role to play in the de­vel­op­ment of West In­dies crick­et."

Richard­son said no one mem­ber of the cur­rent coach­ing and man­age­ment team can take sole cred­it for the uni­fied way in which the West In­dies team played at the re­cent tour­na­ment in Sri Lan­ka.

The An­tiguan said it was just a to­tal team ef­fort.

"We have a re­al­ly good man­age­ment team. We have about eight or nine per­sons who work in var­i­ous de­part­ment of the team and we set an ex­am­ple and a stan­dard for the play­ers.

"We make sure the play­ers are in line and are do­ing the right things at the right time. I think every­body got to take cred­it for that," Richard­son said.

"I don't think any one of us can take all the cred­it. I think it's a con­cert­ed ef­fort by all. We re­alised the im­por­tance of do­ing well for the West In­dies and play­ing well as a team. And that's the on­ly way we are go­ing to be suc­cess­ful."