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Sunday, July 6, 2025

Cannot be business as usual

by

20160109

It cer­tain­ly will not be a hap­py new year for the West In­dies team and man­age­ment cur­rent­ly tour­ing down un­der. And the same ap­plies for all the WI fans, what lit­tle is left of them, that is.

I, for one, can re­call the heady days of a dis­tant past when the WI team was an all-con­quer­ing force in world crick­et. Ar­guably the best Test team ever, Clive Lloyd and his bunch of mer­ry ma­raud­ers made oth­er teams grov­el at their feet. And they were the biggest box-of­fice draw even when play­ing abroad. Every­one want­ed to see Richards, Greenidge, Haynes, the afore­men­tioned Lloyd and the four-pronged pace at­tack of Roberts, Hold­ing, Croft and Gar­ner ini­tial­ly.

But those days are long gone and all any die-hard fan has to look for­ward to is one hu­mil­i­at­ing de­feat af­ter an­oth­er. And the West In­dies Crick­et Board can try to shirk their re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the dis­as­ter that is WI crick­et, but if you are tasked with man­ag­ing the game re­gion­al­ly and can­not pro­duce re­sults then whose fault is it?

The lat­est from the WICB is, of course, that they will not be dis­solv­ing "them­selves" any time soon. Not un­ex­pect­ed but the sheer ar­ro­gance to lay blame every­where else is quite amaz­ing. No look­ing in the mir­ror for Dave Cameron and com­pa­ny, no way.

The Cari­com com­mit­tees have got it all wrong, did not look at all fac­tors and if they, the board, have pro­vid­ed enough com­pen­sa­tion, fa­cil­i­ties, train­ing and re­sources well then it is the play­ers who shoul­der the blame.

What a cop out! To re­it­er­ate, the WICB is charged with run­ning the game re­gion­al­ly. If re­sults are not show­ing on the field and it is the play­ers at fault well, who de­vel­ops and se­lects the play­ers in the first place? There is no way the WICB can es­cape the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty and no one in the WI will buy that.

The Caribbean peo­ple recog­nise that things have changed. They know mon­ey plays a most im­por­tant role in crick­et to­day. They will even ac­knowl­edge that the crop of play­ers to­day don't have the same mo­ti­va­tion and men­tal strength that is re­quired to com­pete at the top lev­el of the game. But if that be the case they al­so know that the WICB is the or­gan­i­sa­tion that is sup­posed to change that par­a­digm and de­vel­op bet­ter pre­pared crick­eters. So no pass for the WICB and they are not fool­ing any­one with their rhetoric.

No "hap­py new year" and I am not sur­prised at the re­sults in Aus­tralia. If I were a bet­ting man I would be wa­ger­ing on how fast the WI would lose each Test. I could have been rich since I knew it was well with­in three or four days. The ques­tion is where do we go from here?

Since the board has no in­ten­tion of be­ing held ac­count­able by Cari­com then I sug­gest that the on­ly re­course for the Cari­com gov­ern­ments is for each in­de­pen­dent na­tion to with­hold any fund­ing from the ter­ri­to­r­i­al boards un­til re­form is forced to hap­pen, ie the dis­so­lu­tion of the WICB.

If I am not mis­tak­en no ter­ri­to­r­i­al crick­et board can sur­vive with­out some kind of gov­ern­ment sub­ven­tions. And this would be the ve­hi­cle which could en­sure nec­es­sary changes be­gin to take shape.

Whether or not the re­spec­tive gov­ern­ments take this ap­proach is left to be seen.

At this point I do not see too many op­tions for them and if they do not act force­ful­ly then it will be just busi­ness as usu­al with the re­sul­tant hu­mil­i­at­ing de­feats con­tin­u­ing to over­shad­ow the once proud crick­et­ing tra­di­tion of the West In­dies.

D Brahim

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Thi­sIsTrin­ba­go.net


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