Tony Cozier

The West Indies’ thumping victory over Australia in Friday’s World T20 semi-final was as near to flawless as it gets in Twenty20 cricket.

Michael Muirhead said all the right things on his appointment last week as new Chief Executive Officer of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), a post he takes up in nine days time.

T20 World Cup….. If confirmation was needed that Ottis Gibson was simply stating the obvious in his assessment of the fourth World Twenty20 that starts in Sri Lanka on Tuesday it has been indisputably provided over the past few weeks.

Unable to convince the International Cricket Council (ICC) to provide an exclusive window for the Indian Premier League (IPL), the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) have decided to do it on their own.

The parallels, as far as they go, are obvious. They are both 32, two of the most commanding batsmen of their time and highly paid box-office attractions wherever in the world they play.

You  didn’t have to be a sports fan or be able to tell the difference between hurdles and steeplechase and a leg-break and a broken leg to feel special about being West Indian these past few weeks.

With West Indian attention firmly set on London and our special stars at the Olympics on track and in pool, a breathtaking individual performance in the team discipline that first established the region’s sporting excellence passed on Friday at a hallowed Caribbean cricket venue without the acclaim it truly deserved.

For a variety of reasons, the two forthcoming Tests between the West Indies and New Zealand rank as little more than an irrelevancy as international sporting – indeed cricketing – contests go.

The worry was that it was too good to be true.

The West Indies’ two Twenty20 Internationals against New Zealand over this weekend hold far more significance than simply the latest in the global escalation of the shortest, most popular and lucrative form of the game.

On the face of it, the West Indies’ latest Test series was very much like most of those that have gone before.

In the brief time since an enforced change to his previously suspect action transformed him from average off-spinner into the rarity of mesmerising variety, Sunil Narine has become the most exciting new name in the game.

As the West Indies top order tottered in both innings of the opening Test at Lord’s, the rider that Ottis Gibson added to his damning censure of the team’s senior batsmen following last year’s World Cup resonated.

It doesn’t require a university doctorate to appreciate the daunting task that faces the West Indies in the three Tests on their latest tour of England.

As the menacing steel grey clouds closed in from all directions on the Queen’s Park Oval on Thursday afternoon, it didn’t require Selma Husbands’ metereological expertise to know that the second Test had little time left before it was prematurely condemned to the anti-climax of a draw.

Kieron Pollard’s phenomenal six-hitting capacity has made him among the most sought after cricketers in the newest, shortest and most lucrative format of the game.

IT is remarkable how West Indies cricket manages to create, often out of nothing at all, the never-ending controversies that continue to harm and embarrass it.

This space has unavoidably become a weekly diary of despair. With West Indies cricket in constant disarray, it is seldom short of entries.

Whenever it seems things simply cannot get worse (in other words every other week), West Indies cricket lapses into further sharp decline.

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.