It hasn’t taken long under the new Julian Hunte presidency to recognise that, with West Indies cricket, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
The news that John Dyson would skip both the preparation camp for the forthcoming tours of Zimbabwe and South Africa and the five ODIs in the former is the latest instance of the administrative bungling that has become endemic through a succession of West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) presidents, chief
executives and chief operations officers.
That the latest of the nine coaches hired in the past 11 years, to, among other things, “devise and implement specific strategies and tactics to ensure competitiveness against specific individual opponents” should be absent from the critical build-up to three tough series – South Africa, followed by Sri Lanka and Australia at home – is truly astonishing.
An Australian with no first-hand knowledge of the players he will have under him, Dyson must now meet them for the first time when they arrive in South Africa.
“Chris Gayle, I presume,” may well be his first greeting to the most identifiable of the West Indies players.
By then, the “specific strategies and tactics to ensure competitiveness” would already have been developed by Hendy Springer and David Williams, the two West Indians who are filling the breach in Barbados and Zimbabwe. Too bad if they do not accord with Dyson’s.
Yet, true to WICB philosophy, the new chief executive Donald Peters dismissed the matter as insignificant.
“There are no major issues where this is concerned,” he was quoted as saying. “Obviously for someone coming from so far there are a number of matters to settle.”
Surely, whoever it appointed and from whatever distance he had to come, the WICB needed to make the contract conditional on him attending the camp and being available for both Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Apart from Dyson’s unsatisfactory situation, manager, physical trainer and media manager are other positions still to be filled a week prior to the team’s departure for Zimbabwe and South Africa. There is also an opening for a fielding coach, as necessary as any of the others given the noted shabbiness of the outcricket.
It is not as if these tours or the need for a head coach have been suddenly sprung on the WICB.
The International Cricket Council (ICC) future tours programme was published almost two years ago. The previous coach, Bennett King, resigned after the World Cup in April.
The WICB only advertised for applications for King’s job on August 9 with the deadline for replies August 31, four months after his resignation. It was another seven weeks before Dyson was chosen, King’s assistant David Moore holding on in the interim.
Similar disorganization surrounded King’s selection four years ago.
The original announcement of his selection was premature, prompting the Australian to initially opt out.
When he did take up the post a year later, he was presented with an immediate opportunity to meet the players and observe standards in the round-robin stage of the regional one-day tournament in Guyana.
As he, too, had a number of matters to settle back in Australia, he didn’t make it. When he did arrive, he came straight into one of the many standoffs between the WICB and the West Indies Players Association (WIPA), hardly ideal preparation for an imminent one-day series in Australia.
What the players make of all of this is not hard to imagine.
The head of their association, Dinanath Ramnarine, has been markedly silent on such concerns since he was made a non-executive director of the WICB but Hunte would do well to recall the comments of Gayle, now the most influential member of the team, on last summer’s tour of England.
“The board is always talking about players needing to change but we, the players, need changes from the board as well,” he said in reference to the chaos over his elevation to the captaincy for the ODI series and the late arrival of replacement players.
“We can’t be out in the wilderness all the time because we are the ones who are getting all the blame,” he added. “These are some of the things that we as players have to go through. The WICB says they want the best out of players but we also need the best out of the board.”
They were sentiments that rankled Ken Gordon, then WICB president, who issued a statement of his own admonishing Gayle and threatening later punishment.
The issue was dropped when Gordon was succeeded by Hunte who has made a concerted effort to understand the players’ position.
After meeting with them in Johannesburg during the World Twenty20 tournament in September, he said: “I got the impression that sometimes those guys felt they were out there on their own, that they were playing but nobody cared.”
It is an opinion unlikely to be altered by having to undertake an overseas mission while their new coach is back in Sydney “to settle a number of matters.”
