More Windies Woes
Tue, Nov 24, '15
If you thought things couldn't get worse for West Indies cricket, it just did. A panel of eminent, highly successful Caribbean personalities have just expended a mountain of labour and produced a mouse of a report. It has recommended the dissolution of the West Indies Cricket Board, to be replaced on a permanent basis by, ahem, ahem... the panel does not say. The report puts into elegant language a highly unoriginal recommendation that has emanated from Caribbean rum shops for the past 20 years. Seldom before has a bowler achieved what this panel has -- a wide and a no ball in the same delivery.
Enough is enough. It's not complicated:
(a) cricket is a sport
(b) success in any sport -- more sponsors, fans, positive vibes -- comes from winning, which we have not been doing for 20 years
(c) winning on the cricket field means that your players are batting, bowling, and fielding better than the other team
(d) to do that you need better coaches, more enlightened selectors, tougher local competitions and, in our case, an analysis of our cricket history
It's high time those who keep feeding us this panacea about "governance" answer this question with specificity: how would any of the recommendations in any of those well-meanings dust-gathering reports --Patterson, Wilkins, Lucky and now "The Unlucky" -- add one more run, one more wicket, or one more catch to current sub-par performance?
For 15 years West Indies ruled the roost. The administration was run essentially by one man -- the late Steve Comacho -- with a telephone and a typewriter. With the team was the highly respected Aussie trainer Dennis Waight and from time to time, the guru of cricket, Dr. Rudi Webster, author of "Winning Ways". Now we are sending a back room squad of 10 to Australia to enable us to put 11 men on the field!
The name Rajendra Chandrika is a microcosm of the "can't bat--can't bowl--can't field--can't coach--can't captain--can't select" crisis we face. Here was a specialist batsman, selected by a panel headed by Clive Lloyd, to open against the merciless Aussies a few months ago. Up to then he had not so much as scored a first class century. To no one's surprise -- except perhaps Lloyd's -- he didn't last an over in either innings, bagging the dreaded pair on debut. How would governance changes have improved Chandrika's batting or more to the point, Lloyd's judgment?
We are playing with fire now. The Aussies are not like the English, who are too polite to tell us bluntly that we are no longer welcome to take our appeals to their Privy Council. We will be playing before 90,000 fans in the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne. Should the likes of Chandrika cause the match to end in 2-3 days the Aussies will tell us straight up, "come back only after you have learnt the basics of the game in some Bush League with Zimbabwe, Scotland, Argentina and, Heaven forbid, Canada. Even then, mate, we might not be able to oblige you with a Test at the Gabba; maybe we can play you in Wagga Wagga, in front of a few locals and their favourite kangaroos".
Perhaps then we will need another report, from another set of elites, to tell us what form of "governance" can dig us out of that deep pit!
-teaser-
