To say that the future of the West Indies as a test-cricketing region is in a state of deep uncertainty would be to indulge in considerable understatement. We have had the discourse before. The problem is that you begin to build your hopes based on a sighting of a single swallow only to have it dawn on you that the summer is still light years away.
The recent humiliating and not altogether surprising defeat to England in the Test series brought to an end the Caribbean side’s embarrassingly short hold on the Wisden Trophy and dashed hopes that the immediately preceding series victory in which the West Indies triumphed by a single Test may have been indicative of a gradual reversal of its protracted dismal fortunes.
Not so. By overwhelming the West Indies at both Lords and Headingley what England proved was that the earlier heroics of Jerome Taylor at Sabina Park added to what was widely believed to be tactical errors that may have cost them two of the Tests, did nothing to change the fact that West Indies cricket continues to be in a state of cataclysmic decline.
It is as much the body language of the hapless West Indians, the seeming unpreparedness to compete, to “dig in,” that makes them as ineffective as they are. At both Lords and Headingley, there was evidence of that familiar tendency to lose their way, to allow themselves to be ground down by opposition that had, from the very start of the series, set themselves the task of putting the disappointment of their loss in the Caribbean behind them. And after their overwhelming victory at Lords it seemed that England stopped seeing the West Indies as worthy opppnents, focusing instead on how the Headingley Test could serve as a testing ground for the selection of players to face Australia later in the summer.
What would also not have helped the West Indies was the internal spat that arose over captain Chris Gayle’s arrival in England from his Indian Players League (IPL) contractual obligation in South Africa, just two days before the start of the Test series. The distraction was altogether avoidable since one would have thought that such a simple logistical matter would have been sorted out between Gayle and the West Indies Board prior to his departure for South Africa. The Chris Gayle situation is simply one of those inexplicable logistical blunders that continue to afflict West Indies cricket and for which there is neither reasonable excuse nor rational explanation.
Then there was the absence from the Test side of Dwayne Bravo, one of the West Indies’ most consistently effective all round performers, apparently on the grounds of fitness, in circumstances where he certainly appeared fit enough for the exertions of the IPL.
Then there was Gayle’s outburst in the middle of the Test series arising out of which is a feeling that he may no longer be enjoying either the captaincy of the West Indies team or Test cricket for that matter, the nature of the Twenty/20 version being, perhaps more suited to his particular talents.
Those of us who continue to delude ourselves into thinking that the shortest version of the game has not served to change the face of cricket as a whole, need to change their thinking quickly. Twenty/20 cricket was ‘invented’ to cater to contemporary consumer taste for ‘all action’ entertainment that is usually absent from the longer version of the game. It is a spectacle, a ‘circus’ comprising amazing feats and it has served to create a new following that may very well have already exceeded the numbers of traditional Test cricket enthusiasts.
The other point to be made about Twenty/20 cricket is that both the IPL and its ill-fated Caribbean predecessor, the Stanford Twenty/20 Tournament have offered players more lucrative financial returns for efforts that have more to do with entertaining ‘the crowd’ than with issues of national pride that attend the Test encounters.
Two likely developments in the game ariasing from the success of Twenty/20 cricket are likely to further impact on cricket as a whole. First, astute investors in emerging cricketing markets in Asia and the Middle East particularly, are likely to take a much closer look at possible investment in the shortest version of the game to capitalize on what certainly appears to be its rapidly growing potential as a form of popular entertainment. Secondly, as certainly appeared to be the case in the recently concluded South Africa IPL event, we may well witness the emergence of more and more players who prepare themselves particularly for the more lucrative Twenty/20 game.
That would appear to be the case with Dwayne Smith, for example, who, while now regarded as as a Test reject, appears set to use the Twenty/20 game to reinvent himself and refashion his career in the sport. The prospect of a continuing move in this direction by more and more West Indian players certainly appears increasingly likely in circumstances where there always seems to be one controversy or another over what they get paid to play Test cricket.
It is with the fortunes of our Test team that we are currently preoccupied, however, and there is no mistaking the fact that the gulf between the Caribbean side and the leading international Test sides – Australia, India, Sri Lanka, South Africa and England – would appear to be widening. Among those leading teams, the West Indies have come to be regarded as a “soft touch,’ a ‘pushover’ a side that lacks both the willingness and the know-how to win.
Inevitably, we need to return to what is wrong with our cricket and whatever else may be amiss that fact of the matter is that we have been, for some time now, unable to field a team with either the talent or the temperament to win. It is, the first instance, a function of a distressingly low standard of regional cricket which simply cannot prepare our players for the bigger stage. If, as we claim, Caribbean cricket is such an important part of our Westindianness then the various regional institutions, particularly Caribbean governments must act now to salvage the fame. We can no longer evade the reality of sub-standard facilities at the domestic level, the absence, in the cases of many of the playing terrirtories, including of a well-structured system that allows for the continual development of young players; domestic cricket boards that appear to have no clue as to how to take the game forward and governments that appear blissfully unmindful of the state of our cricket.
