Diary of despair
This space has unavoidably become a weekly diary of despair. With West Indies cricket in constant disarray, it is seldom short of entries. This week’s deals with the appalling state of batting. It is a topic no doubt previously recorded but it has been further emphasized in first two rounds of the current first-class season. [...]
Cricket in chaos
Whenever it seems things simply cannot get worse (in other words every other week), West Indies cricket lapses into further sharp decline. Weakened by strikes, litigations, injunctions, arbitrations and constant, outright animosity between the administration and the players’ association, its latest, lingering malady has brought its
No meaningless knockabout!
Whatever happens over the final weekend of the Caribbean T20, even in last night’s tasty semi-final between Barbados and Trinidad & Tobago, the West Indies selectors should have had enough evidence from the preceding two weeks to immediately name a squad for the World tournament in Sri Lanka in September. It is chronologically a long [...]
Chump change tourney with incentives
The US$62,500 winners’ pay day in the current Caribbean Twenty20 – even the overall pot of US$125,000 – is mere pocket change to the real megabucks of the Indian Premier League (IPL), Australia’s Big Bash and other such biff-bang extravaganzas that have sprung up in every country since introduced in England in 2004. There is [...]
Dark future
At the end of another particularly bad week, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) issued a statement reiterating that it will “continue with its programme for the restructuring of West Indies cricket and will pursue through all available channels the arrangements that are necessary for the progress of cricket in the territories and the region.” [...]
Turbulent start to New Year
After yet another year of habitual turbulence, West Indies cricket starts 2012 with an issue that is potentially more damaging than any of the several others responsible for the current depressed state of the game in the region. Without judicious handling, there have already been portents,
Venue switch, date clashes affect fans, players
Not for the first time, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) finds itself alienating a large and significant segment of its public. Its decision to suddenly switch the first round of next month’s T20 tournament from the Queen’s Park Oval in Port-of-Spain to the Sir Vivian Richards Grounds in Antigua has,
WICB should revisit the Patterson Report
The president and directors of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) are, no doubt, closely following developments down under, in their Australian counterpart, Cricket Australia. If not, they should be. They would find them relevant to their own situation, involving, as they do, changes to the structure of the organisation whose recently appointed chairman, Wally [...]
Failure mindset!
As popular, Caribbean and appropriate as it was at the time, David Rudder’s converted anthem “Rally Round the West Indies” is wearing a little thin for cricket supporters despairing over whether there will ever be a revival. Perhaps the more apt chorus would now come from
Potential is evident
Notwithstanding the results, there are hopeful signs that the long process of building a truly competitive West Indies team is gradually taking shape. The problem is that they continue to be compromised by the inconsistency, strange strategy and self-inflicted
India poses considerably more difficult challenge
All’s well that ends well, even if conditionally in the case of the West Indies series in Bangladesh. After the stutters of the 61all out in the third ODI and the struggle to hang on for a draw in the first Test in Chittagong, the emphatic victory by 229 runs in the final match in [...]
Mesmerised by spin
As humiliating as they were – and they don’t come more humiliating than all-out 61 in an ODI and desperately hanging on for a draw in a three-day Test against Bangladesh – recent events in Chittagoing were not exactly surprising. They simply verified the most glaring and troubling truth about West Indies cricket at present. [...]
Fortunes reversed
They are three young tyros, all from Trinidad and Tobago but all with contrasting physiques, styles and places in the order, who immediately excited optimism that they would be the future of West Indies batting. It is hope that, for various reasons,
Second Coming
Just as too much can be made of the West Indies’ successive ODI wins on Thursday and yesterday in Dhaka, it is impossible to downgrade them, as they inevitably and widely will be, as “only” over Bangladesh. For all their appalling overall record, the Bangladeshis are not utter pushovers at home. Their inconsistency and aversion [...]
The untimely and the absurd
Unless the quote was lost in translation in the Reuters transmission from Dhaka, neither the question at the media briefing on the West Indies’ team arrival in Bangladesh or Ottis Gibson’s answer was surprising. As Chris Gayle kept belting the white ball into the night sky for his Royal Challengers’ team across the border