Dear Ed­i­tor,

The West In­dies se­lec­tors are cur­rent­ly get­ting ready to an­nounce the teams to play against the vis­it­ing Sri Lankans due to ar­rive short­ly in the Caribbean to play a se­ries of ODIs (One Day In­ter­na­tion­als), T20s (Twen­ty20) and Test match­es. It comes on the heel of a fa­mous Test se­ries vic­to­ry against Bangladesh away from home.

On that very tour, the WI ODI team was em­bar­rass­ing­ly white­washed 0-3, so too was the T20 team that weeks be­fore vis­it­ed New Zealand which is why all the hype sur­round­ing po­ten­tial changes per­tain­ing to the Test team con­fus­es me great­ly. Shouldn’t the heavy fo­cus be on the ODI and T20 teams? Af­ter all, there’s a World Cup due lat­er this year to pre­pare for.

But step back for a mo­ment. Pri­or to de­part­ing for Bangladesh, 12 WI play­ers made them­selves un­avail­able for tour du­ty sight­ing var­i­ous rea­sons - COVID fears, bub­ble burnout, oth­er fran­chise crick­et to play and some, no rea­son at all. In­ter­est­ing­ly enough, five WI crick­eters at home be­came COVID pos­i­tive. Thank­ful­ly they’ve all re­cov­ered well.

Now I’ll re­mind you of what I wrote about pre­vi­ous­ly. Watch close­ly how all the is­sues af­fect­ing the fa­mous 12 mag­i­cal­ly dis­ap­pear. Watch close­ly as they’ll line up ready to rep­re­sent the WI, swear­ing their al­le­giance to the Ma­roon crest. But why? Be­cause there’s sim­ply noth­ing else go­ing on at the mo­ment. The fran­chise crick­et cal­en­dar is emp­ty, and the IPL (In­di­an Pre­mier League) has pre­dictably dumped sev­er­al of them. Sur­vival mode will now kick in. Love for WI will reignite....un­til the next fran­chise event.

It is my hope that the WI se­lec­tors re­alise that there won’t be a sec­ond chance to get it right. This is it. Dri­ving for­ward af­ter con­fi­dence-build­ing suc­cess can­not be over­looked. While CWI has clear­ly stat­ed that they won’t pun­ish those who chose not to tour, are they, in turn, go­ing to pun­ish the mem­bers of the suc­cess­ful tour­ing par­ty by re­plac­ing sev­er­al of them? I tell you with all cer­tain­ty....it is sad­ly bound to hap­pen. The in­fa­mous 12 will in the ma­jor­i­ty be wel­comed back with opened arms.

The Test team burn­ing is­sues will sure­ly be" 1 The cap­tain­cy; 2 The open­ing com­bi­na­tion; 3 The re­turn­ing play­ers.

In my view, the re­al is­sues of con­cern for CWI should be: 1 The ODI and T20 teams; 2 The new elec­toral chal­lenge for the pres­i­den­cy.

You’ll eas­i­ly no­tice that I’ve not men­tioned the cap­tain­cy as a re­al is­sue, as the for­mer skip­per is cur­rent­ly main­tain­ing his cur­rent form in los­ing three out of four match­es in the on­go­ing Su­per 50 Cup (An­tigua). To me, it’s a no-brain­er. Maybe it’s al­so wis­er to sim­ply fill the ODI and T20 squads with fran­chise pros. Don’t get any of them near to the Test team.

In the Caribbean, we have the re­al op­por­tu­ni­ty to once again be­gin to grow as a crick­et­ing en­ti­ty or as usu­al, be the mas­ter­minds be­hind our own demise.

An­dre P Lawrence

For­mer na­tion­al crick­et play­er