Is West Indies Cricket Irreparable?

The moaning over the lack of competitiveness of the West Indies in international cricket is now well over a decade old.  And, this could reasonably go on for well over a decade more.  Fact is that the challenges with West Indies cricket are several. 

Firstly, the West Indies team continues to operate more on raw talent than on talent coupled with playing discipline, fitness and acquired skills.  Most of our players have as much skill as the average player entering first class cricket anywhere in the World, but Windies cricketers are not learning or not able to apply training and taught techniques.  On the contrary, technology, training and tutoring are being applied by international cricketers, giving them immediate advantages.  

Secondly, international cricketers appear to have greater aptitude for the game.  They seem to be more equipped with the basic knowledge, communications, analytical and interpretational skills to help them with the increasingly complex game.  Those skills also seem to help international players recognise the value that is built in success and the correlation between winning and earnings.  West Indians do not seem to have that.  They play the poorest cricket, secure the most consistent losing results, but wish to claim disproportionate improvement in earnings. 

Thirdly, the West Indies team has a huge problem in its on-going identity.  Where is this “West Indies nation” or “interest” that they are playing for?  While the English, Australian, Indian and others play for counties and clubs hoping to make their national teams, we have independent Caribbean nations playing against each other, hoping that their country will prevail over the other.  And then, sometimes days later we gather 13 of these arch national rivals together in a “non-nation” called the West Indies team and ask them to develop a holistic team inspired vision and identity to work together to defeat other truly national teams. 

Sometimes, we even ask two or three national captains to serve in the same team, sometimes to support a West Indies captain they defeated as a national captain – sometimes a captain they out-smarted, out-maneuvered and out-played at the regional level but whom they should now serve for the “West Indies”.

One of the critical differences now from the glory days of West Indies cricket is the sociological fact that players born in the pre-independence era did not have the strong national desire and drive to win for country and not region.  As the team lost players who learnt pride in the British West Indies – that is since it lost players born before the mid 1960s, it seems to have lost that “West Indian-ness” – that true West Indies spirit. 

Can independent nations recapture that? 

Then, there is the big “I” of West Indies cricket that we do not want to talk about – INSULARITY.  We all know that support for the team and for the captain, indeed, sometimes for the administration ebbs and flows.  And from what we hear, within the team, this has depended sometimes on whether or not there is satisfaction about the number of Jamaicans, Guyanese, Barbadians, Trinidadians or OECS players in the team.  No matter the club, county or province, elsewhere the leader ends up being Australian, English, Pakistani, Indian and so on.  Jamaican, Barbadian, Grenadian, Guyanese and so on, must transform to being West Indian. 

Then there are differences in culture and the “quality” of management of West Indies cricket that we must assess at another time. 

So with all these issues is West Indies Cricket irreparable?