Going forward

With the sudden retirement of the last of our great players, the question is asked, who is going to score the big knocks now? Which batsman will make all the runs now that Lara is gone? Not so long ago, when Ambrose and then Walsh moved on, people wondered who was going to take all the wickets.

The answer two both questions should be -- the team. The peculiar structure of the West Indies as an entity which is made up of entities feeds the focus on individuals in what should be a team sport. The prevailing thought seems to be that if we just get the best eleven players in the region and press GO, everything little thing gonna be alright. Of course, no one can ever agree on who exactly that eleven might be.

I put it to you that selection is not even vaguely one of the key contributors to the endemic failure of West Indies cricket teams over the past decade. In fact, I will argue that you could take any reasonable combination of 11 of the best 25 players in the region, and produce a competitive if not world beating team. The idea that you simply need to replace this player with that player and everything will be right is absurd, and it points directly at a lack of appreciation for the role of the team in what is very much a team sport.

The key here is the word team. We do not have, nor have we had for a long time, a team. Rather, we have a collection of players whose individual achievements -- or lack thereof -- produce the bottom line. In an age with no Ws, no pace quartets, no Sobers and only one Lara, this is simply not enough. Perhaps it never was.

When Frank Worrell became the second black man to lead the West Indies -- never let us forget that Headley was the first -- he brought a lot more that just cricketing acumen to the side. Worrell was an established and well respected figure in West Indies cricket, and his leadership brought an unprecedented team unity that raised West Indies cricket to a level it had never seen before.

Clive Lloyd, helped by the Packer revolution, built on that base and produced a team of world beaters who grew into the superstars that became Viv Richards' West Indies, which was feared and loved around the world, and idolized at home. If you stop and think about it, you will realise that it was here that the wheels really came loose. At this point we had lost the team that Worrell had built, and became a collection of players.

Great players, mind you.

But even great players have to retire some time, and when the structure that produced them crumbled, the law of diminishing returns came into play. By the last years of the twentieth century, the standard required to get into the team was in full decline, but the superstar culture was still in force and the facade of a team was very thin indeed.

The internal strife within the team -- and without -- from that period on is well documented, and it is pointless to dwell upon it or to point fingers. West Indies cricket is a reflection of us and it is what we have collectively made it, so we may just as well point fingers at ourselves.

Now, going forward, we need to re-examine what we want to achieve, and how we did it in the past, while recognising that cricket in the 21st century is not what it was in the 20th century. Like Worrell, we need to raise the standard of West Indies cricket to a point where it is competitive at a world standard. Given a small handful of proven decent Test players, and a large collective of unproven hopefuls, we must put together a unit of complementary players and rebuild a culture of teamwork and professionalism.

Instead of looking for one or two batsmen to carry the side, more emphasis needs to be put on partnership building, avoiding the loss of quick wickets, and supporting the new man at the other end. Every player on the team needs to feel that he is responsible for the bottom line, and value both his wicket and the runs scored while he is at the crease, regardless of whose bat they come off. The role of fielding as a means to take wicket needs to be given more value, and every run conceded taken personally.

Similarly, the emphasis on pace over quality has hurt this side badly. If you look around the world, it is not the speed merchants who dominate good batsmen, but the bowlers who understand where to bowl, what to bowl, and know how to do it. Accuracy and variation are the meat and potatoes, express pace is simply gravy. Nobody wants a plate of just gravy.

Slow bowlers and spinners -- often mistaken for the same thing -- deserve more respect. The best sides in the world have shown that they can lose wickets to slow bowlers, when used appropriately and backed up by the field.

Overall there needs to be more value placed on getting the basics of batting, bowling, and fielding right, and less on style. Every player will have successes and failures, but when the failures come from basic technical faults that go uncorrected, then it's time to move on.

The West Indies would do well to look at a workman-like side such as New Zealand where -- possibly barring Shane Bond -- there are no stars. These guys put their heads down, work hard, and work together. Sometimes their batsmen score centuries, but often they produce good totals with everyone contributing, down to the last man. When they take the field, they tend to look for wickets by applying pressure with committed fielding and disciplined bowling, not by bowling short and hoping for an edge to get held.

While New Zealand are not world beaters in Test cricket either, their recent record far exceeds our own, and the difference between them and the middle tier of non-Australian teams is not so much as the difference between us and them. They win some, they lose some, but they can chase down big totals and they rarely embarass themselves.

This is not to say that there is no room for individual achievement or expression at all. When the core job is done, the partnership built, the damage repaired, or when the situation requires it, players have a lot more latitude to express themselves as individuals. If you look carefully at the successful Australians, you will see that this is their approach -- always team first, but then when it is appropriate, individual goals are achieved.

In terms of the player pool, this region has the same level of talent it always has, perhaps more even, considering that the population is so much greater than it was in Worrell's day. The argument that the talent is being bled off to basketball or football doesn't wash, as football has always been dominant in the region, and there is no highly visible outlet for basketball or other imported American sports in the Caribbean. The Caribbean has always produced an abundance of naturally gifted athletes, and you can see this in the dominance of our youth cricket teams.

Regrettably, the low standard of domestic first class cricket and the lack of any real development structure means that many of this young talent reaches the senior sides without a solid grasp of the basics. This, however, can be instilled in a stable senior side with remedial coaching, and will in turn filter down to the lower levels. If the expectations in terms of work ethic and what is required from a player are made clear, and a player's place is made clearly conditional upon them, the players who matter will stick and those who don't will fall away. The bottom line here is that we can build a solid, cohesive team with the talent at hand, and compete internationally with that team.

Unfortunately, a lot of the problem is cultural. West Indians want flashing blades, they want spectacular shots, and they especially want pace like fyah. It will be difficult to find much support in the region for a team without identifiable stars, a team that grinds out runs and strangles out batsmen. In the first year of this team, there will be many calls to return to the "proven formula" of the four prong pace attack and the big hitters. These calls will be made without an understanding of what exactly that proven formula was, or a recognition that the big hitters and the four prong were not produced in a vacuum.