Australia, New Zealand and Zimbabwe have all gone through disagreements between board and players that have led to strikes and threatened strikes and that, once again, have shaken West Indies cricket to its core.
There are certain similarities in all.
One provides an example of what might be used to try to resolve the latest standoff between the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and the West Indies Players Association (WIPA), as it must be if West Indies cricket is to survive.
Another presents a parallel that reveals the catastrophic repercussions if it is not.
When New Zealand’s first-class players maintained a strike over pay for 11 weeks in 2002 and New Zealand Cricket attempted to recruit club players to fill the vacancies, a settlement was reached after senior players, captain Stephen Fleming and Chris Cairns, took over negotiations from players’ union representative Rob Nichol.
The move brought agreement and allowed New Zealand Cricket to immediately put together players’ contracts for a four-year period.
Fleming and Cairns came in after the main cause of the breakdown was widely perceived as a personality clash between Nichol and New Zealand Cricket’s chief executive Martin Snedden.
Given a resumption in talks that is absolutely essential in the present West Indies situation, would a change in negotiating personnel – say, vice-president Jimmy Adams and vice-captain Denesh Ramdin instead of the omnipresent Dinanath Ramnarine for the WIPA, non-elective directors Clive Lloyd and Sir Hilary Beckles instead of president Julian Hunte and vice-president Dave Cameron for the WICB – have the same effect?
It is an unlikely scenario but, for all the present intransigence and bad blood, some procedure is urgently required to prevent the West Indies following Zimbabwe’s circumstances that so closely, and worryingly, mirror their own.
As is now the case here, if for different reasons, Zimbabwe’s team was decimated in 2004 when 15 white players withdrew in protest against the dismissal of captain Heath Streak through what they saw as racial influence. Only one, the left-arm spinner Ray Price, has come back to the fold.
Left with young, inexperienced replacements, clearly incapable of holding their own at the highest level, the Zimbabwe Cricket Union (ZCU) voluntarily pulled out of Test cricket to give it time to try to bring the new players up to scratch.
With a misguided sense of optimism, they returned to Tests the following year. Cricketing boys don’t turn into men that quickly and the problem was worsened by repeated discord between the ZCU, under controversial, long-serving president Peter Chingoka, and several players.
After losing eight of their nine Tests by massive margins (the one draw was appreciably shortened by rain), Zimbabwe again bailed out of Test cricket in January 2009. They haven’t played a Test since and, following a recommendation from the International Cricket Council (ICC) cricket committee, are unlikely to do so for some time.
The committee advised that Zimbabwe not be reinstated to Tests “until such time as the team demonstrates its ability to perform at a standard that does not risk undermining the integrity of Test cricket”. Instead, they should continue four-day matches against full member ‘A’ teams and associates.
They have just been placed into the Inter-Continental Cup, the first-class tournament for associates involving Bermuda, Canada, Holland, Ireland, Kenya, Namibia, Scotland and United Arab Emirates.
If, or when, they do come back to Tests it almost certainly would be in the lower of the two divisions, an arrangement that is gaining increasing support within the ICC.
For all the understandable intentions of the WICB to regain its control of the game that its weak leadership and sheer incompetence have conceded to the WIPA, this is precisely the path that lies ahead unless the two warring organisations, even at this late stage, can combine to steer away from it.
Already the rapid decline from the envied pinnacle of world cricket throughout the 1980s to the pits of the last dozen years would place the West Indies firmly in Test cricket’s projected second division.
The recommendation made by the Jamaica Gleaner, one of the Caribbean’s oldest and most respected newspapers, after the trauma of the 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean has been cited in this column more than once.
It was that West Indies do exactly what Zimbabwe did – withdraw from Test cricket for three years to concentrate on rebuilding through ODIs, ‘A’ team tours, academies and the restructuring of the board as recommended by the P.J. Patterson report.
Preposterous as it seemed at the time the continued infighting between the WICB and the WIPA has brought that prospect ever closer.
Surely if things remain as they developed over the past week, with more than half the regional players heeding the WIPA’s directive not to answer the selectors’ call, the WICB could not possibly expect the makeshift team that has been hurriedly cobbled together against Bangladesh to take on the game’s infinitely more daunting opponents.
The next Test assignment is Australia in November and December. There is no more intimidating location in all cricketdom. Further down the line, South Africa, no less powerful, are scheduled in the Caribbean next May.
The West Indies, even with the best players on board, were thrashed in all eight Tests over their last two tours of Australia. The stomach turns to think of the fate that would await those assembled in St.Vincent, as committed and keen as they are.
The likelihood is that the Australians would politely suggest they stay at home for their own good, as well as for the good of the Australian spectators and their television commitments.
It is instructive that Sky Sports, which has exclusive television rights to West Indies cricket in Britain, dropped their scheduled live coverage of the Bangladesh series as soon as the team was stripped of its familiar names. It was a flashing warning light clearly visible as far away as the Caribbean.
No matter how far apart they happen to be, no matter who has scored the most telling public relations points in the reams of claim and counter-claim that have poured forth from their offices, the WICB and the WIPA must revisit their hard-line positions.
If any senior player, all now millionaires following the Stanford windfall and their earnings from the WICB and the Indian Premier League (IPL), have had their fill of Test cricket and the WICB and want to stick to the shortest and most lucrative format, all well and good.
Chris Gayle, for one, has long since made his intentions clear. He was a reluctant captain, tired of the job and of the grind of international cricket.
He has been the only constant opening batsman since Desmond Haynes and his forthright power-hitting would be missed. He surely can’t come back as captain and is likely to be content as a freelance performer in Twenty20.
There may be one or two others in the same boat. But caught up in the conflict are a host of highly promising young players for whom Test cricket remains paramount and representing the West Indies their primary goal.
It is incumbent on both the WICB and WIPA to make sure that the likes of Adrian Barath, Lionel Baker, Darren Bravo, Fidel Edwards, Denesh Ramdin, Ravi Rampaul, Lendl Simmons and Jerome Taylor are not denied their dream.
Sadly, West Indies cricket has degenerated into one seemingly never-ending nightmare. Will those who can end it please wake up before darkness descends for good.
