BEGGING Her Majesty’s pardon for applying her poignant, well known phrase to the game of cricket; it is just that it seems particularly appropriate in this instance.

In 1992, Queen Elizabeth II declared that it was “not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure”.

“In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘annus horribilis’”, the British Monarch commented after her particularly horrible year. West Indies cricket won’t look back on 2014 “with undiluted pleasure” either; it has been its ‘annus horribilis’.

It began with the dismissals, in the space of three months, of Test captain Darren Sammy and head coach Ottis Gibson.