Last week’s reinstatement of Chris Gayle for the forthcoming tour of Australia typifies the transformation. Even if the West Indies selectors and the board had been so minded – and, given the circumstances, the latter certainly would have been – they could find no authentic candidate who wanted the “honour”.
While Gayle, so initially wary of the pitfalls of the post that he resigned after three months, declared that he was available once more, others eliminated themselves by stating their disinterest and proclaiming their support for him.
The truth is that, for the majority, the captaincy has turned into cricket’s equivalent of the N1H1 virus, something to be avoided like the plaque.
Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Ramnaresh Sarwan had both previously been there, done that and determined that it wasn’t for them.
Chanderpaul quit after a year, overwhelmed by the divisions caused by the first players’ strike in 2005 and eager to protect his precious batting that has prospered like no other’s since.
Identified from an early age as a future captain, Sarwan was installed after Brian Lara’s third term in the post ended ignominiously after the 2007 World Cup.
He was immediately cut down by injuries, supplanted by Gayle and, after a couple of series as vice-captain, stepped down without explanation.
Although willing to lead Guyana, as he did in the recent President’s Cup, he declared that he was no longer interested in the West Indies job.
Dwayne Bravo, deputy to Gayle in Zimbabwe and South Africa in 2007-08, and Ganga, impressive skipper of Trinidad & Tobago at regional level and, more especially, the Champions League in India in October, were other names that occupied the selectors’ recent discussions.
Both had joined the strikes in 2005 and again this year but, as in Gayle’s case, that was not to be held against them. Instead, they effectively ruled themselves out, quickly stating their support for Gayle.
Like Sarwan, Ganga is happy to lead Trinidad & Tobago, as he has done with such distinction for six years. But, if nothing else, his experiences at the helm of West Indies ‘A’ on an indisciplined, disagreeable tour of England in 2002 would have alerted him to the difficulties of the wider job.
The post has become so tenuous that it has changed hands 11 times since Richie Richardson succeeded Viv Richards in 1991 at the end of the West Indies’ most glorious decade.
Courtney Walsh, Lara (three times), Jimmy Adams, Carl Hooper, Chanderpaul, Sarwan, Ganga, Gayle and, in the emergency of the most recent players’ strike, Floyd Reifer have all drunk from the poisoned chalice.
Such upheavals, caused by a number of complex factors, reflect the lack of leadership that afflicts other areas of Caribbean life and explain cricket’s current dismal state of affairs.
It is not coincidental that the West Indies were strongest under strong captains, Frank Worrell (who passed the team he built on to Garry Sobers) and Clive Lloyd (who did the same to Viv Richards). Their potential successors have become overawed by the challenge.
Adams was a captain who began with series victories over Zimbabwe and Pakistan in 2004 before his spirit and his batting were broken a few months later by heavy losses to England in England in and Australia in Australia.
Now president of FICA, the international players’ union, he has put forward one of the reasons for the general reluctance of West Indians to take on the leadership.
“I only did the job for a year, and that was enough for me,” he said.
“It is hard to describe what it is like to lead a losing team, with the expectation that exists in the Caribbean, until you have experienced it for yourself.”
Gayle was the only one on the selectors’ short list who was up for it again. He was not the ideal choice but, in effect, he was the only one.
Here is a cricketer who came to the post by default at the tailend of the 2007 tour of England, who immediately and publicly castigated the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) for its obvious ineptitude and who resigned just over a year later because of a disagreement over selection, only to be persuaded to return by no less than Julian Hunte, the WICB president.
In spite of an upsurge in his batting statistics in the position and the relatively modest improvement in the team’s results (for a decade, everything has been relative with West Indies cricket), Gayle more recently complained that the responsibility was becoming overbearing and indicated he would soon give it up.
Instead, he hinted that his preference was for the game’s newest and shortest version, Twenty20, and had lucrative contracts in hand in the Indian Premier League (IPL) and in Australia’s Big Bash. When, for the second time in his career, he chose to join the players’ action against the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and left a decimated team to fend for itself in the home series against Bangladesh, his tenure seemed at an end.
The WICB, with whom, in his words, “there was no love lost”, might not have been displeased to see him go but it also recognised the value of his explosive batting and his experience in a weak team at a critical time.
Daunting series follow against Australia and South Africa, sandwiched between the World Twenty20 tournament before home crowds in the Caribbean. West Indies performances will be carefully monitored, especially by the growing lobby for Test cricket to be divided into two divisions.
Gayle’s reappointment was, once more, largely by default.
But there was an element of expediency as well, not much of a virtue but, in the situation, understandable.
