Alvin?Corneal

De­pend­ing on whom you ask, the de­scrip­tion of the state of West In­dies crick­et can pro­vide an an­swer which will lead one to be­lieve the best and the worst, but cer­tain­ly not com­pli­men­ta­ry to the present im­age of the game which had reached the high­est qual­i­ty above every crick­et­ing coun­try in the world many moons ago.

How­ev­er, few of the arm­chair crit­ics cared to ex­plain the rea­sons for our demise. Was it a sharp de­te­ri­o­ra­tion from the lev­el of the leg­endary pre­sen­ta­tions of play­ers like Sir George Headley, Sir Gar­ry Sobers, Sir Viv Richards, Ro­han Kan­hai, through to the ab­solute­ly bril­liant bat­ting ge­nius Bri­an Charles Lara.

The rank­ing scale has dropped from ten to a ze­ro and be­fore any­one tries to find ex­cus­es, stand in the line of thou­sands who can pro­vide some strange ones.To be an­gry, emo­tion­al, dis­ap­point­ed or fu­ri­ous be­cause of a drop in stan­dard or in any mood, will be jus­ti­fied.

Tar­get the poor work of ad­min­is­tra­tors, the at­ti­tude of the play­ers or in many cas­es com­ments which will in­cite in­su­lar­i­ty, par­ti­san­ship, so­cial sta­tus, the neg­a­tive or pos­i­tive ef­fect of the West In­dies Play­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (WIPA) dur­ing the down­ward spi­ral of the game, will mir­ror to­tal con­fu­sion and no progress.

I wish to work back­wards from the present sit­u­a­tion for the pur­pose of reach­ing the cru­cial junc­ture which can be tar­get­ed for an im­proved im­age of the game and by ex­ten­sion, its re­turn to the top. The great en­gi­neers have al­ways im­plied that if the foun­da­tion is not sol­id, then the build­ing will col­lapse.

It is true to say that the game of crick­et in the Caribbean worked through the ranks, took their de­feat as lessons and turned the ta­bles on their teach­ers as time went by.

WI be­came the ex­em­plars, thanks to the ex­pe­ri­ences and tu­tor­ing ben­e­fit­ed from our Eng­lish ex­perts. The ex­po­sure to pro­fes­sion­al­ism for our crick­eters was the ini­tial step where the pos­i­tive at­ti­tudes were re­spon­si­ble for these "green­horns" and to­geth­er with their nat­ur­al tal­ent, they were able to grad­u­ate in­to cham­pi­ons as a team.

Let us fast track the eras and en­ter the days when the in­vi­ta­tions from the Eng­lish clubs had ceased, the game it­self had been changed in three for­mats, each in a var­ied ap­proach and the now fa­mous Twen­ty20 (T20) en­ter­tain­ment show which brought some mil­lion­aires, who recog­nise the en­vi­ron­ment which al­ready had great sup­port, good crick­eters with half way filled pock­ets.

Had we nev­er met the charis­mat­ic, ad­ven­tur­ous, mon­ey hun­gry Amer­i­can Allen Stan­ford, whose knowl­edge and un­der­stand­ing of the game of crick­et, had used the colo­nial method of be­com­ing pop­u­lar and dom­i­nant among Caribbean peo­ple, our game will not have de­te­ri­o­rat­ed.

Young­sters, who were ap­pear­ing to be­come con­tenders for star­dom in the game, were lured in­to style of play which ob­vi­ous­ly dis­tort­ed the use of their or­tho­dox styles and turned them in­to lit­er­al swipers or tear away fast bowlers.

In the midst of all this fi­nan­cial haven, ad­min­is­tra­tors be­came more in­ter­est­ed, not nec­es­sar­i­ly be­cause they had the qual­i­fi­ca­tions to im­prove the de­vel­op­ment process but more be­cause they could fight for an iden­ti­ty which did not need a proof of com­pe­tence and will al­so en­joy a good pay day.

Ob­vi­ous­ly, the ad­min­is­tra­tive struc­ture fell apart, in­su­lar­i­ty was a prac­tice of the day and a po­lit­i­cal form of ad­min­is­tra­tion showed it­self as the de­cay of the sport.

Crit­i­cisms flew to and fro, par­ti­san de­ci­sions cre­at­ed a quag­mire which be­came so con­fus­ing, that not even the play­ers could un­der­stand the func­tions of the ad­min­is­tra­tors. My friends, there­in lies the rea­son for the di­a­bol­i­cal lev­els of dis­ci­pline demon­strat­ed by man­agers, se­lec­tors and even­tu­al­ly the play­ers.

Now, the re­pair sys­tems seem re­mote and the game has reached the point where noth­ing at­tempt­ed is work­ing. Some are do­ing their best to get the joyrides na­tion­al­ly, re­gion­al­ly and some am­bi­tious ones stretch­ing for in­ter­na­tion­al op­por­tu­ni­ties.

In­ci­den­tal­ly, that is the rea­son for our pa­thet­ic dis­play against Pak­istan and even then, there are voic­es who vouch for our chances to qual­i­fy for good re­sults in ma­jor com­pe­ti­tions.

Any­one could see the loss of in­ter­est of the pa­tri­ot­ic sup­port­ers and the emp­ty sta­di­um seats in the Test match­es will even­tu­al­ly be the fo­cus of dis­cus­sion among the spon­sors.

If you think that I have de­tect­ed a gloomy pe­ri­od, you are ab­solute­ly right.