Just when I was plan­ning analy­ses which may help to un­der­stand the fail­ure of the West In­dies fail­ure, the T&T Con­ca­caf gold Cup and the mys­tery as to the where­abouts of the Pro League.

But hon­est­ly, the task is far too much for just one ar­ti­cle, so let us start with com­ments by some of the finest crick­eters who made some in­ter­est­ing state­ments which may help to restart the suc­cess of West In­dies crick­et.

The first is the sup­port which was giv­en to the cur­rent skip­per Ja­son Hold­er by the for­mer West In­di­an Clive Lloyd, a man who re­al­ly knew what lead­er­ship was all about. I be­lieve that Clive may have had a full ca­reer on the field and some­times there were chal­lenges which had con­front­ed that bril­liant squad of play­ers. First­ly, his se­lec­tion did not reach him un­til he proved that his re­li­a­bil­i­ty while at the wick­et was as much as one wished a mid­dle-or­der bats­man. When he con­vinced the se­lec­tors in that di­rec­tion, he was named by many as the best out­field­er in the world, with his daz­zling speed, clin­i­cal pick­up, ac­cu­rate re­turn to the wick­et and even three in a few ef­fec­tive medi­um-paced de­liv­er­ies.

The lead­ers un­der which he played for some time, en­cour­aged many high-pro­file per­sons to recog­nise his full worth as play­er and cap­tain. The names of the play­ers in the start­ing team in those days were qual­i­ta­tive in their own de­part­ments of the game. Which team in the world would have had a glut of fast bowl­ing whose pen­e­tra­tive pow­er could have de­stroyed the great­est bats­men in the world? Andy Roberts, Mike Hold­ing, Col­in croft, Mal­colm Mar­shall, Michael Hold­ing and Joel Gar­ner have been dic­ta­tors of the great game. Many, in­clud­ing my­self, claimed that the skip­per had very lit­tle dif­fi­cul­ty in us­ing strat­e­gy when these guys bowled. His qui­et per­son­al­i­ty and safe hands left us all with the fact that the en­tire suc­cess sto­ry was based more up­on the de­struc­tion the “demons” were nat­u­ral­ly ca­pa­ble of do­ing to op­po­nents.

How­ev­er, time has changed and the ex­pe­ri­enced for­mer cap­tain is able to sit at the view­ing ta­ble to as­sess and the com­ment which brought some doubt to me was that he felt that Ja­son Hold­er has been do­ing well enough as a cap­tain and should be kept. I then ad­mit that my ob­ser­va­tion of the cur­rent cap­tain did not prove his lead­er­ship, and more than that, the ex­pe­ri­ence which was cred­it­ed to Hold­er could not be jus­ti­fied. He had a long spell as cap­tain and while his bat­ting and bowl­ing had im­proved on the way, the proof of his knowl­edge was not com­pa­ra­ble with his play­ing per­for­mance.

I of­ten judge lead­ers by lis­ten­ing to rea­sons why they did well or why they failed. The friend­ly cap­tain, when asked the ques­tions, just re­it­er­at­ed that the bat­ters must bat bet­ter, the bowlers must bowl bet­ter line and length and the play­ers must take the catch­es. My heav­ens, those are ex­act­ly why and when the skip­per’s di­rect ad­vice to his play­ers must come with the tech­ni­cal prac­tice in the nets, the tac­ti­cal dis­cus­sion with re­gard to the de­fi­cien­cies of their op­po­nents and look for­ward to the im­ple­men­ta­tion of these bits of that ad­vice in the up­com­ing match­es.

If he ever starts to do same, then we may recog­nise the state­ment made by the for­mer great cap­tain Lloyd and at the same time, en­joy the ben­e­fits of the new man.