WI make NY Times...for all the wrong reasons

“West Indies used to be the envy of the world but we expected our dominance to last forever and stopped doing what we were so good at. Now we seem to have given up.”

His words are echoed by a man who goes back even further than the 74-year-old Roberts in commentator Joseph ‘Reds’ Perreira, who has seen it all in more than 60 years as an eloquent voice of Caribbean cricket.

“I was so embarrassed,” says Perreira, still commentating and writing on the Caribbean game at 86. “I mean, 27 all out? That hurt West Indians down to their toes. Our game is at its lowest ebb since we really started to emerge in 1948, when we beat England in the Caribbean. I fear for the future of our game.”

Jimmy Adams has captained West Indies and been their director of cricket, and is one of the most intelligent and articulate figures in the game. He poses a question that will make all who love the sport shudder.

Should West Indies even exist in the modern cricketing world?

“The first thing to decide is whether there’s any purpose in continuing as West Indies,” Adams says. “What is West Indies cricket? You have this entity that is trying to pull 15 nations in one direction and you have to ask: is it still real? Is it still something that the region wants? It’s the fundamental philosophical question.

“I don’t pretend to know the answer but it has to be addressed before you get to the problems with bat and ball.

“Times change. West Indies were great when we were coming out of a post-colonial era. The late 1960s and the 1970s was this period where a lot of countries gained independence and that was a huge motivational force.

“The question always was: when we come out of this era, what’s going to keep us together? I’m not sure the region has found an answer.

“The Caribbean has never found anything as strong as the feeling it had when people were fighting for and eventually coming out of colonialism and telling the world: ‘We’re as good as you.’ It hasn’t found a force as powerful as cricket was in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.

“I’ve spent some time at associate level and I saw Jersey come within a whisker of qualifying for the T20 World Cup. Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago or Guyana could easily do the same. I could see us playing white-ball cricket as individual nations and then start really tapping into governments for support at a level which is never given for West Indies because there is no West Indies. What we have now just isn’t working