Money may be the root of all evil but the most successful West Indies cricket captain ever Clive Lloyd feels that it may also be responsible for the poor showing of the Guyana national cricket team in this year’s regional four-day cricket competition.
The Guyana team is languishing in the cellar position on a mere seven points after five completed rounds of this year’s tournament and Lloyd has linked the lack of earning power of today’s young cricketers to the team’s performance.
“They need jobs to sustain themselves, to eat the right things and so on. They need mentoring; people that they can call on to have a chat with when they are in desperate need and I suppose a lot of them do. If you want guys to eat well and play well, they need to have a job,” was Lloyd’s assessment of some of the factors that are stopping some of the young Guyana players from realizing their true potential.
Coach Rabindranauth Seeram and manager Carl Moore are both of the view that the Guyana players have the necessary talent but have failed to play to their potential thus far in this year’s series.
The team has missed the established players in Captain Ramnaresh Sarwan and Shiv Chanderpaul for the early matches through injury although Chanderpaul will return for today’s match against Barbados at the Albion Community Development Centre ground.
The vastly experienced Lloyd, who is chairman of the International Cricket Council’s Cricket Committee, voiced his concern over the current state of affairs.
“Are we showing enough compassion in this day and age?” he asked.
“Everything is expense and if you have a young cricketer just depending on handouts and you want him to perform well, well he can’t,” he said pointedly.
“I think it is incumbent on whoever it is that is looking after our cricket to make sure that our young players, some of whom are 22 or 23 and are not working anywhere, get help.
“They must have a job to go to so they learn to be uniformed; working hard; coming on time; at the end of the week, they have something to look forward to. That builds character.
“If a guy is not working that’s a stigma that he does not want to have because what is going to happen is that they will be prone to all sorts of things, peer pressure etc., and hopefully, they don’t get into that drug habit.”
Asked if he felt that the government too should play a role Lloyd said:”I would think so. I would think that the government has a role to play in all their athletes.
“Jamaican athletes, in England, India, Pakistan they all have jobs, they’re looked after. We have to try and look after our sportsmen. I’m not saying that there are not other people out there, but if you expect to do things, you got try and provide them with the tools to perform well and a job is important.
Asked if he was disappointed with the showing of the Guyana team in this year’s regional first class cricket tournament, Lloyd said “Not only this year, last too we didn’t do very well. The point is that our cricket has always been of a very high standard. Under19s right up and um, we always had a lot of Under 19, three or four Under 19 players in the team in the West Indies team. We don’t have that, other countries have overtaken us.
“Now we need to try and do something to get our cricket back on track.
The West Indies under Lloyd’s captaincy won two World Cups. He had a distinguished career which saw him playing 110 test matches for the West Indies, scoring 7515 runs at an average of 46.67.
Nicknamed the `Supercat’ Lloyd is a recipient of the Commander of the British Empire (CBE).
