Alvin Corneal

Maybe I did not de­vote enough time to lis­ten­ing care­ful­ly to the re­cent in­ter­views with the two oc­cu­piers of the hot seats in the WICB board­room.

To my mind, there is ab­solute­ly no good rea­son why the ICC should even en­ter­tain the thought of di­vid­ing the hand­ful of crick­et­ing coun­tries for any rea­son.

I can on­ly as­sume that the qual­i­ty of our crick­et has reached a lev­el where we are no longer the crowd pullers we were in pre­vi­ous years.

When­ev­er the chair­man of the WICB could ac­cept the fact that the board will make mon­ey from the re­cent pro­pos­al of the ICC, my ques­tion to the gen­tle­man will be: "How will an in­crease in our bank ac­count up­lift the abysmal state of game it­self?"

Is mon­ey the be all and end all for the game's sur­vival? Are we so far away from the sport that holds our in­ter­est that we can­not see the rapid de­cay of its qual­i­ty by the poor per­for­mances of the play­ers them­selves ?

Messrs Cameron and the cur­rent di­rec­tor Mr Py­bus have so far proven to be un­able to present a pic­ture which spells progress.

We have of­ten heard of these grandiose plans from one leader to an­oth­er, which al­ways ap­pear to be su­per­fi­cial chat­ter, with­out even the slight­est method­ol­o­gy lead­ing to a bet­ter crick­et pro­gramme.

My deep feel­ing is that the struc­ture of West In­dies crick­et is frag­ile in every way, with the sources of ad­e­quate sports man­age­ment and tech­ni­cal de­vel­op­ment lit­er­al­ly de­fi­cient.

If this as­sess­ment has the lev­el of ac­cu­ra­cy which I be­lieve is ev­i­dent, then the stake­hold­ers com­ing from the dif­fer­ent af­fil­i­at­ed coun­tries, must act in the in­ter­est of an im­proved state of the game, even if they have to with­draw their own failed ideas, and re­place them­selves with pro­fes­sion­al prac­ti­tion­ers whose ex­per­tise will con­tribute to a bet­ter qual­i­ty, a more or­gan­ised form of crick­et ed­u­ca­tion to the glut of po­ten­tial­ly tal­ent­ed crick­eters.

At this point in time, we are ful­ly aware of the avail­able tal­ent and the guid­ance which they need to turn their po­ten­tial in­to star­dom, a process which we have been able to wit­ness through the group of su­per­stars who took us to the top over the past few decades.

We have no bar­gain­ing pow­er which would sound con­vinc­ing to the ICC. Our play­ers are not well at­tuned to the pro­fes­sion­al ap­proach which be­ings suc­cess.

Our bark is loud­er than our bite and no amount of con­cil­ia­to­ry com­ments from the pa­tri­ots have been known to bring an im­proved state of our crick­et.

Maybe the most in­tel­li­gent ad­vice to the WICB came from the fa­mous Bar­ba­di­an sports psy­chol­o­gist Dr Rudy Web­ster, whose rep­u­ta­tion is well known by nu­mer­ous for­mer crick­eters the world over.

His ex­pres­sion of the val­ue of ed­u­ca­tion for our crick­eters, spe­cial­ly through the util­i­sa­tion of high qual­i­ty coach­es on a long term ba­sis, may well be the most ap­pro­pri­ate route to a bet­ter stan­dard of our crick­et.

It may even be a great idea to in­clude him with­in the tech­ni­cal staff in a way that he had done over the years.

We are now cer­tain that mon­ey did not help us to be bet­ter crick­eters.

The play­ers are well paid, but our re­sults have not been close to what the for­mer play­ers achieved and for less mon­ey.

Maybe the de­f­i­n­i­tion of the pro­fes­sion­al has a cer­tain de­gree of am­bi­gu­i­ty.

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