It is wide­ly recog­nised that the West In­dies men's crick­et team has been ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a dis­ap­point­ing streak for quite some time, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the long-for­mat game where they cur­rent­ly hold the eighth po­si­tion out of 12 teams.

How­ev­er, what tran­spired on Mon­day at Sabi­na Park, Ja­maica, where they were dis­missed by Aus­tralia for a mere 27 runs—the sec­ond low­est in­nings score in his­to­ry and the worst in 70 years—was tru­ly dis­heart­en­ing.

It is hard to put this del­i­cate­ly; this is not sim­ply a rough phase, we have hit rock bot­tom and are in a state of cri­sis that im­pacts the very essence of Caribbean iden­ti­ty and pride.

For a re­gion where crick­et has long been more than just a sport, but has rather served as a cul­tur­al cor­ner­stone and a sym­bol of our re­silience and col­lec­tive strength, this is a bit­ter pill for us to swal­low.

The rem­e­dy, there­fore, must not on­ly be clin­i­cal, but ef­fec­tive.

We note that Crick­et West In­dies (CWI) has tak­en an im­me­di­ate step to­wards rem­e­dy­ing this cri­sis, by call­ing an emer­gency meet­ing of the Crick­et Strat­e­gy and Of­fi­ci­at­ing Com­mit­tee to in­volve West In­dies leg­ends such as Sir Clive Lloyd, Sir Vi­vian Richards and Bri­an Lara.

While it is im­pos­si­ble to pre­dict the out­come of this meet­ing, what is ab­solute­ly clear is that the Caribbean pub­lic is no longer will­ing to ac­cept stop-gap or fur­ther ex­per­i­men­tal mea­sures.

At the core of the col­lapse lies a glar­ing lead­er­ship vac­u­um.

While play­ers must take re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for their on-field ex­e­cu­tion, the con­sis­tent lack of com­pet­i­tive spir­it and ba­sic crick­et­ing com­pe­tence points di­rect­ly to sys­temic fail­ures at the high­est lev­el.

For ex­am­ple, the one-coach sys­tem with Daren Sam­my at the helm of the Test, ODI and T20 teams has proven in­ef­fec­tive based on cur­rent re­sults.

But if CWI is con­vinced that this is the way for­ward, it rais­es se­ri­ous ques­tions about Sam­my's abil­i­ty to do the job.

Fur­ther­more, are the coach­ing method­olo­gies cur­rent­ly in use out­dat­ed, or is there a fun­da­men­tal dis­con­nect be­tween the ad­min­is­tra­tion and the tal­ent pool?

The re­volv­ing door of coach­es and in­con­sis­tent se­lec­tion poli­cies sug­gest an ab­sence of a co­he­sive, long-term plan. There ap­pears to be lit­tle ac­count­abil­i­ty for the re­peat­ed ca­pit­u­la­tions that leave fans ut­ter­ly be­wil­dered and heart­bro­ken.

The CWI board must move with haste to re­con­sid­er the struc­tur­al and sys­temic changes rec­om­mend­ed in sev­er­al of the re­ports done on West In­dies crick­et from the PJ Pat­ter­son Re­port to the Don We­h­by Re­port. CWI pres­i­dent Dr Kishore Shal­low must en­cour­age his di­rec­tors to adopt fur­ther changes to ini­ti­ate a more ef­fec­tive way of gov­ern­ing West In­dies crick­et.

The wor­ry­ing down­ward spi­ral al­so begs the ques­tion of what tan­gi­ble re­sults came out of the Cari­com Re­gion­al Crick­et Con­fer­ence held in Port-of-Spain in April last year as the im­pact is yet to be re­alised in any tan­gi­ble way.

While Cari­com lead­ers must con­tin­ue to de­mand change from CWI ad­min­is­tra­tors, they too must re-eval­u­ate what they are do­ing wrong bear­ing in mind that there can be no per­ma­nent fix to the re­gion­al game un­less we fix the struc­ture of crick­et in the re­spec­tive is­lands.