How Holder and Sammy have changed the West Indies script
Sun, Feb 17, '19
At a little over three years old, Shannon Gabriel was one of only three members of the current West Indies squad to be alive when Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Jeffrey Dujon and Malcolm Marshall retired, marking the end of the golden era of the team. The youngest member of the current side, Alzarri Joseph, was only ten when Brian Lara retired, arguably the last symbol of the mythical past. It is either extremely lazy, or a testament to the enduring mythology of those old teams, that three decades later, any achievement or failure by West Indies leads to people dredging up the past.
It is not that other narratives about the team haven't existed, but they have often been ignored. For about a decade West Indies have been at the very outer limits of the game's most cutting-edge format. As documented in several places, they have created a singularly unique and dominant type of T20 side.
They have also created not one but two remarkably similar, barely believable bodies of work - the captaincies of Darren Sammy and Jason Holder. Their stories are not easy to discern looking at the numbers alone, but rather require the context of their appointments and the subtext to their performances. Because in all the discussion of the lamentable decline of West Indies cricket, it is almost always the players who are blamed first, and the chaotic administration seems to have been taken for granted as a constant. It's almost if we want to believe that greatness can go on forever without institutional support. And so,to look at Sammy's and Holder's captaincy numbers is to not understand their remarkable careers.
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