West In­dies crick­et fans are still won­der­ing what hap­pened over the past week af­ter the team crashed out of the ICC T20 World Cup yes­ter­day in one of its most abysmal per­for­mances yet.

To be clear, skip­per Nicholas Pooran’s team failed to make it out of the qual­i­fy­ing pool for the first time in the his­to­ry of the com­pe­ti­tion now in its eight edi­tion — a stun­ning state of af­fairs giv­en that Windies are a two-time cham­pi­on (2012 and 2016).

More crit­i­cal­ly, the team’s per­for­mances un­der Pooran head­ing in­to and dur­ing the cur­rent tour­na­ment have been well be­low stan­dards ex­pect­ed. From their first loss to Scot­land, still an as­so­ciate team fight­ing for re­al recog­ni­tion, to yes­ter­day’s hum­bling tour­na­ment-end­ing de­feat to Ire­land, this team nev­er seemed ready for a ti­tle run.

Both his lead­er­ship and in­di­vid­ual per­for­mance should al­so be enough for Pooran to re­flect on whether he is tru­ly ready for the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty giv­en to him by Crick­et West In­dies.

In terms of per­for­mances, how­ev­er, Pooran is not alone, since oth­er key se­nior play­ers, Ja­son Hold­er and Rov­man Pow­ell among them, al­so failed to de­liv­er.

Once again, the team’s lack of dis­ci­pline in car­ry­ing out strat­e­gy played it­self out as Pooran seemed un­able to ad­just to what the op­po­si­tion dished out. Of course, Scot­land, Ire­land and Zim­bab­we were not ex­act­ly among the bet­ter crop of T20 teams ei­ther , which on­ly adds in­sult to in­jury.

Most dis­turbing­ly was the bats­men’s in­abil­i­ty to play spin and to ma­nip­u­late the ball around for quick sin­gles when they were un­able to find bound­aries. In fact, the prob­lem against spin is such an Achilles Heel that op­pos­ing teams have made this their go-to op­tion against the Windies.

Coach Phil Sim­mons la­belled the team’s per­for­mance yes­ter­day as un­pro­fes­sion­al but quite frankly, it summed up their ef­fort for the en­tire tour­na­ment. But Sim­mons and his coach­ing staff must now al­so come un­der the pump, since they have failed to rec­ti­fy the ob­vi­ous flaws of the team dur­ing their tenure. While Sim­mons has been able to achieve some suc­cess here and there to date, many of their un­der­ly­ing tech­ni­cal and at­ti­tu­di­nal flaws re­main, so the ques­tion has to be asked about whether his staff has the com­pe­ten­cy to right the Windies ship or needs help or need to go and an­oth­er per­son be giv­en the chance.

An ex­pect­ed­ly up­set CWI pres­i­dent Ricky Sker­ritt has promised a thor­ough post-mortem of the per­for­mance. Tak­ing to so­cial me­dia in re­sponse to see­ing the Windies na­tion of fans hurt­ing via var­i­ous plat­forms, Sker­ritt de­liv­ered a bru­tal as­sess­ment of the ear­ly ex­it and, per­haps, more im­por­tant­ly gave the im­pres­sion they will do what is re­quired to fix the is­sues.

The fans will cer­tain­ly hope so, since the re­gion­al gov­ern­ing body is al­so re­spon­si­ble for some of the woes plagu­ing the teams at all ver­sions of the game. For starters, the se­lec­tors failed to pick the best pos­si­ble team from the tal­ent pool - which is to sug­gest they nev­er gave Pooran and Sim­mons a chance at suc­cess. There al­so re­mains the is­sue of the con­tentious re­la­tion­ship be­tween the play­ers and the board, which of­ten al­so works against the se­lec­tion of the best team.

Ul­ti­mate­ly though, the CWI must get it right quick­ly since this lat­est hu­mil­i­a­tion has not gone down well with the fans and it is un­like­ly they will for­give the team any­time soon.