Is Hooper The Right Man For The Job?

(Trinidad Guardian)

West Indies lost a match to South Africa that they should have won. All Trinidad and Tobago and, I dare say, all the West Indies are hammering Mervyn Dillon for the defeat.

Of course Dillon is responsible to a certain extent but, I repeat, West Indies cricket must begin to improve from the top down. It is an accepted position in cricket that the captain may not necessarily the best batsman or the best bowler or, even, the best tactician. The best captain is, must be the best leader of his team.

That is a concept that is blurred and ignored as, often the best captain happens to be the best player.

The qualities of leadership can not be ignored without cost, especially in a weak team or in one that is struggling to play to a standard close to its apparent ?talent? or with any sort of pride in its performance.

The West Indies Cricket Board has had innumerable examples of teams from other countries that never performed as one would have expected them to, given the quality of players in those teams. We do not have to go to other countries for examples.

The history of West Indies cricket and the captaincy battle is fresh in everybody?s mind, even the young people who were not born when Frank Worrell was made captain over the very capable Franz Alexander, must be aware of it.

Worrell was then, neither the best batsman, nor the best bowler in the team. His day had long gone, an era in which he fought for the proper payment for professionals in the team, when he dominated the world as one of the very best and artistic batsmen and allrounders the game had seen.

He cared about his team and they knew it and they played for him as much as for themselves.

Wes Hall is alleged to have once said: ?The skipper made you feel you could walk on water?.

He had no curfew for his players on tour. He explained to them their responsibility to themselves to be the best they can be, to the team which they could not let down and to the people back home. After all, it was the only thing at which we were the acknowledged best in the world.

It so happened he was also still an excellent player and a great tactician. Most importantly, he was a great leader and his men would have followed him to hell and back.

Granted one would not find Worrells popping up every hundred years, but the WICB had very recently seen the effect that poor leadership had on its team when Brian Lara, undoubtedly the best batsman, the best tactical brain in the team, led it for a while and was unable, either to get his players to play to their best or even himself to produce to his own best standards.

In a short time after that unfortunate period, Carl Hooper, a very talented player whose career statistics have belied that talent, undeniably one of the great underachievers in the team, was so disgusted with his own performance, he left West Indies cricket in mid-tour against the Aussies in the Caribbean and announced his retirement from Test cricket.

He lived in Australia for a while and returned to play for Guyana, scoring prolifically in the Busta Cup competition. That led to him being recalled, not merely to the Test team but as captain.

A man who has never shown any leadership qualities, whose play could not inspire anybody to depend on him or to use him as an exemplar, has been given the most important position in West Indies cricket.

He promotes such an air of remoteness, aloofness that one can not imagine the team wanting to ?do it for the skipper?.

He is never enthusiastic or apparently happy on the field and that is needed in a team filled with young and inexperienced players, struggling to find their feet, being beaten even by supposed inferior teams and most humiliating, being lampooned in the foreign press as impostors.

The captain did not think of going to Dillon and telling him that if he bowled a no ball or wide in his last ball against South Africa, he would not be allowed back in Trinidad.
Instead of fighting for his team, he is involved in a battle with the West Indies Players Association about his share of the bonuses that the team earned in the most recent Test and One Day series against India and New Zealand.

The players know that and I wonder, will he be able to make them feel they can walk on water or beat any of the Test playing countries.

* SOURCE: Trinidad Guardian.