Cameron and Pybus need to answer for West Indies' on-field problems
By inadvertent yet timely coincidence, the directors of the West Indies Cricket Board hold their quarterly meeting in St Lucia on December 12 and 13, in the middle of West Indies' first Test in Australia in a series long written off as destined to be embarrassingly one-sided.
Their first order of business is to come to a position on the CARICOM (Caribbean Community) review panel's report on its governance. WICB president Dave Cameron was slated to meet on the issue with the head of the CARICOM sub-committee on cricket, Grenada prime minister Keith Mitchell, on December 4. Since the report recommended the board be "immediately dissolved and all current members resign", to be replaced by an interim board, their response is easy to predict.
As potentially critical as it is to the future of the WICB, the continuing, and seemingly escalating, weakness of the team requires the directors' equally urgent attention. It has caused such overall anguish that it brought an emotional reaction from Sir Garry Sobers at a media conference during the team's recent tour of Sri Lanka.
The Australian media, if not Cricket Australia itself, acknowledged West Indies' dismal record in proposing that the more competitive New Zealand replace them for the showpiece Tests in Melbourne and Sydney. Because of already set international itineraries, implementing that proposal was impractical, but it did reflect widespread opinion.