I con­tin­ue to in­sist, as I have been do­ing since the start of the dra­mat­ic de­cline of West In­dies crick­et 25 years ago, that a ma­jor el­e­ment of the per­sis­tent fail­ures of our teams, par­tic­u­lar­ly the bats­men, is re­lat­ed to their men­tal weak­ness, es­pe­cial­ly for Test crick­et.

The play­ers’ lack of in­ter­est in prepar­ing for four-day and Test crick­et is linked to their de­sire to ped­dle their skills for big US dol­lars in a four-hour work­day at the fran­chise leagues.

That’s hard­ly an orig­i­nal thought and as­ser­tion. More­over, the grav­i­ta­tion­al pull to the T20 leagues is preva­lent in many crick­et-play­ing na­tions. There are a few things that make a dif­fer­ence be­tween out­comes re­lat­ing to our teams and those of oth­er coun­tries. The likes of In­dia, Aus­tralia, Eng­land, Pak­istan, and oth­ers have mul­ti-mil­lion pop­u­la­tions and tens of thou­sands of young men and women who play or­gan­ised crick­et in their do­mes­tic and fran­chise leagues.

Be­cause of such a size from which to se­lect, those coun­tries cater to white- and red-ball team spe­cial­ists; our se­lec­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties are far more re­strict­ed to a rel­a­tive­ly small group of play­ers.

Crit­i­cal­ly, al­so, the ad­min­is­tra­tions of crick­et in the top crick­et­ing na­tions have the fi­nan­cial bud­gets from which to pay their play­ers to spe­cialise in the dif­fer­ent for­mats of the game. The ex­am­ple of the for­mi­da­ble bat­ting team that Aus­tralia sent to the West In­dies for the T20 se­ries is a case in point of size and qual­i­ty. The bats­men demon­strat­ed the abil­i­ty to thrash our bowl­ing to rags.

The fact is that our most tal­ent­ed bats­men over the re­cent pe­ri­od have fo­cused on the T20 fran­chise leagues, which pay big bucks. They there­fore have no in­ter­est in play­ing the long and far more com­pli­cat­ed and de­mand­ing game.

Play­ers of the tal­ent of Dwayne Bra­vo, An­dre Rus­sell, Kieron Pol­lard, Sunil Nar­ine, Nicholas Pooran, Shim­ron Het­my­er, and sev­er­al oth­ers, had they giv­en a mea­sure of time and en­er­gy to build­ing from a Test crick­et foun­da­tion, could sure­ly have been qual­i­ty play­ers for all for­mats.

What the fo­cus on the dol­lars to be earned play­ing in the T20 game has done is to have cre­at­ed se­ri­ous lim­i­ta­tions to the ex­pan­sion of the minds of these bats­men to con­cen­trate and to de­vel­op the tech­ni­cal and men­tal ca­pac­i­ty to play Test crick­et.

That fo­cus has all but de­stroyed such a tal­ent­ed play­er as Het­my­er, so that even in the T20 game, he has been re­duced to a voop­er on­ly ca­pa­ble of a quick and oc­ca­sion­al 30 to 40 runs be­fore he gives away his hand seek­ing to man­u­fac­ture an­oth­er six.

One re­sult of the lim­it­ed men­tal and tech­ni­cal abil­i­ty of the bats­men be­came eas­i­ly vis­i­ble against Aus­tralia in the re­cent Test se­ries. Our bats­men were com­plete­ly with­out the tech­nique, the men­tal ca­pac­i­ty, and the dis­po­si­tion to con­tend with the Aus­tralian bowlers. The weak­ness­es even showed in the abil­i­ty of the T20 spe­cial­ists to play an in­nings of sub­stance in the white ball game.

A re­view of the dis­missals and the gut­less sur­ren­der in the last in­nings of the Test against Aus­tralia by the bats­men is an ex­cel­lent ex­am­ple of what I re­fer to. Every bats­man felt in­ca­pable of re­spond­ing pos­i­tive­ly to the bowlers; it was a mind­less en­fee­ble­ment on show; they could do noth­ing but sur­ren­der; not one of them had the men­tal equip­ment to con­front the Aus­tralian bowlers with dili­gence and an as­sur­ance of mind that they were up to the task of re­sist­ing, far less tak­ing charge.

This is a pat­tern of psy­cho­log­i­cal weak­ness that has dug in­to the minds of every team of West In­di­an bats­men of the gen­er­a­tion since the 1990s.

The ex­cep­tions have been the likes of Lara, Chan­der­paul, Hoop­er, Gayle, Sar­wan, and a cou­ple of oth­ers who, in re­al­i­ty, be­longed to the pre­vi­ous era of “gen­er­als”, as Rud­der refers to them.

Deep in the con­scious­ness of the pre- and post-colo­nial West In­di­an crick­eters and teams was their emer­gence out of the an­ti-colo­nial strug­gles, those who had their ground­ings in the re­sis­tance against im­pe­r­i­al dom­i­na­tion.

Viv Richards said when he walked to the wick­et, he had in his mind the dis­ad­van­tage tak­en of his an­ces­tors, and his in­tent was to re­pair that dam­age in the best way he knew how: to sav­age the bowlers. For a cou­ple of decades, op­pos­ing crick­eters spoke of the Richards im­pact as he walked on­to the field, dis­play­ing to all his de­ter­mi­na­tion to an­ni­hi­late them with his bat, most of all with the will of his mind to make them his pris­on­ers dur­ing his stay at the wick­et.

Tony Greig, the South African-born cap­tain of the Eng­lish Test team of the 1970s, was fool­ish enough to pro­voke con­fronta­tion with the Clive Lloyd West In­di­ans. The fast bowlers and the bats­men cap­tured and in­stalled in their minds and be­ings Greig’s in­sult­ing phrase: “I will make them grov­el.” He felt the pain of his ab­sur­di­ty. Our play­ers had pride gained through re­spect for the West In­di­an crick­et tra­di­tion. Log­i­cal­ly, with this gen­er­a­tion of bats­men in par­tic­u­lar de­void of such an ap­pre­ci­a­tion, non-achieve­ment is the pre­scribed out­come on the field of play.

I shall con­tin­ue.

Tony Rakhal-Fras­er is a free­lance jour­nal­ist, for­mer re­porter/cur­rent af­fairs pro­gramme host and news di­rec­tor at TTT, pro­gramme pro­duc­er/cur­rent af­fairs di­rec­tor at Ra­dio Trinidad, cor­re­spon­dent for the BBC Caribbean Ser­vice and the As­so­ci­at­ed Press, and grad­u­ate of UWI, CARI­MAC, Mona, and the St Au­gus­tine In­sti­tute of In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions.