West Indian Cricket is Without Vision, Without Leadership, And - Worst Of All - Without Purpose
Much has been written about the parlous state of West Indian cricket this year, from the administrative disputes to the terrible performances on the field. The Windies’ recent thrashing at the hands of England at Edgbaston by a huge innings and 209 runs has done nothing to dispel opinions about their dire freefall in the rankings in both ODI and Test.
As an Englishman whose formative cricketing years were the 1990s, I do have a large degree of sympathy with Windies fans who are most likely despairing at their team’s woes. Countless were the times when I would see England, under the stewardships of the doughty Graham Gooch or the stoic hangdog Michael Atherton, get hammered by Australia, or India, or South Africa, or pretty much everyone else. The nadir, the home series loss against New Zealand in 1999 (pace, NZ fans), which saw England ranked rock bottom of the 9 test playing nations, and which warranted a reprint of the iconic “RIP English Cricket” headline in some papers. From there, the only way was up.
In remembrance of West Indian Cricket?
When I was a 14-16 year old fan watching my team being hammered time after time, it was easy to think that the English cricket team was not only utterly awful right now, but that they always had been utterly awful, and always would be. I’d heard of great players like Hutton, Boycott, Botham, Trueman et al, and great performances (Headingley ’81, Bodyline, 364* and all that) but to me they were ancient history. The occasional heroic effort like Atherton’s rearguard in Johannesburg or Devon Malcolm’s 9-fer did not buck the overall trend of England being a poor side.
So I absolutely sympathise if you’re a West Indian fan, particularly a young one who loves the sport and probably believes that your team has always been crap, and always will be. I’ve been there, and wondered why the hell I love this game. The mythical figures of the past have long since disappeared, and the stars of the present are absent, chasing riches (Actually, with respect to those stars – Gayle, Sammy, Bravo, Pollard – there’s no guarantee that the West Indies would be doing a great deal better in the current series even if they were in the team, in English conditions against the moving ball).
But here’s where the comparison ends, and where I fear the future for the current West Indies team looks even bleaker than did England’s eighteen years ago. Back in that awful summer of 1999, what didn’t change was the fact that England retained the basic building blocks needed to build a cricket team. A functioning grass-roots system, good facilities, a passionate fanbase, and leathery elder statesmen (Athers, Hussain, Thorpe, Gough) on hand to guide younger players coming through (Vaughan, Trescothick, Harmison, Flintoff). But even more important than this, was that English cricket still had a sense of purpose, even if that purpose was ignominiously dragging its carcass off the foot of the world rankings table.
It’s hard to see even those basic building blocks in place in the current Windies team, or more broadly within the current administrative setup.
The West Indies has always been a bit of an odd fish, sporting-wise. It’s not a single country but a regional collection operating under the banner of a very specific, colonial sport. The cricketing history of the West Indies is long and distinguished, and cannot be separated from issues of race (before the appointment of Frank Worrel in 1960, all West Indian captains had been white, and seldom were black players allowed to be batsmen even at regional/club level; this may have been one reason why the Windies developed such a seemingly bottomless reservoir of fast bowlers come the mid-70s onwards). Despite the progress made prior to the 1970s, issues of race had not entirely been separated from the sporting competition. The 5-1 hammering at the hands of Australia in 1975 was greeted with derision, some of it laced with racial overtones, and of course there was Tony Grieg’s infamous and unwise declaration that he intended to make the West Indies “grovel.”
The Windies, under the leadership of Clive Lloyd, bounced back, as everyone knows, and how.
This unique combination of regional unity, colonial rule, race and sport meant that cricket was not merely about runs and wickets, but social empowerment. Michael Holding said, “I have five million West Indians depending upon me to do well so they can walk the streets and be proud.” This righteous and furious determination to win stemmed from these social injustices and sporting humiliations. So whither the Windies now?
The start of something great: Clive Lloyd holding the cricket World Cup trophy, 1975
The commercialisation of cricket, which happened around 1996 when the Indian cricket board took advantage of the 1996 Cricket World Cup to propel the stature of the sport into the stratosphere, and attract new legions of fans and investors into the game. This broadly coincide with the start of the precipitous fall of the Windies, as Mark Taylor’s Australia beat them in 1995, a signal of the end. The commercialisation of cricket, from the growth of the ODI format to the metastasising of T20 around the world, has taken the last twenty years to mature, but now offers such riches that players are perversely able to make the bulk of the earnings away from the pinnacle of the sport. If there’s a parallel for this elsewhere in the sporting world, I’m not aware of it. This odd dichotomy has not ailed cricket in the major cricketing nations, except the West Indies, whose T20 side has climbed to the top of the world, while their test and ODI teams have sagged to the bottom of the barrel, and do not even show any sides of the only way being up.
It may be that cricket in its greatest, most prestigious form – Test Cricket – has served its purpose in the West Indies. The unique fusion of race, unity and cricket is no longer there. Cricket no longer serves as a means of fame and social empowerment; it is merely a career, and only in its most truncated format.
This is not to say that all West Indian sport has been left to a perpetual state of retardation. One or two of them have gone faster than any person has ever gone before, let’s not forget. But cricket, for so long the beacon under which this part of the world could rally itself and define itself, looks like it is no longer an essential vessel. This is, then, an existential crisis for West Indian cricket. What can be done where Test cricket is no longer intrinsically fused with the identity of these peoples?
It may be fashionable to blame the boards in these instances, but it’s hard to see past Whycliffe “Dave” Cameron’s stewardship of Cricket West Indies for fallibility (although to be fair, the rot set in long before his tenure). The official “vision” for CWI is:
“To establish and sustain West Indies cricket as the sporting symbol of the West Indies, and the West Indies team as the dominant team in international cricket.”
The dominant team in international cricket? Which team? There can be no greater discrepancy between teams of differing formats than in the West Indies, where the T20 team have been 2012 and 2016 T20 World Champions, and the Test and ODI teams, who lie, slumped, rock bottom of the ICC rankings. Talk about double vision.
But whatever the wild schizophrenia of the Windies’ ability to achieve that latter part of the vision, it’s the former part of the statement that rankles. The Windies cricket team do not possess that magical symbolism of struggling against oppression, breakers of chains, smashers of helmets and bashers of sixes. Of course, with cricket now primarily being a commercial venture rather than a social one, reviving the Windies using the concept of cricket as a social unifier is no longer viable; there are no chains left to break. But if CWI is serious about “establishing and sustaining West indies cricket as the sporting symbol of the West Indies”, the I’d suggest it needs to focus more on the pride of maintaining and preserving the legacy of the great teams and players from the 1970s and 1980s while it still means something. Not a single iconic player from that era populates the CWI Board, and only bit part players sit upon the board of selectors. Where are Holding, Richards, Garner, Haynes, Richardson, and Lloyd? They need to be visible, and part of the ongoing narrative, before these great men start to die out.
Whycliffe Cameron (left), pictured at the ICC Conference: if you need to manage a hotel, he's your man.
CWI ought to do more to create a new storyline out of the ashes of these recent crushings, not with racial overtones but with tones of heritage, of pride. The great histories of the past may yet still invoke inspiration, pride and performance, and the recent maulings should be enough to provoke fire in the belly, if told in the right way and juxtaposed against those past glories. The story has to be presented in the right way. As a storyteller, this seems obvious to me, but the businessmen of CWI with their BScs in hotel management? I’m not so sure. I hope somebody in the upper echelons of West Indian cricket can identify ways in which a new chapter in West Indian (Test) cricketing history can be written, before the story ends completely. And cricket would be a deeply sadder and emptier place for that.
